DJ Equipment Setup

Series Summary

Have you ever found yourself in the club—moving to the music, making eye contact with other young, hip people around you—and wondered how the DJ does it night after night? Entertaining a crowd of music-conscious party animals is not an easy thing to do; just a few false moves and you’re out of favor…and out of a job.

Hip hop music has a unique ability to get people bobbing their heads, feeling the groove, dancing to the beat. A DJ’s job is to keep that beat seamless and uninterrupted all night long. You can tell a master turntable artist not by his highly technical scratching skills, but rather by how well he mixes beats and songs together, creating the perfect playlist for a night out on the town.

In this free hip hop DJ music video series, learn some of the fundamental mixing and turntable skills necessary to play a night club or party. First, get tips on what equipment you need: Technics turntables, a two-channel mixer, some record needles. Then, discover the basic techniques for mixing two songs together, including beat per minute counting, beat matching, and transitions with the crossfader. Once you have the important skills mastered, learn the fun stuff: cutting and scratching. Put it all together, practice, and go out and get a DJ gig!

Video Transcript

" Hi! What's up? This is DJ Colione on behalf of expertvillage.com and in this clip I am going to show you basic set up for doing some vinyl Djing. The first thing you are going to need is two Technic 1200 turntables. So the industry standard the best you can get work horses and they will last you forever. You got to get two of those. You got one 2-channel mixer, There is a ton out on the market from Vestax, Staton, Rega but if you are going to be doing vinyl stuff, you really just want a 2-channel mixer, forget the 4 channel house mixer. You just want 2 channels to be cutting back and forth. You need 2 needles and you need slip mats and some records and that's about it. So what you are going to do is set them up like this. All right so you got your 1 turntable, you got your mixer, you got your other turntable. Now what you want to do is plug these turntables into the wall just like any other powered item. From that you want to find the phono and ground wire on the turntable. The phono is going to look like this; these 2 little RCA kind of things and your ground wire is this little lanky kind of wire with a metal prong at the end. From that what you want to do is go in back of your mixer, you want to see it say phono and it will say line. You want to make sure if you are going on turntable, you want to put on phono. Line isn't going to work so you want to grab this and the next thing you want to do is you want to plug in your ground wire. The ground wire, make sure the signal sounds clear. If you don't have the ground wire in, you are going to get this weird kind of a hum. Not great for doing big shows. So once you guys got that in check, you got to plug in your mixer and your other turntable and you are pretty much set up to be doing some vinyl Djing. "