4 Month Djying Course

Across 22 sessions on professional CDJ-2000s and a DJM mixer — the same equipment found in every serious club in the world — you will learn to mix, perform, and eventually make your own music. By the final session, every almuni has produced original DJ edits, built bootleg remixes in Ableton, and created club-ready versions of Hindi indie and Bollywood tracks that no other DJ in their city has.

The production insight thread running through every session is what sets this curriculum apart. Every technique taught on the CDJs is explained in terms of how music is actually constructed — so graduates leave not just knowing what to do, but understanding why it works. That understanding is what separates DJs who last from DJs who plateau.

BOOK A FREE PHONE CALL

ON THIS CALL WE'LL TALK ABOUT 🤙🏼

YOUR MUSICAL GOALS: What kind of Music do you want to produce?✨

YOUR CURRENT SKILL LEVEL: If you are a complete Beginner or already have some experience with production.

YOUR STRENGTHS & WEAKNESSES: What are you good at? and which areas do you want to emphasize?

WE CREATE A PERSONAL PLAN: That outlines what you need to focus on each week to make progress.

LET'S CRACK IT TOGETHER..! 💪🏻

WHAT'S SPECIAL ABOUT THIS COURSE

THIS COURSE OFFERS

1 YEAR GUIDANCE & SUPPORT TO HELP YOU BUILD YOUR CAREER

GUIDE BOOK, PRESETS, SAMPLES & LIBRARIES FOR STUDY USE

PRIORITY ACCESS FOR INTERNSHIPS/ JOB OFFERS

CREATIVE & PRACTICAL
LESSONS WITH DECONSTRUCTION OF MY TRACKS

4 MONTH COURSE CURRICULUM

22 Sessions · Pioneer CDJ-2000s + DJM Mixer · Batches of 3–5 Students

PHASE 1

LESSON 01

Studio Orientation & The CDJ-2000s

What the CDJ-2000s is and why it is the industry-standard piece of hardware at every major club and festival in the world
The physical layout of the decks — jog wheel, browse encoder, pitch fader, hot cue buttons, loop controls, and transport section
How the DJM mixer works — gain structure, 3-band EQ knobs, channel faders, crossfader, and headphone cue system
Understanding the waveform display on the CDJ screen — what the visual shape of a track tells you before you even hear it
Signal flow in the studio — how audio travels from the CDJ to the mixer to the monitors, and why gain staging starts here
Your first hands-on session: loading a track from USB, reading the screen, and pressing play on professional club hardware for the first time

LESSON 02

BPM, Tempo & The Beat Grid

What BPM (Beats Per Minute) physically means — tempo as a pulse, not just a number on a screen
How to count beats, bars, and 8-bar phrases out loud alongside a track — the invisible rhythmic structure every piece of electronic music is built on
The 4/4 time signature explained simply and practically through three different House tracks
Using the pitch fader to speed up or slow down a track — what the ±6% and ±10% ranges sound and feel like in practice
Identifying where phrases begin and end by ear — why this is the single most important listening skill in all of DJing
Exercise: given a reference track at a fixed BPM, use the pitch fader to hit target tempos by ear before looking at the display

LESSON 03

Beatmatching by Ear

What beatmatching means — aligning two tracks so their kicks and rhythmic elements land on exactly the same pulse simultaneously
Using the pitch fader and jog wheel together to bring two tracks into sync manually, without touching the sync button
Listening for the 'flamming' sound — the subtle doubling effect that tells you two tracks are slightly out of phase with each other
Why the sync button is disabled for this entire phase, and what training your ears this way permanently develops in your listening ability
Expanding to wider BPM gaps and learning real-time drift correction — what to do when a track slowly creeps out of sync mid-mix
Rotational drill: every student takes turns on the CDJs while others listen and call corrections — because learning to hear someone else's errors sharpens your own ear faster

LESSON 04

EQ Fundamentals & The Core Transition

What the 3-band EQ on the DJM does in plain terms — highs control hats and air, mids control synths and vocals, lows control the kick drum and bass
Why the low frequencies are the most critical thing to manage in any transition — and what happens when two bass lines clash simultaneously
The low-swap: the single most important DJ transition technique — cutting the bass on one track while bringing in another, then swapping at the phrase start
Gain staging before you touch the fader — setting the correct input level on each channel so your transitions are clean rather than jumpy
Using the EQ kill switches on the DJM as intentional performance tools rather than just quick fixes
10 back-to-back transition exercises using only the EQ — no fader drops, no effects — to build muscle memory for the fundamental technique

