This Is So Lit!

A Look at the Triumphs & Tribulations

Of the Modern DJ in the Digital Age
By: Michael Huber

A Niche in the Wall

The streets around the Bay Ridge area of Brooklyn, N.Y. are cold as the temperature
drops in late October and a sharp wind rushes down the crowded streets, forcing the
people to bundle up and hide from their bitter touch. The streets are covered with stores
in virtually every available spot on every block. There seems to be a grocery deli every
other block, each with the same signs whose only difference are the names that own
some false possession over each store. It feels like every space is crammed with some
small-time business just trying to eek out a meager existence in a city that often chews
people up and spits them out with no regard for anything but the next thing to eat.

It is October 22nd on 5th Avenue in Brooklyn, and along the storefronts near a
mini-mart with people fighting outside sits a small bar called the No Quarter Tavern. Its
a dinky little bar that has a large window to see what is going on inside. There are
people braving the wind and cold to smoke cigarettes, but theyre less conventional than
the standard bar-goer. Given the time of year, theyre wearing Halloween costumes of
some kind.

Tonight is supposed to be a Halloween bar event where disc jockeys are going to be
spinning tracks and mixing together sets for the bar-goers who are progressively
getting drunk. Outside of the bar is Josh Lampman. Josh is a large, boisterous
33-year-old disc jockey who goes under the stage name Faith in the Glitch. Tonight he
is performing with his friends Rich NAME and Brian NAME at the No Quarter Tavern for
a Halloween bash. However, to look at Josh or Brian, youd be surprised to know what
appears to be costumes is in fact standard dress for them at gigs, not just for
Halloween. Brian embraces the Steampunk style of goggles, top hats, and suspenders
with vigor and flare. However, its not as much of a selling point to his DJ style as his

friend. Josh is in a white dress shirt with green stripes, green bowtie, tan khakis, and a
matching sport coat to make the old-timey swing outfit complete. He even begins
speaking as if he were reporting on the 1927 Kentucky Derby from a small radio booth.
Josh has a beer in his hand.

This is the intended effect, as that image is one that Josh vibrantly exudes for his gigs.
Josh plays a specific genre of electronic music, Electro-Swing.

Its basically just electronic music mixed with jazz of any kind, Josh says as he combs
his moustache with a special comb and product to make it stand out against his face
and gravity itself, but dont say that to a purist, theyll just spend 20 minutes telling you
why youre wrong.

Josh has been at this for a long time, and hes seen it all. I started back in the 90s on
vinyl. I saw a guy, DJ Venom, and the way he did everything he did, I just had to be like
that, he said. A few weeks later, I had $400 in quarters saved up, and I took them -- a
backpack full of quarters -- and went down to the music store, and I bought a mixer and
two turntables. It was basically as Beck said, I got two turntables and a microphone.

Josh has come a long way since then, but hes admitted that it has been easy: Its hard
to be a DJ. Its a labor of love. If you come into this thinking youll be famous and make
money, dont come into it, cuz thats not how it works. Youll realize that the minute a
drunk girl throws her drink at you when you miss a beat.

Joshs friends come and start hanging out with him outside the bar, fighting a battle with
the verbosity of Brooklyns streets using their voices and humor. The show was
supposed to start 45 minutes ago, but the New York Mets are in the World series and
the Kansas City Royals just tied it in the ninth inning.

Well, were not playing tonight! Pack up now, everyone, shows over, Josh says after
the Royals score the run, and the rest of his friends just laugh.
Josh and his friends seem to know the landscape of 5th Avenue and the No Quarter
Tavern, well, and thats no accident: This is sort of a home base for me and the guys.
No Quarter allows us to have shows here for our niche group of niche DJs here in this
little niche of the Brooklyn city wall, Josh says. Did I mention the word niche
enough?

I feel like its important to stand out against all of the noise out there now, and thats
why I think its good to be a niche DJ or fill a specific genre void in a region. Theres
thousands of DJs in New York, and were about the only ones playing Electro-Swing.
We are pretty much go-to DJs for anyone interested in the genre here.

Joshs passion is logical, but not pragmatic in the same way that the current model
suggests to aspiring DJs: If I wanted to do the standard way that DJs try to get big, Id
play the Beatport Top 100 or just spin mixes of bass-heavy remixes and songs from
Billboard. Im not out to do that. I want to stand out against this noise of millions of other
DJs in the US, and god knows how many globally, who are just putting out garbage and
blending into each other. This is New York, be original or go home. Thats just how it is.

I never came into this to make money. You have to work your ass off finding gigs, and
then work harder catching up with the guy whos supposed to pay you, and sometimes
you just get screwed over, Josh says reminiscing about his beginnings, My first real
venture in the business selling my own work was when I went to a convention and sold
all 200 CDs I printed of my first album, $10 each. You know what I spent that 2 grand
on? I bought more DJ equipment, most of it vinyls.

This is a labor of love. You can make money doing it, but it takes a long time before it
can pay your bills. You could play Billboard or the nae nae song and be stuck in a club
for the rest of your life, and thats your career. Even though I love doing this, I would
never want that to be my life. Id rather do small shows like tonight with my friends
playing the music Id love at night and working in the day, which is exactly what I do.

And that is the way it has to be for many DJs, even in a place as lucrative as New York
where the night-life is booming every night. Josh works as a cameraman and editor for
New Jersey TV, which is based in Newark. Josh lives in Port Chester, N.Y. and his
commute is tiring.

I didnt have time to go home after work, so I have a studio camera worth more than my
car sitting in my trunk, he said, adding: I had to put a change of clothes and all my DJ
equipment in with that this morning. Try fitting that in a small Honda, its like Tetris on
hard mode.

As he laughs at the thought of it, it gives an idea of how hard a man has to work to be a
DJ, when society generally sees the profession as easy.

I love it, I absolutely do. I love everything about it and I take any gig I can get. Im trying
to get something up in the city for electro-swing with some friends. I just need some
entrepreneurship to get it done. Still hoping, though!

At 1:30 a.m. with a few drinks down and good jokes had between friends, Josh packed
up his stuff, aggravated that the Mets vs. Royals game was still going. His joke about
not playing that night became prophetic after 12 innings, and he did not bother to check
how the game ended.

