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  • It's been a few years, but teaching yourself to beatmatch the old fashioned way just means locking yourself away for maybe a day and practicing until you can basically do it. It also means listening to every one of your records, counting the BPM and then writing that on the sleeves. Unless you're one of those who reckon they just know how fast any track is.

    But even then, there's a bigger art to it. DJing has two main skills: knowing your records back to front and knowing how to read a crowd. By knowing your records, I mean knowing where each track comes in, how long the intros are, where to drop the next track etc.

    Advice: if you want to play out in clubs and bars, make a 30 minute mix that best showcases what you'd play to get people dancing and specifically buying drinks. Then put that on a CD or mixcloud and take yourself round some local bars at a quiet time in person and ask to speak to whoever books DJs. That's what I did.

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