LESSON 05

Hot Cues & Rekordbox Library Management

What hot cues are — instant jump points you set inside a track that let you navigate to any section of the music in one button press during a live performance
Colour-coding the structure of a track using hot cues: green for the intro, yellow for the first drop, red for the breakdown, blue for the outro — and why having this visual map changes how you perform
How to analyse and prepare tracks in Rekordbox before you ever bring them to the decks — BPM grid correction, key detection, and adding performance metadata
Building a structured library system with custom tags for genre, energy level (1–5), and comments — so you can find exactly the right track in 5 seconds when you need it
Exporting your prepared library to USB and loading it correctly onto the CDJ-2000s — including what to do when a track's grid analysis is wrong
First look at the key column in Rekordbox — what the letters and numbers mean and why this data will become central to your work in Phase 2

PHASE 2

LESSON 06

Advanced Phrasing & Track Architecture

Moving beyond counting beats — learning to read the emotional energy shifts inside a track, not just its rhythmic structure
Anatomy of a full club track in detail: functional intro, first loop, build, drop, breakdown, re-drop, outro — and the role each section plays for the DJ
How to identify the natural exit and entry points a producer has intentionally designed into every track — the moments where mixing in and out sounds inevitable rather than forced
Why a transition that starts at the wrong bar always sounds wrong even to a non-DJ listener — and the musical reason behind it
Group exercise: annotating 5 tracks by ear — marking every structural section — then comparing your annotations to the Rekordbox waveform to see how accurate your listening has become
The goal of this session: never approaching a set again without knowing exactly where every track wants to be used

LESSON 07

Harmonic Mixing & The Camelot System

What musical key means in plain terms — and why two tracks in incompatible keys create a dissonant, uncomfortable sound when mixed together
The Camelot wheel: a simple circular map of key relationships that tells you exactly which tracks are musically safe to mix with any other track in your library
How to read the key display on the CDJ-2000s and use it in real time to make smarter track selection decisions mid-set
The three compatible key moves: same key (safe and smooth), adjacent step (slightly brighter or darker), relative major-minor jump (emotionally contrasting but harmonically resolved)
How moving clockwise on the Camelot wheel lifts the energy of a set — the same modulation technique producers have used in pop music for decades to create a sudden rush before a final chorus
Building a 6-track harmonically sequenced House set from scratch — pre-planning the key journey on paper, then executing it live on the CDJs

LESSON 08

DJM FX — Filter, Echo, Reverb & Delay

The filter knob as a performance tool: sweeping the high-pass filter to strip away the bass and build tension, sweeping the low-pass to smooth and blend during a transition
Echo out and echo in — using the tail of an echo to bridge the gap between two tracks at a phrase end so the mix feels seamless rather than cut
Reverb as a space creator: how adding reverb to a breakdown gives the room an acoustic sense of opening up before the next drop arrives
Beat-matched delay for rhythmic texture — adding repeating echoes that lock to the tempo of the track and create forward momentum rather than muddiness
The cardinal rule of DJ effects: any effect that calls attention to itself has failed — effects should serve the music, not demonstrate your hardware
The zero-FX challenge: performing a complete 15-minute set using absolutely no effects, then identifying the exact moments where an effect would have genuinely served the music — and adding only those

LESSON 09

Loop Techniques, Beatjump & The Long Blend

The CDJ loop buttons in performance: setting a loop, extending it by doubling its length, halving it to tighten the rhythm, and releasing it at precisely the right moment
The creative re-loop: using a loop to hold a moment the crowd is physically responding to — extending it beyond its original length without anyone on the dance floor noticing the seam
Beatjump: moving forwards or backwards through a track in precise bar increments without stopping playback — the technique that lets you skip a section or recover a lost position live
The 32-bar long blend: holding two tracks simultaneously for 16 to 32 bars using EQ shaping, filter movement, and fader position working together — creating a third piece of music that only exists in that moment
The two styles of blending: Tech House blending (gradual, melodic, warm — letting tracks breathe together) vs Techno cutting (surgical, rhythmic, precise — tracks entering and exiting on a single beat)

