- What do DJs actually do?

It's a question that's plagued the internet for the last year, even bringing some people to tears.

- What do DJs actually do?

Because I don't think they're remixing the song on the spot.

I think they make it ahead of time.

So what dials are they pressing?

- But as the amount of DJs out there is seemingly on the rise, it's a fair question to ask.

Are they just pressing buttons?

Is it as simple as having the aux during a party or is there more to it?

- You're kind of like the spearhead of a certain sound.

I feel it's your responsibility to educate, educate the crowd, kind of like a radio DJ, like a taste maker.

- I'm gonna dig into the history of DJ culture and talk to DJs to figure out what the role of the DJ is and what they're actually doing when they're on stage.

Before we answer the question of what DJs do, let's rewind a bit and first figure out what a DJ is.

The term DJ stands for disc jockey and various sources say it was coined in 1935 by Walter Winchell to describe radio announcer Martin Block.

Disc refers to the records that Block played, and Jockey refers to someone who controls a machine.

Martin Block hosted a radio show called Make Believe Ballroom, where he used records to create the illusion that you were listening to a band play in a ballroom.

It was an idea he copied from a Canadian broadcaster named Al Jarvis, but Block's version, which aired between the Lindbergh baby kidnapping news bulletins became a bigger success.

Block and Jarvis weren't the first people to play recorded music for other people though.

People have been playing recorded music since the phonograph was invented in 1877, and people have shared recorded music over the radio since 1906.

As technology has progressed, what a DJ is and what they do has continued to evolve.

Nowadays, disc jockeys don't need to be playing on discs at all, and the term is broadly used to describe anyone who plays recorded music for other people.

There are still radio DJs who play music over the radio, but there are also club and festival DJs, turntableists, wedding or event DJs and bedroom DJs, a mixture of professionals and hobbyists all using the term DJ.

So that's what a DJ is, but what do DJs actually do?

If you look at the comment section of videos of DJs performing, you'll find comments of people saying DJs are fake twisting knobs, or fake pressing buttons.

So are DJs faking it or is there more to it than their looks?

I sat down with one of my favorite DJs, Jarreau Vandal, to find out more about what DJs actually do.

- When I play a set, you know I always try to like kind of tell a story about myself, but then also make it known that I paid attention to what kind of music or genres are popular here, or what's an underground genre that I think deserves more attention in that specific country.

- DJs aren't playing live music when they're performing.

Instead, they're playing pre-recorded music, oftentimes manipulating the music by adjusting things like pitch, speed and other effects.

What most DJs do can be broken down into three steps.

Song selection, beat matching, and transitioning.

First is song selection.

This is kind of like having the aux cord and picking the music for a house party or a car ride, except when you're hired to entertain the room, you're probably gonna put more thought into it.

Carl Cox calls reading the room an art form.

In an interview, he said, I always kind of DJ to the people that are not moving.

If everyone starts having a good time, my job has already been done.

Okay, so part of the job is picking songs to play, but why are they touching so many buttons and what do those buttons actually do?

That's where beatmatching comes in, a technique to keep people from leaving the dance floor at the end of each song.

Here's our producer Jojo, who is also a DJ, demonstrating how to beat match two tracks.

When beat matching, DJs use two turntables to play two different songs at the same speed.

Then they gradually adjust the timing of one record, so its beats play in sync with the other.

This technique was popularized by a New York City DJ named Francis Grasso during the late 1960s.

Grasso used his ears to hear when tracks were perfectly in sync.

As technology has evolved with new turntables and digital audio, beat matching can be done with the press of a single infamous button, the sync button.

The last part is the transition where the DJ blends one track into the other, eventually replacing the current song with a new one.

If you're creative, there are endless ways to transition one song into another, but there are a few popular transitions that most DJs use.

They can transition from one track to another using the cross fader, which slowly brings the volume up of the new song as you move the cross fader toward it and simultaneously lowers the volume of the old song as you move the cross fader away from it.

They can use the equalizer knobs to get a more fine tune transition between the songs.

The equalizer knobs allow DJs to adjust the volumes of specific frequencies like the low end, the mids, and the highs.

This helps add control for a more seamless mix.

They can use effects like reverb or echo to help emphasize a transition or mask it.

Or DJs can simply quickly cut one track into the other by quickly swiping the cross fader, or starting one song as they hit stop on the other.

Sometimes when you see a DJ twisting knobs and it doesn't change the sound, that's because they're working on the incoming song they're about to transition to.

- That's always something to do.

Like, okay, I just mixed in the song, okay, now I gotta get the next song ready.

I gotta find it like the cues, so the starting points, like what starting point is gonna be good for this song that's playing?

DJs are not doing nothing.

- Throughout the 20th century as music technology has evolved, DJs have continued to innovate the way that they play music for people.

The dual record player was invented in 1927 and allowed DJs playing records to start a new song as soon as the old song finished.

During the 1950s, sound system culture took over Kingston, Jamaica, where massive homemade speaker stacks played records for people on the street.

Informal battles took place where rival sound systems competed for supremacy.

This helped elevate the DJs playing on those systems to celebrity status.

In the Bronx during the 1970s, Kool Herc pioneered a technique by playing the same record on two separate turntables and cutting them together.

This allowed him to extend certain parts of a song by cutting back and forth making a live remix.

This went beyond just playing recorded music for others.

By manipulating the sounds, Herc was effectively able to create new music on the spot.

Other DJs like Grandmaster Flash and Grand Wizzard Theodore helped extend turntablism further by perfecting techniques like scratching, looping, and cutting.

Artists like Daft Punk, Justice and Fred Again have worked live instrumentation and synthesizers into their DJ sets.

Blurring the line between artist performance and selecting music and modern DJ software has allowed DJs to use AI to isolate specific sounds and tracks to create live remixes.

This has enabled DJs like Nick Chio to play the vocals of Kendrick Lamar's Not Like Us over Abba's Dancing Queen live.

But if the role of the DJ is to play music for people to dance to, then why do people watch the DJ at all?

At clubs and festivals around the world, you'll see crowds of people facing the DJ, watching them like they would a band perform at a live concert.

But it didn't always used to be this way.

Historically, the dance floor was a place for people to dance with others, and sometimes the DJ couldn't even be seen like at the Hacienda, where the booth was above the club in the balcony.

But during the 1990s, DJs started to become superstars, even headlining main stages at music festivals.

And when you're playing to a crowd of over 90,000 at Glastonbury, it might seem weird for the crowd to face away from the stage.

This discussion around whether or not people should face the DJ has been a hot conversation in the dance world.

A viral post from the dance publication, happy Tuesday, stated why you should stop facing the DJ booth.

And it started a lot of conversations around the topic.

They argued that not facing the DJ booth creates better dance floor energy and puts more focus on the music.

In an interview with Boiler Room, the Iconic House DJ Honey Dijon explained when I was growing up, you couldn't see the DJ.

The music was a star and not the DJ, and so people actually danced with each other instead of side by side.

It's possible that this new trend of facing the DJ has added to the confusion about what DJs actually do.

When everyone is facing the DJ like at a concert, it may add to the expectation that you're watching someone do more than pick the music for you to dance to.

Of course, there are times when facing the DJ is warranted, like when a young 15-year-old A Track won the DMC World DJ Championship in 1997 with his turntables wizardry.

So what do DJs actually do?

Well, a lot of things, depending on the type of DJ they are.

They could be playing the bride and groom's favorite tracks at a wedding, playing a festival main stage with original music, or facing off against their rival in a scratching battle.

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