The Mets lost to the Royals in the 14th inning, well after Josh had left. He had lost a gig,
money, and a chance to build his audience just a little bit more. There was a hole in his
wallet from beers, but not in his pride or enthusiasm: I had an excuse to spend time
with friends. Sure, it sucked that we missed the gig, but there will always be others.

Faceless Celebrities
Josh Lampman is what most people would consider a DJ, but what exactly does that
mean? The term DJ stands for disc-jockey which originated as the names for the
hosts of radio shows. It referred to the discs they used -- vinyl records, CDs, and the
like -- to mix music together songs and have them flow together, like a jockey controls a
horse.They had soundboards that took up huge real estate in the radio booth just for the
ability to play a two or three-second-long soundbite to add effect to a discussion or slip
a promotional tag in the show. These men and women were performers and brought
together the idea that making music and performing it in concert was not the only way
for people to enjoy a selection of artists.

However, as Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton write in their book Last Night a DJ
saved my life: The History of the Disc Jockey, the DJ has changed a lot from its
inception, and it has gone through a lot. It has fought musicians, record labels, media
conglomerates, and oppression from every angle. The DJ has become one of the
ultimate symbols of success in the industry today, raking in over $6.9 billion. However,
of the DJs we all hear on the radio and online, there are millions more around the world
that are nameless, faceless, and are still just trying to get a piece of that pie.
In this ever competitive field of nightlife recognition, even a DJ like Josh, who is one of
the only people performing a genre of music in the biggest city in the U.S., making a
living is difficult.

Billboard writes about how the global Electronic Dance Music (EDM) market is valued at
over $6.9 billion. Skrillex, one of the biggest Electronic Dance Music, or EDM, producers
and DJs in the world, is valued at over $15 million, and he started in his room as a kid
and worked his way to the top. Its the American dream in the digital music age: buy the
equipment, software, and music, and all you need to do is devote your time to the craft.
Its the idea that hard work will pay off into success, and it is just not the case for the
vast majority of DJs and people entering the field.

As Andrew King of Canadian Musician writes in Making the Cut, the field of electronic
music is far too saturated with musicians trying to make it big, so much so that theres
no solid idea of how many DJs there actually are in the U.S, let alone globally, in 2015.
Its become so easy to be a DJ you can do it from a smartphone, as Kevin Young
Writes in Tools of the Trade, and thats the problem: people think anyone can do it.
However, the craft of being a DJ is not just making playlists and making scratching
noises every other song. You have to move the crowd, get the beat, feel the music and

let the audience to feel it too. It is an art that requires passion and dedication, and too
many people ignore that and dive into something they are woefully unprepared for.

It becomes nearly impossible for someone to make it as a DJ because your talent as an

artist and performer gets drowned out by the noise of people who are in it for the wrong
reasons.

As the electronic music landscape is now, the amount of money and work you put into
the craft will not inherently equal success. It rarely does at all. A lot of the time its just
luck and who you connect with. Josh has been in the industry for over 15 years, and
despite all of the contacts hes made, the money he spent, and the time he invested to
making himself better, hes still working a day job and picking up gigs where he can for
money. His tenacity and hope is inspired by his love of music and the craft, but love
does not pay the bills.

Golden Oldies

Before, in the glory days of radio, DJs were the people that could make or break an
artist. Brewster and Broughton write about how record labels and artists alike would do
anything they could to get their newest songs on the radio. Radio is where DJs could
make their mark on the industry, and starting radios inception, people were playing
records and broadcasting music on the airwaves. It evolved into things like American
Bandstand and American Top 40 from the Billboard. The Billboard Top 100 eventually
became the Top 40, because the maximum amount of time that radio shows would
allow nationally could only accommodate 40 songs. When radio was king, DJs ruled the

music conversation from the local to the national level, and America listened to the
voices on the airwaves just as much as their own ears.

Some DJs were so powerful that they were seen as a menace to society and the status
quo. Christoph Cox points out in Audio Culture, as well as Brewster, how Alan Freed
was one such DJ. Freed is often called the father of Rock n Roll due to how much
influence he had on making the genre well known by promoting it on his broadcasts, as
well as for coming up with the term rock n roll on his broadcasts. He was known for
playing blues, jazz, rock, R&B, and other kinds of black music in an age of racism and
public oppression of African Americans. As surprising as it may seem now, that music
was seen as not only bad music, but also a stain on white culture & radio, and a
detriment to the children of America.

Freed was forced out of radio stations, but still kept on bringing the music to the youth of
the nation. He saw the music as something that young Americans would love, and he
was right. White teens would take their allowance and job money down to the record
store and purchase the albums they heard on Freeds broadcasts. White parents were
alarmed when they heard their kids listening to songs like Shake, Rattle, & Roll, with
its sexually explicit lyrics that were for the lesser, uneducated, poor blacks. Yet, despite
all of this, Freed kept playing.

In 1962, Alan Freed was charged with Payola, or taking bribes to play songs more and
give more publicity to the artists, and was no longer able to host radio programs on
prestigious stations due to be legally blacklisted by the industry. Three years later, after
bouncing around small stations and being told he could not play rock and other black
music, and going to the bottle to drown his sorrows, Freed died in 1965 from liver

disease complications. But many people say that the racism and big record labels that
forced him out of radio was what really killed him.

However, the DJ as we know it today, and the ones that would pave the way for them to
become famous producers, began in Jamaica in the 1960s. Broughton sheds light
explaining how In this country of poverty, violence, and political unrest, the people loved
music above all else. They would listen to American radio stations out of the south when
the weather was clear enough for the signal to reach them. But, unlike American radio,
Jamaican radio was owned and operated by the government, and the music, news, and
information the people wanted was never on the airwaves. So, Jamaicans made
themselves the DJ, and skipped the radio altogether. They would buy records and
perform them live on homemade sound systems ranging from something you could
throw in a sedan, to something bigger than that same sedan. And they liked it loud.
They made it so that you could hear the music several streets over so everyone could
dance and move to the music.

What made Jamaica so important, though, as Brewster and Broughton write, was the
dub and the remix was truly created there. Record store owners were also DJs, and
theyd take their vinyls and work on putting them together into sets, as well as adding
their own flare to them in various ways. There was the dub, a transformation of the term
overdubbing which was a recording term, and the remix, which was compiling songs
and sounds together to make something new and different from the original sampled
songs. Many DJs and record store owners in Jamaica had makeshift recording setups,
and they would take albums, instruments, and their voices, and overdub them together
into something new and different. Many times, theyd make a track and perform it that
night for a crowd.

