Private DJ Lessons · One to One · Online or In Person
Hands on, in depth, and built around your music.
Six private lessons on Rekordbox, from never having touched a deck to playing a full set.
Book your first lessonMost people who want to DJ never really start. They buy a controller, watch a year of tutorials, and still cannot tell you why their mixes sound wrong. Not because they lack the ear. Because nobody sat next to them and showed them.
I will sit next to you. Your hands are on the gear in the first ten minutes, and by the last lesson you play a full set while I coach you through it.
What You Walk Away With
What You Will Learn
Your library, your playlists, your cue points and your colours, set up the way a working DJ sets them up. Most people lose more time to a messy library than to any technical skill, and you will not be one of them.
Analysis, beat grids, cue points and what a badly gridded track sounds like so you catch it at home instead of in front of people. Preparation is the invisible half of DJing and almost nobody teaches it.
Beats, bars and phrases, until you hear the eight coming instead of counting it. Once you hear the shape of a track you stop guessing where a mix should start and begin choosing it.
You learn to hear drift and correct it with your hands, so unfamiliar gear in a dark booth never rattles you. Sync is a time saver, not a skill, and you will earn the right to use it.
Where the bass lives, why two kicks together sound like mud, and how to hand the low end from one track to the other without anyone noticing. This is the difference between clean and amateur.
Used as tools rather than decoration. How to extend an intro that is too short, rescue a mix that is running out of road, and add tension on purpose instead of by accident.
How to blend tracks that sit in friendly keys so your transitions sound musical rather than merely in time. No theory degree, no jargon, just a system you can use on the night.
A long blend, a filter sweep, a hard cut and a breakdown swap all belong to different moments. You will learn which ones suit the music you actually want to play, and when each one is the wrong choice.
How an ecstatic dance arc rises, holds and releases, and how the same instincts work in a club, at a wedding, or at sunset on a beach. Where to open, when to lift, and how to bring people down with care.
What to play at 11pm on a half empty floor, and what to play at 2am when it is full. How to feel a room turning before it turns, and what to do when it has already gone.
Where to find music worth playing, how to decide fast whether a track is a keeper, and how to move it from download to ready to play without losing whole evenings inside folders.
What you are actually here to play, and how to make a set that could only have come from you. This is the part that turns a competent DJ into one people remember and book again.
Is This You
And Who They Are Not For
The Curriculum
Your gear, Rekordbox, and how music is actually built. Counting bars and phrases out loud until you hear them without thinking. BPM, the pitch fader, and your first beatmatch by ear with no sync. You finish this lesson holding two tracks in time and making a clean transition.
EQs, gain staging, filters and cueing. Where the bass lives, and why two kicks together sound like mud. The transitions that work on almost any two tracks, and the ones that only work when the music allows it. This is the lesson where your mixes stop sounding muddy.
What separates a DJ from someone pressing buttons. Energy and where to place it. Phrasing. Harmonic mixing. How to build a flow that takes people somewhere instead of playing good songs in a row.
Loops, hot cues, effects and the transitions that make people look up. We add these once your hands already know what they are doing, which is exactly why most beginners sound gimmicky and you will not.
We plan a 30 to 45 minute set together. Opening, build, peak, close. You practise it, and we work through what goes wrong when it goes wrong, because it will. Recovering from a train wreck in four seconds is a skill and you will have it.
You play your full set and I coach you through it live. Then the part nobody teaches. How to prepare for a real gig or a recording, what to bring, what to ask the venue, how to read a room, and what to do when it is not going your way.
Included
Hand picked for you, so you learn on music you love instead of whatever came with the software. Deep house, afro house, melodic house, disco, organic, tell me what moves you and the crate is built around it.
Twenty minutes to get your gear connected and making sound, so we never lose paid lesson time to a driver problem.
You send me a practice recording. I send back three timestamps. One thing that worked, one thing to fix, one thing to try next.
Ready to upload, so you finish with something real you can send to a venue or put out into the world.
What to charge, what to ask a venue before you say yes, and the failsafe checklist so a USB never ruins your night.
Your Teacher
I am an Australian DJ and Sound Alchemist. Eight years behind the decks, two of them learning the hard way in Sydney clubs and six building a name across Bali and South East Asia.
These days I am a resident DJ for the Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection, playing to rooms that change country overnight. Alongside that are the floors that raised me. Nihi Sumba, Potato Head, Rock Bar Ayana, Ulu Cliffhouse, Further East, luxury weddings, and sunrise dance floors in the jungle where nobody wanted the music to stop. I have played Burning Man. I have played for Cartier. I have also played to eleven people in a half built beach bar and learned more that night than at either.
I play deep, melodic and afro house, and I write my own music alongside it. I play as a duo with my brother on saxophone, which taught me more about listening than any tutorial ever could.
Most people pick a lane. I refused to.
That range is the thing I can actually teach you. The technical side of DJing is available to anyone with a laptop and a free weekend. Knowing what a room needs, and having the nerve to give it to them, only comes from standing in front of enough of them and getting it wrong until you get it right.
I still play every week. Everything I teach you is what I am using on Saturday night.
The Practicalities
I take a small number of private students at a time, because the mix reviews between lessons are real work and I will not do them badly.
Investment
Best Value
All Six Lessons
$1,111USD
The sixth lesson is on me, and the crate, the mix reviews, your final set and the gig ready pack are all included.
Payment Plan
3 x $399USD
The same six lessons. $399 today, then $399 before lesson three and $399 before lesson five.
Questions
Yes, by lesson one. Tell me your budget when you book and I will point you at the right controller. A good beginner setup is around $300 USD and it is the only real cost outside the lessons.
Because Rekordbox is what is plugged in at almost every club, festival and beach club you will ever play. Learn on it and you can walk up to the CDJs anywhere in the world and play.
Yes. You need to be able to hear when something is out of time, and that is trained, not born. Beatmatching feels impossible for about ten days and then it clicks. Everybody goes through that.
You can start, but you will learn far slower. Your hands need something to touch.
House in its many forms. Deep, afro, melodic, tech, disco, organic. The fundamentals carry into any genre and your crate is built around what you love.
If you do the practice, you finish able to play a 45 minute set cleanly. Whether you book a gig after that is about your local scene, not your skill.
Tell me 24 hours ahead and we move it. Life happens and the course bends around it.