Class of 2024 — 25: a year on the decks

There's a moment, somewhere around the fourth week of every class, where the room shifts. The questions stop being about which knob does what and start being about why the room felt flat between minute twenty and minute thirty. That shift is the whole programme in a sentence.

The 2024 — 25 group came in mixed: a couple of self-taught bedroom DJs with three years on a controller, two complete beginners who had never touched a CDJ, and one producer who could finish a track but had no idea how to play one out. By block two they were all reading each other's mixes — and pulling each other up.

What we keep noticing is how little of the growth is technical. The hands learn fast. The harder things are taste, restraint, knowing when a transition wants to be invisible and when it wants to be the moment. You can't drill those into anyone. You can only set the room up so they have to use them.

We treat the studio like a working booth, not a classroom. Two CDJ-3000s, a DJM-A9, a real monitoring setup, and a clock that says you've got the room for two hours — same as a club. The pressure is the lesson. When something breaks, you fix it on the floor, not afterwards.

Halfway through, every class plays in a real club. Different city, different room, real crowd. Some students nail it on the first try. Some get rattled and have to play through it. Both are useful. Nobody who plays that first gig walks out of it unchanged.

By the time the year ends, what they take with them isn't a list of techniques. It's a way of listening — to a track, to a room, to themselves. That's the part that travels. Gear gets old. Ears don't.