However, what more frequently happened was the creation of new sounds and mixes
live at events. A DJ would spend hours during the day finding new records to play for
that night, and they would spin them into their own mixes, overdubbing them vocals, live
bands and instrumentation, and other records to create something unique. It would
never be the same thing each time it happened, it would be improvisation and
manipulation that could only happen when the crowd was there and people were
moving to the music. It was this spirit and style of music creation that would lead to
reggae and influence hip hop and rap of the future.

There would be regular DJ events from aspiring DJs in the area, sometimes every night.
The DJ was a local celebrity, but they werent in it for the fame or the money. They were
there for the love of music and to spread the ideas of freedom, love, and peace the
Jamaican way, even though the government didnt want them to. They want the music
to be heard more than their name, so they took on the role of the faceless celebrities of
Jamaica.

That was very much how the club DJ was in the U.S and other places in Europe. These
people would get paid to go perform at dance clubs and discos to keep the music
flowing and the crowd moving. They would spin records on turntables connected to a
large, heavy mixer and speakers that could be heard outside the club on a really good
night. These DJs would play music, get a reaction from the crowd, and just like
Newtons laws of Gravity, would react to them in a game of hot potato where the heat
was coming from the music and the vinyl being spun.

However, most of these DJs were only celebrities in the local area, or when they were
performing at the club. People loved the music, and loved the DJ for it. They felt the
music in their body, and for those that were drunk or high on something, this made them
want the music -- and the DJ -- in less-than-normal ways. Brewster interviewed Junior
Vasquez as he once recounted about a particularly high partier at a club, humping the
speakers, and, as Vasquez remembers, He kept yelling, Im fucking the DJ!

These kind of things are what club DJs deal with pretty regularly. Josh said, In a club,
you can be doing great and everyones dancing. Then you fuck up one thing or have a
little too much silence, and the same drunk people that were loving you suddenly turn
on you in 30 seconds.

For the majority of DJs, they will remain in the clubs, parties, and weddings as the
celebrities that pump the music. They feed the room, and bring life to what would
normally be a dead dance floor. When the party goes until 3 am, the DJ is there,
pumping the hot, heady air full of tunes. The average person will know the name of the
DJ that night from them blasting it through the sound system for promotion, and maybe
a couple of people will get his name when its all over, but most forget when they wake
up the next day.

As Jake Meyer writes in What DJs Really Do; the average DJ is a celebrity when he
performs, except theres no paparazzi or autographs. The DJ is faceless and often
forgotten, and theyre fine with that, because they are doing what they love and they
wouldnt have it any other way.


Put It To The Max
I arrive outside The Pine Box bar in East Brooklyn during the last hour or so of daylight.
Im here to watch a young DJ perform in his own, unique style in a couple of hours. The
chill in the air proves its going to be a cold night tonight, definitely below freezing. I find
parking outside the bar and take in my surroundings.

Its definitely Brooklyn. The towering blocks that make up the buildings and architecture
of the place are laden with the signs of heavy industry both in the past and present. A
Boars Head distribution site is less than a block away from the bar, and the smell hits
you like a brick when the icy wind blasts you in the face. Beautiful, colorful street art
paints the walls, doors, and buildings in equal measure to the graffiti tags, all filled with
gang symbols, expletives, and caricatured typography in black and white paint. It gives
a good understanding of the state of this neighborhood and Brooklyn at large.

Signs of gentrification are everywhere. As college students, artists, and young people
trying to find work in The Big Apple flocked to Brooklyn, they brought their cultures,
experiences, and tastes into New Yorks largest borough as well. You see Toyota
minivans and Honda sedans older than many of the residents of the area right next to
Fords, GMCs, and Hyundais that look as if they just came off the lot. There are college
kids and hipsters in eclectic fashions walking right past poor Puerto Rican mothers and
Guatemalan men fresh off work shifts, trying to support their families in the harsh,
unrepentant streets of Americas largest city.

Right down the street from the Boars Head building is a small cafe snugly placed in
between two brick buildings filled with tenants and other small businesses. The outside
of the shop is painted in a mural of a blue-jay staring intensely forward down the street
The Pine Box resides on. There are hipsters moving in and out of the cafe with
cappuccinos in their hands and scarves around their necks. The faces pass by each
other without glimpsing out of their phones or the leaving the thoughts floating around in
their brains, ignoring everyone around them as they rush to the Morgan Street Subway
stop to catch the L-train to Manhattan. Its as if many people here live in Americas most
populous city, yet no one else is around them. People and strangers are merely
afterthoughts in the hustle and bustle of New York life.

I enter the bar through the doors, taking note of the mural painted outside the bar, with
the words Bury in a Pine Box to the right of the entrance in verbose lettering. Verbose
is also a good way to describe the crowd of hipsters, young people, and the rest of the
patrons at the bar. The ding of the crowd forms a senseless cacophony of unintelligible
languages that derive from the same spoken language, yet no native speaker can
understand all of it at once.

The bar definitely earns the name Pine Box, as almost every table, booth, and wall is
accented and made with pine wood with a lacquer finish. The bar where the drinks are
served is the smoothest surface in the bar, save the glasses used to serve the cocktails,
and is unusually clean for the nature of the establishment. There is a lounge with long
booth benches underneath a flat-screen TV. The small tables in the lounge are
repurposed halves of industrial steel barrels, with obvious signs of use manifested as
chips in the black paint and rust speckled across exposed bits of steel.

The bar celebrates the Halloween and Fall season with vigor. The back wall adjacent to
the bartenders has become a mural of spooky cobwebs, poisoned whiskey, demons,
and gravestones drawn in black permanent marker. The people of the bar seem
oblivious to it, but it is sure to attract the eye to a new patron looking around, such as
myself.