LESSON 10

Energy Management & Set Arc

The energy curve as a design tool — how to build tension, sustain a peak, and deliberately release energy across an hour of music in a way that feels intentional rather than accidental
BPM creep in Techno: how to move a set from 128 to 132 BPM over two hours in increments so small the crowd feels the escalation without consciously noticing the change
How to sequence tracks for emotional energy flow separately from harmonic flow — and knowing which to prioritise when the two conflict
The deliberate energy drop: why bringing the room down intentionally at a specific moment often hits harder than the peak that follows it
Pre-set planning exercise: mapping a 10-track set on paper as an energy graph before playing a single track — designing the journey before you begin the drive
The distinction that this session is entirely about: the difference between a set that was technically correct and a set that made the room feel something they will remember

LESSON 11

Bollywood & Hindi Indie in a Club Context

Why this is the one DJ skill currently being taught nowhere else in Delhi NCR — and why the gap in the market exists
The BPM and key characteristics of popular Hindi indie and Bollywood tracks — typically 90 to 105 BPM — and how to pitch-adjust them into a House or Techno set without the transition sounding strained
How to navigate the rhythmic phrasing differences between Indian song structures and 4/4 electronic music — the moments that require extra care and the ones that work more naturally than you expect
Building a 3-track Indian-to-House bridge that feels like a deliberate artistic statement rather than a genre collision or a crowd-pleasing gimmick
The tracks that cross over well and the ones that do not — and the specific production reasons why certain Hindi indie records integrate smoothly into an electronic set while others resist it
The psychology of collective recognition: why the moment an entire room hears a familiar song simultaneously is one of the most powerful emotional states in live music, and how to engineer it at exactly the right point in a set

PHASE 3

LESSON 12

Set Architecture & Crowd Reading

The DJ set as a three-act narrative — opening, build, peak, release — and how to design that arc deliberately before you play the first track
Listening to a 60-minute recorded set together as a group and annotating it in real time: where does energy rise, where does it release, which moments feel inevitable and which feel surprising
The physical signals of crowd engagement — what a locked-in dance floor looks like, sounds like, and moves like compared to one that is beginning to drift towards the bar
Dance floor geometry: what the physical distribution of people between the front of the room and the back is telling you about the state of your set at any given moment
The 30-second rule: if you have not actively read the room in the last 30 seconds, you have stopped DJing and started playing records at people
Faculty role-play exercise: instructors react in real time as a simulated crowd while each student plays, making engagement and disengagement visible as immediate physical feedback

LESSON 13

Live CDJ Mashups — Acapella Over Instrumental

What a live CDJ mashup is: playing the vocal track from one record over the instrumental of another in real time on the decks — no DAW, no preparation beyond the cue points
How to find and vet compatible mashup pairs — key compatibility, BPM proximity, and emotional register — because a technically correct mashup that feels wrong emotionally is still a bad mashup
Using hot cues and pitch adjustment together to lock a vocal to a running instrumental at exactly the right phrase start, with the landing tight enough that the crowd does not notice the join
The vocal phrase problem: making sure the lyrics land at a musically meaningful moment — not just on a correct beat, but at the beginning of a musical thought
Each student prepares three working mashup pairs in Rekordbox and performs each live on the CDJ-2000s — faculty grades on the landing accuracy and musical coherence of the combination, not just the technical execution
Why this skill is the direct bridge to Phase 4: every creative decision you are making in this session — reading key, BPM, phrase, and emotional compatibility between two pieces of music — is the same decision a producer makes in a DAW, except you are making it live

LESSON 14

Advanced Tension & Release

Building genuine suspense using broken loops, strategic silence, and white noise sweeps — techniques that create physical anticipation in a crowd rather than simply marking time
The held moment: deliberately extending a breakdown past the bar where the drop is expected — and the mental discipline required to hold your nerve while the floor screams for the kick to return
The false drop: a deliberate arrangement technique used by producers in the studio that you can now execute live on the CDJs, making the crowd feel the drop before they actually hear it
Beatjump used as expressive musical statement rather than as navigation — jumping forward or backward in the track to deliberately create surprise or loop a moment of peak intensity
How to engineer a peak moment the room is still talking about two weeks after the event — and why the engineering of that moment starts 20 minutes before it arrives
Practising every technique in isolation first, then combining filter, loop, silence, and beatjump in a single live sequence that builds from nothing to an overwhelming moment and resolves cleanly

LESSON 15

Venue Contexts — Warmup, Peak Hour & Closing

Why warmup, peak hour, and closing are three fundamentally different skill sets — and why most DJ schools treat them all as the same thing
Warmup principles: never compete with conversation, arrive musically before the crowd has arrived emotionally, and make every person who walks through the door feel the music was already waiting specifically for them
Peak hour: every decision is amplified — your mistakes are louder, your great choices are more powerful, and your instincts are the only thing that can keep up with what the room needs
Closing: the hardest slot of the night — bringing four hundred euphoric people down from a peak gracefully, without the room collapsing, without playing something that feels like the lights have been turned on
Each student builds and performs a 15-minute set for each of the three contexts back to back in the same session — warmup, peak, close
The professional debrief: a 60-second verbal statement between each set explaining what you changed and exactly why — because articulating your decisions out loud accelerates learning faster than playing alone

