This is a compilation of conversations I've had over several years, with lots of different people.  A lot of the challenges are ones I went through personally (or still do!).  The rest are ones that I've seen and/or helped others go through.

Ultimately, I think a DJ's role is to raise the level of dancing by playing good music that will inspire and challenge the dancers.  Everything else comes from that.

Why you should DJ

First, before anything else, you should ask yourself : "why do I want to be a DJ?"

If the answer is that you're a music nut, and you've been finding tons of awesome music and want to share it with people, then awesome.  If you're the kind of person who is constantly searching through record stores, eMusic, and hitting up DJs or instructors for the names of great tunes, then you've got that seed that it takes to be a really good DJ.  If not, then you might be doing it for the sake of being cool.  If so, please, do everyone a favor, and don't.

As a good friend put it: "If you're doing it with intention, and working on it, cool. If you are thinking "huh! that's all there is to it? this is easy!" then you need to stop."

What you should play

The next step is to check your ego.  It's VERY easy to talk yourself into playing music that people don't relate to.  Granted, part of your job is to find good music that people haven't heard.  But the bigger part of that is inspiring them, which typically means playing accessible songs.  Tempting as it is to play some really obscure version of a song, it's important to remember that obscure versions are obscure for a reason.  Popular versions are popular for a reason.  One of the hardest things to accept is that people really want the comfort of the familiar.  You might feel like you're repeating yourself by playing a song that's a cliche.  You are.  BUT THAT'S NOT A BAD THING!  Music is all about theme and variation - the differences are cool BECAUSE they're different from the general trend.  If every song is new, there's nothing to relate to - it's the DJ equivalent of playing that post-modern, Ornette Coleman-esque avant-garde stuff.  Cool for a very small subset of people who already have music pinned down inside their own heads that they don't need theme anymore, just variation (that consists of a few DJs and musicians, and that's about it).  Everyone else is waiting for something they understand.

After that, it's all about playing good music, and playing it in an order that makes people want to dance to each song as it gets played.  Tricks to help that happen:

Roughly 2 out of 3 songs should be standards.  So, in a typical set of an hour, with 20 songs, 14-ish should be songs that experienced dancers already know.  Of those, at least a couple should be "superhit" numbers : Fever, Smooth Sailing, Jumpin at the Woodside, whatever.  Those songs that everyone knows by heart and can't wait to rock out on.  They're powerful, and a little goes a long way.  I don't think I've ever used more than 5-6 superhits in a set - there's only so many of them, and it's good to keep them from getting played out (a la Fever, Wade in the Water, etc).  There's a certain energy that happens when a really well-loved, or just plain good, song comes on - people look around a little more, and walk a little faster to find that perfect person to dance with.  That energy gets picked up even by people who don't know the song - they can tell it's going to be good, though.  After a really great dance like that, you're still inspired for the next song.

Of the remaining 1/3 of the songs, 1 or AT MOST 2 in an hour can be "novelty" numbers.  This means anything that really pushes outside the boundaries of swinging music.  This includes Hip-hop, 80's, Rockabilly, etc.  Examples I've played:
Ray's Waltz by Dan Barrett (swings, but in 3/4 time)
Bemsha Swing by Thelonious Monk (very complex rhythmically)
Autumn Leaves by Cannonball Adderly / Miles Davis (modern jazz.  Damn... just... damn!)
Funky Cold Medina by Tone Loc (hip hop, but in 4/4 with the emphasis still on 2/4 instead of 3)
Only The Good Die Young by Billy Joel

The rest should be solid, swinging numbers that provide some variety because they're new.

Even if you never learn to flow, if you play good music, people will have a good time.  Seriously.  It's amazing how rare that is.  As long as you're playing those tunes that inspire you and others, that reach down inside them and say "DANCE!" then you'll be fine.  Everything else is polish.

How you should play it

Having said that, the best advice is to have each song sound sort of like the one that came before it, but also a little different.  This helps keep you from getting into a rut, and from jarring people so that they don't feel like dancing.  It's possible to have people LOVE dancing to a B-grade song, if it's preceded by an A-grade song that has a lot of similarity.  If each song is somewhat the same, and somewhat different, you'll naturally cover a really broad range.  Sort of like that old kids' puzzle, where you can change "cold" into "heat" by changing one letter at a time :

COLD
HOLD
HELD
HEAD
HEAT

Obviously, this process only works if you have a good idea of where you're going next.  This requires that you have a decent-sized collection of music, and more importantly that you know your songs.  There's bazillions of possible flavors for the music to come in.  It's easy to find a match if you listen to your music enough to know lots of songs that sound similar (and you'll come to treasure crossover songs).  It's easiest to know your collection if you've spent years acquiring it.  I don't know of any really good DJs whose primary source of music was copying it.  Which is not to say that DJs don't give each other songs - but when Abdel sent me a copy of Sidney Bechet's "Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me", I went out and bought a half-dozen more CDs (haven't regretted it, either!).  If you're the kind of person who will make a good DJ, it's generally because you're a music junkie, in which case most DJs are willing to give you a CD or two to help get you started.  They know you're going to go find plenty more by the artists that you like.  (I once had a guy offer me $20 to copy my hard drive.  Really.)

Doing this well is a great deal of the art of DJing, and it pretty much requires the ability to preview tracks. If you can't preview, it's REALLY hard to be sure that two songs "match". Setlists are not a substitute for DJing, so just don't do it.  If you're not changing what you're playing based on the crowd's reaction, you're not DJing.  We might as well have put on a mix CD.