The bathrooms are one of the more interesting aspects to the bar. Instead of gender or
unisex symbols placed on the doors, you simply have the letters WC etched on the
wooden doors. It stands for water closet, which is a European term for the bathroom,
which is unisex and open to all patrons. However, the best part is the inside of the room.
Within the water closet, you are surrounded by walls completely covered with stickers,
pictures, and clippings from newspapers and magazines ranging from last year to the
Reagan administration. There are too many on the walls to count, and there are several
layers of photos over each other as time has passed and the passions of patrons have
wavered over time. It is the same for both of the bathrooms, though each one has
different decorations. The most telling examples of this are the etched writings and
stains on the circular mirrors in both bathrooms, all carved by people who spent a little
too much time and money at the bar and definitely needed a cab to get home.

As the sun sets and preparations for the show begin, it becomes clear that the music
show is not the main attraction. The showcase tonight is a collection of underground
musicians selected by CMJ for their 35th anniversary. CMJ is a company that prides
itself as bringing out new, undiscovered talent for a larger audience and giving these
musicians more publicity, as well as some cash for their time.

The musician that has brought me down here is Max Coburn, or as hes known in the
electronic music scene, Maxo. Max is a short 24-year-old man with a shaggy beard,
long, curly hair, and blue eyes that lie behind thick-rimmed glasses that help frame his
face. Max is not soft-spoken, but he certainly isnt a loud, boisterous person like many of
the acts on the set. That should be expected, says Max, because theyre all rock bands
and singers with guitars. Im a controller DJ. Its as if whoever made the set just threw
together names and didnt bother to check out who they were. This is definitely true,
because when I first came to the bar, the audio engineer for the club had no idea that a
DJ was even playing that night.

I came into the bar and walked up to the sound guy during the sound-check for the
guys playing right now, Max tells me as he gestures towards the performing room just
up the ramp that is blasting loud metal music across the entire bar, and no one noticed
me except the sound guy, and that was only because I told him I was playing. He just
said to come back after they were done for sound check. Pretty common at a lot of
these bar and club shows.

The wind outside carries the pungent odor of cigarettes from smokers in to mix with the
musty smell of the bar. The sound guy walks up to us after just coming in from a smoke
break. He pays me no mind as he talks to Max about his set and what he needs. You
got about, Id say, 10 minutes before these guys are finished and unpacked, I slightly
overhear above the din of the crowd. The sounds of the guitars and drums are melding
with the roar of the bar-goers to form a symphony of noise.

The set finishes up in about 5 minutes, so Max and I ascend the ramp into the small
room where hell be performing. The LED lights in the room cover it in a shade of green
reserved for peppers, lettuce, and the kale that seems to be all the rage now amongst
the very group of young hipsters that populate the bar. Theres no smoking in the room,
but the air is hot and heady as I breathe in, and it feels at least 15 degrees warmer in
here from the rest of the building. The stage is a small, raised platform that looks more
like a tall landing on a staircase than anything else. Theres a small 5-piece drum set in
the back, and an amalgamation of speakers and guitar amplifiers that crowds the small
surface area of the platform, leaving about 20 square-feet at most for performers. The
room is also accented by pine bars and walls, with bar stools and the same industrial
metal drums, except these are full-sized for drink placement.

Theres no more than 10 people in the entire room, and most of them placidly converse
with their friends and companions as Max sets up. He asks for a table and receives one
that takes up most of the stage, far too much for his needs. All Max has is a small
25-key digital keyboard controller, an audio interface, and his laptop. All of his
equipment is tagged with stickers, badges, and decorations, much like the streets of
Brooklyn where he lives.

Max sets up within five minutes and his sound check takes roughly the same time, so
his set begins early, which he is all too happy about. He introduces himself in a soft
voice farflung from the previous act. Hes not a man of exposition, so he quickly starts
his set with a song that sounds like a mix between 16-bit video game music mixed with
music out of a modern EDM track.

And thats exactly what it is.

Max produces and performs a specific style of music called Chiptune. Chiptune could
be loosely described as video game music format referred to as 8 and 16-bit music, due
to the bit depth and degree of complexity of the digital files used by retro video games
in the 80s and 90s. Max, however, adds his own flair to the music. He uses his
keyboard controller to manipulate the pitch, tempo, and add effects to them to make
each part of the songs he samples new and fresh to any audience. He describes his
sound as jazz-fusion mixed with video games.

Although Max is able to use the knobs and pads on his controller with ease and
poignancy, his best talent is his ability to provide musical accents and additions with his
powerful and enthralling piano skills. He uses his keyboard to improvise and whip
together notes and themes into a song that, in many cases, seem as though they
belonged in the song to begin with. He deftly flies from one key to another with what
could only be described as a graceful flurry of fingers and music.

The green color of the room fits the futuristic music being played. As Max plays through
the songs, you can see his body move to both the music through the speakers, but also
the music in his head. With his musical background, Max analyzes every song he plans
to play at a show well before he ever steps foot on the Subway to make it to the gig.
The synthesized beats and melodies all play in Maxs head as he times each individual
note with laser precision. For each song, Max has an immense amount of ways he can
approach and perform it with his mixture of control and melodic accompaniment. Those
who say DJs arent musicians clearly havent met anyone like Max.

As the speakers in the ceiling blast Maxs mixes around this tiny wooden room, I look
around and see that the few people that are in the room, save myself and someone
else, are fairly disinterested in Max and his performance. They pass glances and clap
every so often, but it seems more obligatory than complimentary. The one thing they are
not, though, is rude. Max has a few technical difficulties throughout his set, and the
intoxicated members of the room are courteous enough to clap and cheer him up, and I
can see in Maxs face a sigh of relief whenever someone does that. It goes to show that
even in the brutal music scene of New York, in a small wooden box in the middle of
Brooklyn, people care enough about making a musician happy and enjoy his set than let
him flounder in silence and misery. It was probably the most touching thought that came
from the entire experience.

I interviewed Max after the show, and asked him how he saw the DJ scene as a whole.
Its hard to be a DJ. Im still living with my parents, and Im picking up so many things
just to pay bills, he says with a wry smile. He laughs a little, but from the look on his
face, its definitely not something he really considers funny. In order for the average DJ
to be successful, they cant just spin tunes. They have to produce, too. Im making most
of my money from producing video game soundtracks and songs for sale. Its bringing in
some decent money, but not enough to live off of.

Just like Josh, Max loves the scene of electronic music and DJing. He was not around
during the era of vinyl records, and he does not fit within the paradigm of the traditional
disc jockey. While Josh and Max are completely different DJs in every way, they are
bound by the same love and passion for music. However, that same bond is one that
has cost Max a lot of his time, money, energy, and independence. He may be his own
boss on paper, but he is forced to follow whatever gig or commission is sent his way to
make ends meet, and he still cant leave the home he grew up in.