LESSON 16

Playing the Indian Audience & Professional Setup

The specific emotional mechanics of the Hindi indie or Bollywood moment: how to build the anticipation arc earlier in the set, how long to withhold it, and how to release it at maximum emotional impact rather than musical convenience
CDJ Link setup for professional performance: linking both players to a shared library, using the history export to track what you played, and recording your full set directly from the DJM output
Professional pre-gig protocol as a system rather than a checklist — understanding the venue's likely setup, who plays before and after you, and what that means for your BPM range and energy entry point
What to do when the USB does not load at the venue, when the previous DJ has left the gains and EQ in complete chaos, or when a CDJ throws a grid error in the middle of your set
Performance exercise: each student plays a 25-minute set designed specifically for an Indian club audience, with a stated intention declared before they start for the placement and purpose of the Hindi moment
Faculty assessment: was the Indian moment placed with intention, or was it dropped at the most obvious available slot — and what is the difference between those two choices in terms of impact on the room?

LESSON 17

Technical Disasters & Recording Your Sets

Simulated disasters: faculty will cause actual equipment failures during each student's live set without any warning — CDJ freeze mid-track, USB that refuses to load, a broken EQ channel on the mixer, monitor feedback during a build
How to recover from every major hardware failure without stopping the music and without the crowd ever seeing it on your face
The lesson stated clearly at the start of this session: the worst thing that can happen is never the technical failure itself — it is the crowd seeing your face in the moment it happens
How to record a set cleanly from the DJM output and build a structured self-review practice — one of the single highest-leverage habits a developing DJ can develop
Post-set analysis methodology: what to listen for in a recording, how to take structured written notes, and how to separate what you intended to do from what you actually did
Listening to your own recorded set as if you are a complete stranger hearing an unknown DJ for the first time — the specific discomfort of that exercise, and why it is the most honest and useful feedback you will ever receive

PHASE 4

LESSON 18

Ableton Live for DJs & Warping

The conceptual bridge between CDJ and DAW: how every skill you have spent three months developing maps directly into Ableton Live — you are not starting over, you are getting a new instrument for skills you already have
Ableton's Session View explained through DJ vocabulary — clips are hot cues, scenes are setlists, the launch grid is a performance surface you already understand
Loading a track you have mixed hundreds of times on the CDJs and opening it in Ableton — the moment of realisation that the waveform you have been reading for three months is the same data, now fully editable
Warping: how to lock a variable-BPM track — one that drifted and fought you on the CDJs in Phase 1 — to a perfectly stable fixed grid so it beatmatches cleanly every single time from that point forward
Manually warping a track that was genuinely difficult to mix and building a DJ-ready version with clean 32-bar mix-in and mix-out points baked in permanently
Extending an intro from 8 bars to 32 by duplicating and looping audio cleanly — creating the DJ-friendly space that the original producer never provided

LESSON 19

The DJ Edit — Building Your Own Version of a Track

What a DJ edit is: a custom version of an existing track built specifically for how you play it — your mix points, your energy needs, your set context
Extending intros and outros beyond what the original release provides, giving yourself full control over exactly when and how a track enters and exits your mix
Removing elements that consistently cause problems in the mix — a vocal hook that enters 8 bars too early, a breakdown that runs too long for a peak-hour set, a cold ending with no outro at all
Tightening a 7-minute track to a more functional 5 minutes and 30 seconds without losing the emotional content that makes the track worth playing
Each student selects one track they genuinely love but have always struggled to mix cleanly and builds a personal edit — a version that solves the specific problem they have always had with it
The private edit folder: the library of custom versions that every serious working DJ maintains — the edits no other DJ has, that define your sound, and that are directly responsible for bookings returning

