Your first ever lesson: what you are aiming at

What this lesson teaches

He is explicit that this is video number one for somebody who has just bought their first decks, and that it will not involve touching them. Lesson one is to respect other DJs, including the ones playing music you do not like.

That reads like a nicety. It is not. There are three hard reasons for it.

Technique lives inside genres

This is the one that costs you most if you ignore it. Mixing technique is not general - it developed separately inside each kind of music, in response to what that music is like, and almost all of it transfers.

Hip-hop DJs are known for their cueing and cutting, because the records are short and the edits are the performance. Drum and bass DJs mix long and early over intros built for it, and their sense of phrase is ruthless. House DJs hold two tracks together for a minute at a time and have the most patient EQ work in the business. Reggae and dub are where you learn what taking something away does to a room. Wedding and mobile DJs read a floor better than anyone, because they have to do it with no scene and no shared taste to lean on.

Decide at eighteen that hip-hop is not for you and you have not made a statement about your taste, you have declined a cueing technique you could have used for the next thirty years.

Work

The second reason is duller and more immediate. A DJ who can only play one thing is only bookable for one thing, and the number of rooms wanting exactly that on a Saturday is smaller than it looks from inside the scene.

It is not that you should play everything. It is that knowing how a genre works lets you say yes to the night, and then play it properly.

The room is not you

The third reason is the real one, and it sits underneath the whole job.

A dancefloor is not an extension of your record collection. The people on it did not come to be shown what you like, and a DJ who treats a crowd's taste as a problem to be corrected is going to have a long and frustrating career. Contempt for a genre is contempt for the people who like it, and they can tell from across the room.

And it is a small scene

Finally, the practical point he does not spell out. DJing is a trade full of people who need each other - for cover, for kit, for a word with a promoter. Reputations travel faster than talent and last longer, and the person whose music you sneered about in 2014 is running the venue now.

None of this requires you to pretend. You can dislike a genre thoroughly and still take it seriously. That distinction is lesson one.