I ask him if hes satisfied with his career choice next, and his face instantly brightens. I
love what I do. Ive been playing piano and learning music theory since I was 5 years
old, and I can apply that knowledge and my passion together in this job, hes smiling
even though were both freezing and shaking from the cold and the wind blowing down
the street, I mean, Im going to Japan next week with friends to play music for an
international audience. I love it!

As the streets of Brooklyn get progressively colder, I say goodbye and thank Max for the
show. No, man, thank you for coming all the way down here just to see me perform.
The interview was the least I could do. As I watched him put on his headphones and
head towards the Morgan Street Subway stop and begin his hour-long trip home on a
night approaching freezing temperatures, I saw a young man with a lot of promise and
talent, but like so many others, he has a very long way to go before hes made it.

I Got Two Turntables

Long before the age of iTunes, Spotify, and even CDs, the way people heard music was
by listening to the radio or buying albums. With the radio, you had the local and national
disc jockeys playing music related to the show or station you were listening to, ranging
from jazz to pop music across any given day. It was here where the DJ began to exist
and thrive.

However, this was the age of analogue, where music was recorded on physical tape
and played on discs of vinyl called records that were designated between their RPMs
(rotations per minute) and required expensive equipment to play. A&M Records founder
Herb Albert spoke on NPR about the age of audio when you had to use wire recorders
to record, so you couldnt cut like today, you had to use wire cutters. For a decent
period of time in the 1930s to the 1940s, you had to have three record players that span
at either 33 RPM, 45 RPM, or 78 RPM. This, added with speakers, headphones, cables,
and the space for it all, was a real impediment for many people to listen to anything but
the radio or the jukebox at the bar. Eventually, all these came down in price during the
late 1940s and by the 1950s, every house had a radio and sound system -- that
included a universal record player which accepted all three RPMs -- that could play
music.

Despite the easier means of getting equipment to listen to music, it was by no means
easy to hear the songs you liked regularly. As written by Stephen Witt in How Music
Got Free; when you wanted to listen to a song, you had one of two choices. You could
wait for it to be played on the radio -- or call it in if you were brave or desperate enough
--, or you could buy those expensive vinyl records that could either have one song,
called a single (which is still a term used today) which could only fit about 3:30 of music,
or an LP, which stood for long play, that could fit around 45-60 minutes of music.
Paul Miller writes in Sound Ubound how these restraints caused most songs to stay
under 3:30 long and LPs, which would eventually be just referred to as albums, to stay
at around 12 songs and an hour at most. Even today, in the digital age, all pop songs
have some version that is radio friendly that fits under 4 minutes and albums usually
stay around that length due to the traditional norms that analogue radio set decades
ago.

The days of analogue were in full force for decades, and Brewster elaborates how the
DJ had to use what he was given. DJs on radio started using turntables and had to
spend time getting new albums ready to play. In what would be blasphemous -- and
illegal under FCC regulations -- this silence or dead air would take 10-30 seconds to
swap out and put a new album on to play. However, when multi-track, live-band mixers
started becoming more affordable for smaller stations and performers, the use of two
turntables to swap through became possible. Soon, the phrase two turntables and a
microphone became the calling card for the DJ, because the necessities for a DJ were
a mixer, two turntables, and a microphone to perform.

The DJ became an artist as much as a performer, says both Meyer and Brewster. He
had to memorize the tempo and timing of songs, how the texture and music played well
with each other, and the exact time to switch the song with the other. The DJ used the
power and beauty of the physical analogue medium -- mixers, vinyl, turntables -- to
weave together a tapestry of sound, and it stayed that way long after the digital medium
existed.

As Joshua Glazer writes in his Medium.com article, A Brief History of the DJ mixer, it
was in 1971 that the first recorded DJ mixer, created by audio engineer Alex Rosner,
and was used to be able to swap between one album to another more easily than live
mixers. It was primitive, only 3 sliders and two channels, and had little resemblance to
the DJ mixers used now. Rosner brought his mixer, Rosie, to the New York City
nightlife and that idea changed everything.

Around the same time, another New York audio engineer, Louie Bozak, worked with
Rosner and other audio engineers to create the first commercial DJ mixer, the Bozak
CMA-10-DL2. The mixer was massive -- over 25 pounds and the exact opposite of
portable -- but it was soon installed by clubs all over New York.
However, it was a long time before the average DJ could afford this new tool. Glazer
notes that the GLI DJ mixer became the poor mans Bozak. It was pioneers in the Hip
Hop genre like Grandmaster Flash and DJ Kool Herc that used this mixer to
revolutionize what the DJ was. The DJ holds just as much responsibility for the creation
of rap as the performers themselves. The record scratching, samples, and overdubs
that got their start in Jamaica and New York reached the hip hop and rap areas like
Detroit, Compton, L.A., and New York and were weaved into this new genre.

The GLI was only two-channel and DJs had to make their own rigged tools to control
the sound the way they wanted. The idea of something like EQ (equalizing), which was
standard on live mixers, was something barely considered by companies, leaving DJs to
make their own methods of manipulating the sound.

Numark burst onto the scene in the 1980s with the DM1775. Mike Fotias is the
production manager for the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, and he remembers what
the mixer was like when he was a DJ, The first super cool 19-inch Numark DM1775
mixer had five sliders and four seconds of sampling memory. It was built like a tank. All
the sheet metal was solid aluminum and steel. The sample had a big start/stop push
button, and four smaller buttons that each represented one second of memory.

Sampling was the big feature, and Paul Miller writes about how important that feature
later became for the DJ and music at large in Sound Unbound. Sampling
revolutionized how music was performed by DJs and how songs would be produced
until now and for the forerseeable future. Sampling allowed tracks to have whole new
parts and songs to be mixed and blended.
And even as it was only for four measly seconds, Numark stuck with it above things like
EQ, and effects processing like other mixers were using. But what mattered was the
mixer was a solidly-built, easy to use, and affordable four-channel mixer that allowed
DJs to really up their game. That fact was what helped revolutionize the DJ field.