LESSON 20

Stems & The Bootleg Remix

What stems are: the separated component elements underneath any finished track — the vocal by itself, the drums by themselves, the bass by itself, and everything else — and why having access to them changes what you can create
How to access stems using AI separation tools, and how to critically assess what the separation gives you — what is clean enough to use professionally and what has too many artefacts
The cultural and historical context of the bootleg remix — from the DJs in Chicago in the late 1970s who rebuilt disco records because they could not afford to commission new music, to the modern SoundCloud edit culture — and why this practice is literally the founding creative act of House music as a genre
Building a bootleg remix from scratch in Ableton: taking a vocal stem you love and constructing a new minimal instrumental around it — choosing the BPM and key to serve the vocal, building the drum pattern, adding a root-note bass line and a single chord pad
Finishing the remix as a complete DJ tool: a 32-bar intro, a main body with arrangement variation, a breakdown, and a clean 32-bar outro — then exporting it as a 24-bit WAV file and loading it into Rekordbox
The moment that changes everything: loading your finished remix onto the CDJ-2000s and mixing it live into a set alongside commercially released tracks — the crowd does not know it is yours, and that is exactly the point

LESSON 21

The Indian Music Edit & Release Strategy

Applying every production skill built across Phase 4 specifically to Hindi indie and Bollywood music — the creative territory no other DJ school in this city is operating in
The structural problems that make Indian music genuinely difficult to mix in a club context: immediate full-arrangement starts with no DJ-friendly intro, dramatic tempo shifts in Bollywood productions, song structures built for radio or cinema that have no logical exit point for a DJ
Building a complete club edit of a Hindi indie track: extended 32-bar intro, clean 32-bar outro, and an optional stripped instrumental section suitable for layering a vocal from a different track over the top
Building a club edit of a Bollywood track — solving the specific problems that particular production creates, so you have a version you can drop at any point in a set with full confidence
These are edits that no other DJ in your city has — because no other DJ in your city is making them in a DAW with this level of craft and intention
How to release a DJ edit or bootleg remix on SoundCloud, how to submit to DJ pools, and how to understand the informal creative economy of derivative DJ work — including how labels and original artists typically respond to high-quality edits of their music

LESSON 22

Creative Identity & Course Capstone

Reviewing your entire Phase 4 output as a body of work — do your edits, remixes, and Indian music edits have a coherent aesthetic and point of view, or are they technically accomplished but without a recognisable identity?
Writing one paragraph that articulates your emerging artistic identity as a DJ-producer — what lane you are building, what makes your work yours — and having that paragraph tested directly against the work you have actually produced
The 45-minute capstone performance: at minimum one original DJ edit you produced during Phase 4 mixed seamlessly into the set, one live CDJ mashup built with the technique from Phase 3, and one Hindi indie or Bollywood moment placed with deliberate and stated intention
The live test: one track will be quietly removed from your USB 10 minutes before you perform, without telling you which one — what you choose as a replacement and how you adapt your entire arc around that change is your final examination
Gig placement: students who have demonstrated genuine commitment and craft throughout all four phases of the program will receive gig referrals, venue introductions, and booking assistance directly from Silk Road Studios
The next step: how the CDJ skills, Ableton foundation, remix workflow, and musical intelligence you have built across this program are the exact foundation the 5-month Music Production Mentorship is designed to take further — and what the combined DJ-producer path looks like for the students ready to go there

LESSON 15

Hot Cues & Rekordbox Library Management

The energy curve as a design tool — how to build tension, sustain a peak, and deliberately release energy across an hour of music in a way that feels intentional rather than accidental
BPM creep in Techno: how to move a set from 128 to 132 BPM over two hours in increments so small the crowd feels the escalation without consciously noticing the change
How to sequence tracks for emotional energy flow separately from harmonic flow — and knowing which to prioritise when the two conflict
The deliberate energy drop: why bringing the room down intentionally at a specific moment often hits harder than the peak that follows it
Pre-set planning exercise: mapping a 10-track set on paper as an energy graph before playing a single track — designing the journey before you begin the drive
The distinction that this session is entirely about: the difference between a set that was technically correct and a set that made the room feel something they will remember

ABOUT YOUR INSTRUCTOR

Satyam Sangwan is a music producer, sound engineer, and educator who helps numerous artists, producers, and singer-songwriters with mentorship, high-quality productions, and recordings at his own space, Silk Road Studios.

A Master's graduate from Berklee College of Music, Valencia 2017 Batch of Music Production, Technology, and Innovation.

An Ableton Certified Instructor with 7 years of experience teaching music production, and sound engineering through 101 coaching, workshops, and lectures at the top universities/ academies in India; Global Music Institute, Seamedu School of Pro Expressions, & Beatfactory Academy.

Makes music under his creative alias Ripple Drift and has released numerous progressive house singles under labels like Routine Espresso & and Raijin Records.