Here is the link to the accompanying video, various time stamps are referenced in the post: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PnAU29enc_zPJmpfHAmFCxnFzmrhblqp/view?usp=sharing

Welcome to my third in-depth blog post. In this blog post, I will be covering the events of my second meeting with my mentor as well as chapters four and five of How to Have a Beautiful Mind while also providing video examples of specific parts of the How to Have a Beautiful Mind.

This meeting was our first practical meeting and I spent most of the time on the decks practicing DJing skills. At the beginning of our meeting my mentor mentioned beat matching as being a primary DJ skill (2:40). On page 49 of How to Have a Beautiful Mind, De Bono talks about saying “now that is interesting” and zeroing in on the topic. For me, that happened when my mentor mentioned beatmatching. We then spent the next while of the meeting practicing beatmatching with a few songs I already had on my computer (8:50). During this, I made a connection that I had learned that most dance music songs have intros, outros and drops in multiples of eight bars. (5:20). After struggling to find songs with percussion to beat match in my folders my mentor suggested sending me some Deadmau5 songs that had long intros and outros with four on the floor drum beats to beat match (31:50). We then spent the rest of the meeting practicing beatmatching these songs. Unfortunately, my mentor had to depart a little bit earlier than I would’ve liked but before he did, so he assigned me some tasks to do before our next meeting in two weeks’ time (43:30). Those tasks were to watch a DJ set, a beginner DJ tutorial and to do a perfectly beat-matched transition between the intro and outro of two Deadmau5 songs while also incorporating EQ.

Tragically our meeting was plagued by various technical difficulties using Zoom. In the beginning, I attempted to use just audio from my studio monitors and then later transitioned to using the zoom built-in computer audio sharing which improved the situation to some degree but throughout my mentor had a difficult time hearing whether or not I had properly beat-matched songs. When the meeting concluded he suggested using Zoom on a different device than the one running my DJ software (42:20).

Overall, I found this meeting to be incredibly engaging, reigniting all the passion I had for DJing and allowing me to start forming some of the foundational skills. Additionally, I found that these chapters of How to Have a Beautiful mind provided incredibly interesting conversational strategies to guide the flow of the meetings I have with my mentor. I will be hard at work learning everything I can about the foundational skills of DJing in the coming weeks and I can’t wait to start crafting my own sets.