Pioneer, which is currently considered the standard of high-end DJ equipment, started

out their DJ mixer products in the 1990s. As a cheap Japanese company that built DJ
mixers that packed features but lacked quality sound and build quality, Mike Fotias is
quoted in Medium saying, [they] werent using the best components, they werent
worried about sound quality, Fotias recalls. It was about how many mixers they could
build and sell. It was our cross to bear, because all the the DJs had it on their tech rider,
and we had to deal with it. How do we make this sound good?

Pioneer & Numark created some of the first CDJs in the 90s, which were essentially
turntables that used CDs rather than vinyl, but they were hardly equivalent. They were
costly, the medium was still very unreliable for perfect streaming, and the idea of
scratching was non-existent. If there was even a smudge on a CD, it would warp or
completely stop the track, and the digital medium was still too new to work out all of the
bugs. As such, Numarks DM1775 and Pioneers DJM series were the mixers that most
DJs were using, but Numark was the mixer that was the best for mobile DJs and the
most well-respected.

Over 20 years later, CDs and vinyl have become novelties, Pioneer has overtaken
Numark in the race for best sound, and the digital medium reigns. The CDJ line still
exists, and are expensive. A CDJ 2000 Nexus runs $2,000 or more, and its not for the
CD capabilities, either. Most of the time, DJs will just use these as essentially digital
interfaces that you can load tracks into software and work from them there. A lot of DJs
will pride themselves on using CDs in these turntables, but its more common for the
average DJ to use a turntable computer interface that feigns the features of the DJ
mixer of old. The digital medium gave the DJ a new way to mix it up when they perform,
but that has not entirely been for the best.

Mixing It Up
Starting in the 1960s, synthesized sounds -- oscillators, synthesizers, signal processors
-- started becoming common in music. However, these instruments and processors
were still using analogue circuit boards and technology to make and warp the sounds.
But in the early 1980s, computers and new technology from the first digital wave began
to seep into music. Synths and other instruments began to use digital processing tools
to make new sounds that began the era of digital music.

Paul Miller and Stephen Witt both address how it was during this time that the computer
and the recording studio made a love-child that would change the world: the digital
audio workstation or DAW. A DAW is a mixture of software and hardware that uses a
computer to encode and create digital music in the form of files like WAVE, MP3, and
FLAC. The standard recording file is the WAVE, which is short for waveform audio due
to showing recorded audio as waveforms on the screen. It was one of the first, and the

highest quality, music file for recording, and was adopted as the universal file for
recording and high-fidelity (quality) music distribution.

However,as David Arditi writes in iTake-Over it would be less than a decade later that
platforms like Napster and iTunes would rock the music world by distributing music files
cheaply, digitally, and in an individual, portable format. Instead, early digital music was
encoded on CDs, or compact discs, which required a new type of audio product to
play, the CD player. It may seem insane now, but when CD players first came out, they
were hundreds of dollars, often the most expensive part of a modern digital sound
system.

Yet recording digital music was still far more expensive, and less lucrative, in the 1980s
than recording analogue on tape. Most DAWs would be the most expensive part of the
studio, costing tens of thousands of dollars for just the interfaces and software alone,
and thousands more for the computers and other aspects. CDs, though cheaper to
produce physically, cost as much as a vinyl, which was easier to play, sounded better,
and people already had the ability to play at home.

However, the idea of the using the CD as a DJ was still far from a reality, considering it
was still too expensive for a DJ to afford an actual DJ mixer, let alone work on the digital
medium. Vinyl was reliable, and it was a tried-and-true method that sounded great and
was easier for the average DJ to use. It was also cheaper. CDs were about the same as
vinyl records, and a single CDJ turntable cost more than most DJs had in their entire
analogue rig. As Josh Lampman remembers, digital wasnt reliable for a long time, and
it was way too expensive for just as long. I started with vinyl in the 90s and I didnt do

digital until college in the early 2000s, even though I was making and selling digital
music.

The Times They Are A Changin

Christoph Cox and David Arditi write about a pivotal shift in the the late 90s that
completely changed how the DJ did business: the proliferation of the MP3. An MP3 is a
lossy, or compressed, digital audio format that originated in the early days of the digital
audio revolution. However, it was the creation of SoundJam MP in 1998 -- which was
bought by Apple and renamed iTunes in 2000 -- and the now infamous file sharing site
Napster in 1999 paved the way for the massive takeover of the format for consumer
use. When Apple gave big artists and record labels the ability to sell their songs en
masse via iTunes for far less production costs and easier distribution than vinyl,
cassettes, and CDs, the music industry changed forever as labels and artists from
across the globe clammered to become part of the new wave of digital music.

MP3s had been on the radar of DJs since they first came around, especially due to their
synonymy CD turntables and digital mediums, but there were few applications for the
format until the 2000s. Computer costs had dropped to an all-time low and they were
getting more powerful than ever, which opened the space for the digital medium to
explode for DJs. Soon, owning a powerful laptop was not just for the travelling
businessman or reporter, it was something the average adult, and thus the DJ, could
afford and use.

Around the same time, the market exploded with MP3 players and DJ interfaces. Mobile
DJs 20 years earlier had to fill their cars with equipment just to do the average wedding
or gig, but the times had changed. Pioneer, Numark, and Native Instruments burst as
heralds of the future of DJing with software and hardware for the DJ that was portable,
powerful, and affordable.

Around the same time, electronic music production DAWs like Ableton Live and FL
Studio, and computers powerful enough to run them, became accessible for the
average person and a new explosion of digital music emerged. Before, what used to
take time in the studio and hundreds of dollars became something you could do in the
living room on a Sunday afternoon.

This created a new landscape that had direct and latent effects. It made it so that
people who had only dreamed of making electronic music and performing it could follow
their aspirations, but it opened the floodgates so that anyone with a computer could try
to be a DJ. The key word of that sentence, though, is try, because having a paintbrush
doesnt make a person a painter, the same way having a laptop didnt make someone
an artist & DJ.

Flash forward to the modern day, and it seems that the profession of being a DJ is seen
as nothing more than an interest than an actual career. In the 1980s and 90s, DJs could
make an honest, solid living and find gigs easily, even if they were faceless celebrities,
because the overhead and operating costs, not even just the talent, was too lofty for
most people to reach. Now, as Adam Tod Brown wrote with venom in a Cracked.com
article, Plugging your laptop into a PA system and sharing the playlist your personal
assistant assembled with a crowd of drunken revelers does not make you an

entertainer.Until the apocalypse hits and you're the only person in town with an iPod,
no one gives a shit about your skills as a DJ.

