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A few nights ago, I was treated to a somewhat alternative, but totally awesome night of entertainment by some of my business associates in the search engine industry: Scratching lessons at the Scratch DJ academy on 6th ave. Not your usual night on the town to say the least, this experience was both novel and educational.

We arrived around 7:00pm with a group of about 15 people (I assume that our friends rented out the space for a few hours to entertain us) and headed up to the second floor where the DJ academy is located. Inside, we were greeted warmly by our scratch sensei for the evening, Master Instructor J-Smoke, who introduced us to one of the vital pieces of equipment in the DJ industry, the turntable, as well as our TA’s, J-Smoke’s fellow DJ instructors at the academy.

Scratch 101
We each got to man our own turntable stations complete with a pair of turntables/records, speakers and a mixing board. Since I’m not amazingly sophisticated in the area of music, I’ll gloss over the minutiae of how these devices work and assume that most people understand the basic principal: the record spins, you push it forward and back to create the scratching effect. With about 10 minutes of basic instruction under our belts, we were all scratching up a storm!

Now I’ll be the first to admit that music is not my forte. I struggled to learn the recorder in middle school and I still struggle with music and instruments to this very day. That being said, scratching was really fun! It would probably take years to master, but getting started is relatively simple, and even if you’re pretty much tone deaf like I am, its still cool to scratch around. Sometimes you even get lucky and scratch up something that sounds good! I’m sure that people who have actual musical skills and talent would find this even more rewarding, but it just goes to show that even as a musical neophyte, you can still have fun!

DJ Names and the DJ Battle
After being shown several basic scratches, we were offered the opportunity to square off in a no-holds barred DJ battle to the death! Okay, no one actually died, but that’s not to say it wasn’t serious business! We had a few people with some actual experience, so in that sense there was no contest, but we all got to steal our nerves and get up front on the instructors turntables and try our newly acquired skills in front of all our friends. I’m pretty sure my 30 or so seconds came out as a discordant mess, but wha-wha-what’s a few errant beats among friends, right? Ultimately, almost everyone gave it a shot, and some were even pretty good, so we all had a great time watching and listening, and the winner actually got a Scratch Academy T-shirt. Pretty sweet, no?

Private Party
Since we were a private party, we got the big seminar room and instructors to ourselves, and after we finished, our benefactors passed around some cold beers and pizza, and we had an improvised dance party, compliments of J-Smoke. All in all, we were there for a good 3 hours, but I can’t offer any kind of value comparison since I was there as a guest of someone with an expense account. What I can tell you is that this was a great change of pace from the usual happy hour bar scene, and while I don’t have any grand aspirations that involve DJ names or mixing boards, I’d love to go back at some point, if only for the sheer novelty of it.

If you do, however, have a serious interest in becoming a DJ, the Scratch Academy offers courses from beginner to advanced levels, and also offers the use of its extensive equipment for training, practicing, and, I’m told, even production. So if you want to get your feet wet in the DJ world, this might not be a bad place to start. Until next time, keep those records turning!