An external USB soundcard is a WONDERFUL tool for DJs.  There's one by Turtle Beach that costs about $30, and was one of the best DJ investments I've made.  If you don't want to spring for one right now, you can probably borrow one from someone who has one.  You can either have two separate programs, like iTunes and WinAmp; or you can have two instances of some programs, like WinAmp.  Many DJs like to use iTunes for finding and previewing songs, because they can search easily, and then drag-and-drop the song into the program that will be routed to the external card.  Get some practice BEFORE your first set, so that it doesn't come as a total shock.  I also set my preferences in WinAmp so that if I double-click a song while browsing in Windows, it gets queued up, but doesn't play - it sucks to have a song stop in the middle and switch to something new because you goofed!  You want to use the external card for previewing, because the external card has FAR better quality than the onboard one.  There are some programs such as PCDJ or Tractor that are used just like regular mixing boards - nice because you can start a song after that annoying intro, although I haven't used them much.    I also set WinAmp to "Force Mono" - this means that both sides of a stereo track play on both the left and right channels.  You'd be amazed how often the equipment has been set up so that only one side is playing.  Doesn't make much difference on old mono recordings, but Ray Charles suffers immensely.  I save all my set lists, so I can look over what I did later.

Sound quality is another issue - the more people can hear in the music, the more they can dance to.  Sound quality can be affected by things like speaker placement and the overall room shape (flat walls provide a lot of opportunity for the sound to bounce around and build standing waves - for this reason music classrooms and concert halls invariably have round or angled ceilings and at least one wall with an angled section).  Make use of the graphic equalizer feature - a lot of recordings will benefit from having the too-high trumpets dropped, the bass boosted, etc.  This changes based on the room, though, so you have to be careful.  Naturally this makes no difference if your audio files sound like crap in the first place, which is another reason to buy your music - you know where it's been!  I really hate the RIAA, but I love hearing this awesome music remastered.  Which Jelly Roll Morton would you rather dance to - the one ripped straight from 45, or the one that was carefully remastered?

Where you can find music (and how to store it)

Local record stores are great.  Most of the small chains will let you listen to the used CDs before making your decision.  My favorite store in town has a whole room devoted just to jazz.  I only let myself go there once in a while, because I've never left without spending at least $100 (it's not a hobby, it's an addiction).  One of the challenges is knowing who makes good music - there's boatloads of musicians out there.  When you pick up a CD, look at the rhythm section - if you've got top-notch players like Papa Joe Jones, Walter Page, Sonny Greer, Ray Brown, Cozy Cole, you can rest assured it's going to swing.  If you're looking at Philly Joe Jones, Paul Chambers, Charles Mingus... well, it might be great music, but you can't be too sure it's going to swing.  If none of those names are familiar: learn the history, and your job gets easier.  Read the liner notes (another advantage of CDs!).  I audited a History of Jazz class, and learned a lot, not just about specific musicians, but also the various subgenres within jazz and how they influenced each other.  You can also go to allmusic.com and look things up.  They've got great writeups, and most of the albums have samples you can listen to so that you can be sure the version on the CD you're thinking about getting is the one you want.  I order a lot of things through half.com, which has really good prices most of the time.

A great source online is eMusic.  For a flat monthly fee of $15 you get to download 50 songs.  As mp3s.  Meaning there's no digital rights management bullshit.  And they've got the whole catalog of a LOT of great labels, like Concord, Smithsonian Folkways, Prestige, Pablo.  Treasures untold are there for the finding.  Do me a favor, if you sign up, tell them you heard about them from me ( beakdan [a) yahoo ) and I get some extra songs.  Which I *always* need  :)  The other great thing about eMusic is that most of the songs are done at high-quality bit rates - none of this 128kbps crap.

On that note, I don't use Windows Media Player or iTunes to rip my CDs.  Neither does a very good job.  I typically rip from CD to WAV using Audiograbber, then go from WAV to MP3 using RazorLame, which I've got setup to encode using Variable Bit Rate (VBR), making the files size about twice as large as 128kbps, but the sound quality is light years beyond.  Then the CD goes on the shelf.  I copy my HD to an external every few weeks, and every few months I bring that external down to Florida and give a copy to Abdel.  Worst case scenario: my apartment catches on fire and all of my CDs are destroyed with my computer, but at least I haven't lost my time investment of hundreds of hours ripping and BPMing tunes.  Renter's Insurance covers the collection itself, and a lot more, for $15/month (I'm a little OCD about this, if you can't tell).

I rip all my files under the scheme:

artist/album/ trk-artist_name-song_title_NOTE_(bpm)

The first two are folders, the last bit means I might have a file with the title:

04-Kermit_Ruffins-Wake_Up_Neesie_EDIT_(130)

That lets me use the search feature in windows to find songs by artist, title.  And if I do the search " (13 " I get everything between 130 to 139 BPM.  On the laptop, I just sort the songs into folders by artist, with a handful of "genre" folders (Blues, Tango, Novelty, etc).  The "EDIT" in all caps lets me know that's not part of the song title (and that it's the version I spent hours screwing with in Audacity, to move the vocal to the beginning of the song so that the song finishes properly, not on that damn false ending).  Because I picked and maintained my naming convention from the beginning, I was able to use Dr. Tag afterwards, taught it my naming convention, and it wrote ID3 tags for all 25,000 songs in my collection.  That cost me $20, but it was WELL worth it.

After all that, the songs that are worth spinning go to the laptop, and get normalized using MP3 Gain, so that all the songs are very close to the same volume level (95 dB).  All the programs I've mentioned (except Dr. Tag) are freeware, although I've also donated to all of them, given how much I use them.  I may be switching to OGG encoding soon, but haven't committed yet.

I'll write more on flow at some point, and some on picking music for the occasion (hint: "White Heat", at 316 BPM, should not be played at 4am!). But this is the basics.

TOPICS:
what makes A vs B song
take a history class
ripping, converting, normalizing, naming convention, ID tagging
matching elements - texture, timbre, tempo
video vs stereo cables

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