The Professional Amateurs
In a tiny corner of Roger Williams Universitys College of Arts and Sciences building is
room 158. The sign reads Office of Dr. Elliott Miles McKinley, Professor of Music. The
room itself is eclectic; a digital piano, bookshelves full of music textbooks and other
music paraphernalia, papers across the desk, and a surprising amount of other objects
fit inside the cramped space. At the desk on his laptop sits Dr. McKinley. McKinley is a
spry, 56-year-old man with a stocky build, broad shoulders, and salt-and-pepper hair
that is more salt than pepper. He wears a brown tweed sportcoat with a blue dress shirt
and gray, neatly pressed dress pants. He is a personable man, always willing to engage
in conversation, and never one to pass up his dry sense of humor. His voice is
surprisingly monotone for a music professor, though that is more deceiving as you hear
him talk about harmonics and modes. His appearance betrays his advanced knowledge
of music. He has a Ph.D in Music Theory and Composition, as well as decades of
experience in the recording industry. McKinley has been in the studio since the
beginning of the digital age, and he isnt one to hide that knowledge from students and
musicians alike.

After he sends an email we begin to converse on music over the years, composition,
form, and technology. I started really getting into recording after I graduated college,
about 1992 or so. I started by being a fly-on-the-wall, and then I started producing and
learning the craft slowly. I knew music theory, so I would track pieces and help the

engineer and the composer work with each other. Eventually, I was doing editing and
work at some studios, and now Im the producer for orchestras and philharmonics.

Back then the whole game of recording audio was different. DAWs were becoming the
mainstream, and they were expensive, says McKinley, I worked with some pieces of
equipment that were over $10,000, and that was not even counting the prices of the
computers, proprietary hard drives, and other hardware powerful enough to run it.

McKinley knows his stuff. He knows just as much about sound as he does about music.
He teaches his students the physics and science of sound waves, music, and all of the
stuff he learned as he worked his way in the industry.

McKinley went into the industry after he earned his bachelors degree at the New
England Conservatory of Music and worked at studios in Boston until he went for his
masters degree. In that time, he learned about the entire process of recording, mixing,
and mastering music from professionals that had been doing it for years. It was their
livelihood, and it was complicated. A professional audio engineer needed a mastery of
physics as well as an ear for sound.

However, since the average consumer was able to get audio production software and
computers that were capable of running them, McKinley has noticed serious problems
with the quality of recordings as of late. There has always been the amateur in the
field, but now that its so easy to pick up equipment and start out in the field, the
professional amateur is now more prevalent than actual professionals.

McKinley is not all against the proliferation of musical technology. Its nice that now the
average person can become an audio engineer or producer. It allows for the field to
become more diverse and gives the average person the chance to enter a craft that
used to be well out of the reach of all but a few people. It allows more people to do what
they love.

But that doesnt mean that the role of the professional audio engineer should be
understated, says McKinley. For things like mixing and mastering, you need the fine
touch of a trained professional that knows what hes doing. Its not just something you
can throw together on your own and find it to be a perfect track. But the consumer
market is ruining the quality of the recordings & its making it hard for engineers.

Its also caused backlash from performers of ages past. People like Joe Walsh of The
Eagles and Steve Lukather from Toto have gone out and been actively opposed to
the massive riptide of artists to go to streaming services and running away from the old
models they gained their fortune and fame on.

Walsh was especially angry at the uptick of virtual instruments and sounds that DJs and
EDM producers have been making, Everybodys adding on virtual instruments that
dont exist onto a drum machine that somebody programmed. And you can tell in the
music thats out now. Its all been programmed. Theres no mojo. Theres nobody
testifying. Theres not the magic of a human performance, which is never perfect. And
the magic of a human performance is what we all know and love in the old records, by
the way they were made. And its all gone.

People like Lukather and Walsh are angry at the fact that so many people are drowning
out good musicians with fake sounds and ruining the magic of human performance
mainly because they were the people that used to produce that performance and music,
and now with streaming services, iTunes, and pirating, they are feeling the burn of the
digital age crushing their generation.

However, with the exponential growth of digital musicians, producers and engineers that
profess to be masters of the craft when they havent put in the time, energy, and effort
that their predecessors have, its easy to understand the anger of those who had to
spend that time working on their craft being pushed aside by the professional amateur.

As McKinley says, anyone that gets paid for doing something is technically a
professional, but its a completely different product from those whove spent years of
their lives working on the craft that these guys say theyve mastered after a few months
with a DAW and some plug-ins.

There is too much noise out there for anyone trying to make a break in digital music at
large. Too many people enter the craft and dont devote enough time to it, says
McKinley, I feel that if you want to get good at something you have to spend 10,000
hours doing it. If you dont want to spend that kind of time on something, then you
should have no business trying to make a living off of it.

Elliott McKinley is someone who has seen firsthand the negative effects on music as a
whole, and he knows that there is something good about the whole at the same time. I
feel that anyone that gets paid to do something is a professional, but it takes time and

effort to actually become one in reality. Everyone starts out as an amateur, but if people
want to invest everything you have into becoming their dreams, then they will be
professionals at the end of the day.

Papas Got a Brand New Bag
Its a brisk night in Queens, N.Y. It is the first night the New York Mets are at Citi Field
for the 2015 World Series, so the traffic is terrible and finding parking less than six miles
away in College Park. However, there is something else that is going on that night, a
live stream between two disc jockeys that is sure to last just as long as the baseball
game.

The livestream is at the home of Robert McGowan, also known by his stage name
Oremm, and Joshua Lampman, or Faith in the Glitch. This livestream has been in
the works for months and its happening just a few days before Halloween with an
emphasis on scary music and visuals. Rob and Josh have been putting it all over social
media for days to hype their fanbases up, and theyre expecting a big show turnout.

Robs home is his parents house in College Park. The two-story brownstone is nestled
on 14th Ave with the houses of college students from Queens University. Rob answers
the door and takes me inside. The interior is all nicely kept, with clean hardwood floors,
spotless white walls, and a warm, welcoming atmosphere. Robs mother is cleaning up
after dinner and offers something to drink, but I decline and follow Rob downstairs to his
performance space.

