What do djs actually do?
When I decided to explore Wedding DJing as a serious side-hustle to my fulltime career as a musician my first step was to search “What do DJs actually do?”. I was naively hoping for some simple help and advice!
Five years later after much googling, chatting, facebook-forumming, youtube-ing and gigging I’ve learned a few things. So here’s my account, for what it’s worth!
In this blog I’m just talking about wedding/function DJs, not:
- Club DJs – who usually do short-ish sets and specialise in specific genres of music
- Radio DJs – a totally different career
- ‘Art DJs’ – I made up this term to describe DJs who specialise in mixing layers from different songs together, producing original music from pre-existing musical stems, etc etc. These are the types of DJs who become famous – like Moby or Avicii – and there’s a lot of overlap between Club DJs and Art DJs.
The very basics
An Event DJ’s core task is to play recorded music in a way that suits the needs of the function.
At a wedding reception, for example, this is usually divided into:
- Background music for cocktails and dinner
- Special song snippets to add some zing to key moments, like the entry of the bridal party
- Special dances (typically the married couple’s first dance)
- Dancefloor music
A wedding DJ will also often MC the event.
The equpiment
My first mental image of a DJ was a person wearing headphones standing behind an intimidating console with two turntables surrounded by dials, buttons, slides and flashing lights. This console is called the DJ Controller or Mixer or just “The Decks”.
The Turntables themselves are mostly a visual nod to the origin of DJing with vinyl records. Although they have functionality they are not hugely necessary for today’s event DJ unless they do a lot of scratching effects. You can also use them to navigate through audio files, but you can do this equally well using a mouse or touchpad on a laptop, ipad or phone (more on this later). Turntables on a digital mixer may also be called Jogwheels.
The main purpose of The Decks is to allow the DJ to control the transition from one song to another. This is why almost all controllers (including software ones) have a minimum of two sides – one for the song that’s currently playing and the other for the song that you’re getting ready to play next.
Most of the other knobs and sliders on The Decks are used to alter the volume and sound of one or both tracks to make transitions between songs smooth (or not smooth, if that’s your thing).
The lit-up buttons are mapped to tools such as looping and cue points. Cue points are markers DJs put on audio tracks so they can easily start from there .. like the chorus or the drop.
DJs use headphones to listen to either the music that the crowd is hearing (front-of-house mix) or the song that is not currently playing or a mixture of both (both called cue-mixes).
DJs also use audio mixers, microphones speakers and lights but I didn’t want to talk about them here as they’re not DJ specific.
The skills
The most essential skill for Function DJs is music choices. These are usually considered in advance of the function in collaboration with the clients. It doesn’t matter how fancy your lights, dials, moves, wardrobe or scratches, if the crowd don’t like your songs they won’t love your work!
The technical DJ-ing skills are all about transitioning from one song to another or making bits of one song mash with bits of another song. It’s super fun!
Transitions can be made with all kinds of cross fades, with or without special effects (like reverb, echo and phaser). These are often combined with beat-matching, which is where you match the beat of the outgoing song with the beat of the incoming song so they glide seamlessly in and out. DJs regularly alter the speed and/or pitch of songs so they can be more pleasingly matched. This took enormous skill and practise back in the days of vinyl. Nowadays it’s a lot easier.
Where do you get the songs from?
There are three sources of the songs a DJ plays:
- Physical – like vinyl or CDs
- Audio files – like mp3s stored on a laptop, flashdrive or ipad. These can be purchased from online stores like Amazon or Apple, ripped from CDs or bulk-downloaded fromĀ subscription DJ pools like Beatsource.
- Streaming – many DJ controllers are able to interact directly with music streaming services like Apple Music and Tidal. Interestingly Spotify does not allow it’s service to be used by any DJ interfaces, although it used to. There’s a lot of controversy within the DJ world as to whether it’s OK to rely heavily on streaming. It definitely carries the risk of completely collapsing if you lose internet – which can happen!
Hope you found this interesting. Obviously this blog just touches the surface but I would have loved to have found an article like this when I started out.
Let me know if I’ve left out anything important!
Brenton Edgecombe 2025