Video Review
Conclusion
In its “DJing skills plus motivational advice” style, the book is similar to Danny Rampling’s Everything You Need To Know About DJing and Success, but is not so detailed. John Steventon’s popular DJing For Dummies has a lot more on the actual mechanics of DJing, although Make Some Noise is better when it comes to the business side of things.
Like all such books, this one has some out-of-date or questionable advice: It recommends the long-discontinued Pioneer CDJ-1000 CDJs, for instance (why not the CDJ-850s or 900s from the current range?), and it advises video DJs to run with the expensive failure that is Pioneer’s SVM-1000 hardware (there must be 1000 happy Serato Video users for every one of those flawed Pioneer units sold).
Also, for me, it was a little too enthusiastic about its blanket recommendation of Beatport for buying DJ music, good though that site is. (For many, scouting out new, exciting, undiscovered tunes in weird and wonderful places is part of what DJing is about, and there’s a school of thought that says the “Beatport Top 100 DJ” is part of the problem…)
As the author himself points out in this video, “real life” mentors are invaluable, and he himself says he wants to teach a course covering how to DJ. I understand his motivation: there’s a limit to how much you can teach about DJing in words on a page, and I would add that YouTube videos, web forums, up-to-date gear reviews (from sites like this one…) and so on nowadays do much of the job training books have in the past.
Within the confines of the book format, though, Make Some Noise: Become The Ultimate DJ is still a useful – if nowhere near exhaustive – read, and an absorbing window on one man’s view of the world of DJing as a career.
• The book and DVD cost $29.99 and are available from Amazon.