Rob is a tall, 35-year-old man with glasses, short brown hair, a round face and a large
build. His voice is flat and deep, but welcoming with a complimentary smile. He is
wearing the remnants of a pirate Halloween costume from years ago, which only
remains as a bandana, eye patch, and cap, but he removes the eye patch when he
begins to set up the stream.

The setup in his basement is something far more complex and intricate than what you
would think goes into a live stream. He has a laptop, 2 monitor screens, webcams, and
a microphone just for streaming. For the DJ equipment, he has a huge four-channel DJ
mixer that weighs more than my dog, plus a streaming mixer, DJ controllers,two
turntables, and audio interfaces which in total cost more than the car he drives. It takes
over a full-sized executive business desk and spills over onto other tables and even the
ceiling. He tapes webcams to the ceiling and has a collection of vinyls that spans a
good portion of the real estate next to the desk. Robs been at this for awhile, and hes
got the gear to prove it.

Rob lives with his parents while he works as an audio technician for Queens College,
with the occasional DJ gig. Like so many others in New York, hes had a hard time
finding himself stable enough work to survive, and his work as a DJ is not nearly
enough to pay the bills. I havent worked at live venue in almost three years. Ive been
meaning to look for some more gigs.

I was inspired by a local radio DJ called Liquid Todd who I listened to every week. It
was the first time I heard someone blend two songs together like that to make
something bigger, Rob says, I was absolutely floored by it and wanted to do it too.

It was 1998 when I had the chance to do radio at my universitys radio station. Once I
had access to the equipment, I started learning. Rob has spent a long time learning,
and he found that he got better after he started producing content online. I kind of
stagnated after a while, and when I began live streaming and posting my stuff online, I
realized I really needed to up my game.

The digital medium and the Internet made everything easier. I can just throw tracks
together now and make a mix or a song and upload it to something like Mixcloud for
free. Before you had to go to a studio and spend hundreds of dollars to produce the
track then put it out for distribution.

Josh comes into the room a short time later and the two begin to get their music ready
for the show. Josh was late due to traffic, so its haphazard, but Josh is ready all the
same. He is dressed in a black dress pants and a matching blazer that has seen far
better days from the sight of the literal wearing and tearing of the fabric from years of
continued use. He has substituted his pinstripe dress shirt to to an orange t-shirt, but
still has his tactfully prepared mustache ready for tonight.

After Rob explains to Josh how the setup works, all the while regaling each other with
old DJ stories that both of them can relate and laugh about, they begin their discussion
on streaming and the internet in general. I remember making sets and uploading them
at such shit quality, and that was huge, says Josh, never really made money off the
internet for a long time, still havent.

Yeah, but with stuff like Mixcloud and Twitch, the operating costs are low. Set up
something like Patreon or crowdsourcing, people will donate, says Rob, hell, I will.
Josh laughs and slams Rob on the back, saying, Thanks, man!

They start the stream with Rob throwing down a vinyl and slowly revving up the speed
and mood of the chat. The stream viewers throw emoticons and Electronic Dance Music
terms like This is so lit! and Dude, straight fire tonight! to compliment them as Josh
and Rob switch off every few songs. The mood of the room is pulsating elation as both
of them throw down the gauntlet for one DJ to top the other. Yet, even with all of this
energy, theres nothing but love and admiration between them, as they drink beer and
laugh about music.

Theres only so many sounds that can be made, and we have probably made all of
them already, says Rob in a philosophical moment of the stream, we just need to
manipulate and mix those sounds to make something new, something better. Thats
what DJs are here for.

The stream goes on for over 3 hours, but by time it ends, it feels like no time has
passed. Watching these two men work their magic for people they have never met for
sheer enjoyment and pleasure shows just how much they love what they do. Live
streams are just like practicing in your room, but you get to do it for other people, and
you get to feel the happiness of the stream chat lighting up when you do good, says
Josh with a smile on his face and sweat on his brow. Its not the same as a club, but its
a hell of a lot better than doing it alone for yourself.

After Josh packs up, Rob gives him a bear hug, knocking down some of the empty beer
bottles in the process. This was great, man, we need to do it again soon, Rob says
with a bellowing tone of joy. Definitely, Rob, get in touch with me the next time youre
free, Josh says, slapping Rob on the back with his palms. I follow Josh out and we all
say our goodbyes before parting ways in the cool Autumn air. Josh and I walk down the
street and we shake hands. Tell me whenever youre in New York again, dude, Id love
to catch a drink with you, Josh says between a warm smile. I tell him likewise and
watch him walk in the opposite direction to his car several blocks away. Im sure the
traffic is going to be terrible if the Mets already finished, so I rush to my car and drive
away.

The Final Word

The state of the DJ is a peculiar one. The increasing noise and competition between
people who are in the game for the right reasons and the wrong reasons, the talented
and the hopeless, and everyone who thinks they can be the next big thing has made it
difficult for anyone to really stand out. However, it is people like Josh Lampman and
Max Coburn, people who put their 10,000 hours dozens of times over for the craft of
making the perfect mix and living the dream of becoming a DJ for a living. But the world
is a harsh place, and these guys may have the skills, but DJing cant pay the bills like
they want it to.

The Internet at large gives them a new bag of toys and opportunities to make a name
for themselves in the vast oceans of the global music scene. Be it chiptune with Max or
electro-swing with Josh, DJs are finding new and more impressive music and tricks to
break through the cacophony around them, and they hope it works.

However, Josh has to do freelance work to pay the bills, and Max has to live at home
with his parents to survive. The climate of electronic music is full of lightning and storms,
tearing away the houses and triumphs of the little guy whenever the next big thing rolls
in from the horizon. The DJ, as both an artist and a businessman, must learn to react
and adapt in enough time, or be swept out to sea on the waves of change.

Josh refuses to be one of those lost at sea, and wants to make his dream of success
not just possible, but a reality. Hes spent his life planning what he could do, and while
he hasnt reach it yet, he feels those winds on the horizon and has his sails ready to
pick them up.

One could only hope those winds take him to sunny shores and greener pastures than
the No Quarter Tavern in Bay Ridge or a house in College Point, but as James Brown
sang in his single that was played by DJs almost 50 years ago, Papas got a brand new
bag.

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