DJ Turntable Basics

Series Summary

Learning how to spin is a great way to earn a living or to spend your time. Disc jockeys are people who play a set of recorded music for an audience. This audience could include dancers, club attendants, wedding guests, birthday party guests, or any other type of celebration. Disc jockeys often do more than let the music play. They will showcase their set of skills including scratching, cutting, back spinning, and beat matching. If you are a DJ on the rise, check out these cool videos and learn first hand how to be a DJ.

In this series of expert videos, you will learn how to manipulate recorded music and other basic DJ skills. See examples of the various electrical components needed to DJ including turntables, equalizers, speakers and music collection. Learn how to operate these components and how to select the right type of music for a given audience. Watch as our expert demonstrates how you can mix a beat while using the headphones and how to scratch a record. Learn a little more about scratching and the history of how this form of spinning has influenced the music scene. You will learn how to perform needle drops and to drop in on the one. In this series you will also find information on cutting history and the history of doubles. Use this information to create your own beats and learn to mix and match beats using the turn table.

Video Transcript

" On behalf of Expert Village.com, I would like to welcome you to DJ Basics 101. My name is DJ Trails with Hip-Hop Elements. You can reach us at hiphopelements.com here in Miami, Florida. I am going to give you a little intro to the turntables today and the basics of DJ’ing. Now this applies whether your are a hip-hop DJ or breaks DJ or electronic cosmic music DJ, it all works. Basic intro to the turntable; this technique 1200 and is the cornerstone of the DJ’ing right here. I am going to show you how this baby works. This is the tonearm over here with the needle. What you do is you pick this up over here, you place it on the record, you have on and off switch right here. This is power, on and off, start and stop. You get a nice effect. You just stop it. You turn off the on-off switch. You have slow start. The other thing we have here is pitch control, which is the speed the record plays at and this is what you use to mix, listen to the sound or the beat. This changes the tempo. Next thing we have here is a 33 and the 45 for those you who don’t know. Well, alot of guys might have never seen a record before but 45's are the little records with the big holes. These are the 45 adapters. Switch on 45 and that’s the basics of the turntables."