 In 2015, DJs are everywhere. They're critical darlings and pop producers, playing the biggest festivals and still driving the dance floor at every nightclub in town. In this top shelf, we're looking at the equipment that makes it all happen, and what an amateur needs to get in the game. So here's what a basic DJ setup looks like. The core is the music, and while some DJs still use vinyl, most of them are playing it straight off a laptop, controlled by software like Traktor or Serato. If you want to play with loops or scratching, you bring in a turntable or a CDJ, which plugs into the program as a controller. And then there's the mixer, which keeps everything sounding sweet and gives you one last layer of controls as you send everything out to the speakers. We headed to a popular Brooklyn nightclub to check out some DJ setups in the real world. Verbodin opened up in Brooklyn last year, and it's become one of the city's most versatile nightclubs, hosting everything from burlesque to deep house yoga, alongside the usual dance parties. Music director Michael Roche showed me around the space, including the massive sound system, three walls of video projection, and one very big disco ball. But first, I asked Roche to show me the gear that makes it all happen. You've got a lot of bells and whistles here already. Lots of bells and whistles here. So why don't we start at the very beginning and kind of start with the workhorse of the mixing dexes, which is the Pioneer DJM 900. This is kind of the central hub of everything. The mixer is what all of your playback methods are going to be going through before it hits the main system. So your CD players, your turntables, your computer, your sound card, any of your outboard effects or anything are all going to be controlled by this desk here. It has multiple inputs, so you could put digital inputs, analog inputs, and phono inputs on a single channel. So it basically gives you almost 12 to 16 channels on one mixer with just a flick of a knob. Let's talk about turntables now. Yeah. So this is the Pioneer PLX 1000. Pioneer is now one of the few companies making professional direct drive turntables. Direct drive turntable basically ensures that the speed that you want the disc to play at continues to play that way. So this is the top of the line gear. We're in a nightclub. But what if I just want something as a hobbyist DJ? This gear is going to be out of my league, right? I wouldn't say that it's out of your league, but there are so many different types of mixers and there are so many different brands out there that it's kind of important to do your homework to find out what your actual needs are. 10 to 15 years ago, you'd only be working with a turntable. Pioneer, Allen & Heath, Rain, all of these companies have different models of mixers that have come out through the years at different price points that will help you kind of find and narrow down where you want to go. The things that have come out over the past few years have given people a lot more options on a consumer level that allow you to do more with less. Okay, I mean, that sounds like that sounds like a great first step. Absolutely. Mixers and MIDI controllers are a good start. But that's not all there is to DJ. You need to move the crowd forge a connection between the sound and the person who's playing. To learn more about that, we met up with DJ Shifty at his place in Brooklyn. Fear not, my friends. This will be my greatest performance. Shifty is one of the best DJs around a two time DMC World DJ champion and a master of using the tools of a DJ to connect to an audience. I come from a battle DJ background where you're really trying to push the equipment and push the technique, the physical technique. And even the turntable was not meant to be a scratch tool. The whole idea is almost like hacking the equipment and seeing how you can almost like push it beyond what it was meant to do. But I'm always trying to take the technology old and new and see what I can do to sort of push myself and push what I've seen other DJs do. So walk me through your setup. Okay, so first I have the classic Technics turntable here, the 1200, 1210 model. This has really been the industry standard for turntables for 30 plus years. I'm sort of emulating what it would be like to use vinyl, but using it to control my software. Because when yeah, when you say emulating that sound we heard NYC isn't on the record. It's a sample that's on your computer. That's a sample that's on my computer. What's actually on the record is this, which is one of my favorite songs. It's not for everybody. But what's happening is that signal is getting sent to the computer and the computer is sending the sound back out, changing the sound in the same way I'm controlling the signal. So if I go like this, what we'd actually hear was... So it lets you scratch your mp3s. And this is what's called a MIDI controller. It just gives me more ways to access features of my program, which is Traktor, but rather than clicking or hitting my keyboard, I do these sort of things on here. And so that's a much more natural, comfortable, analog way of controlling digital sound. And then in the middle here we have the mixer and this controls the sound from the different decks. This is sort of a fancy mixer in that I also have MIDI control to jump around my song. So really all the sound is coming from the computer and all this stuff is just to give me different ways to control it in a way that feels better than like checking email. Yeah, exactly. If suddenly I took all this away and I was like, okay, just make the same sounds with the software, you could do it, but it wouldn't really be the same, right? For the sort of stuff that I do, I'm very active, so I'll be like... That you can't really do on a computer. And so there's some sort of beauty to the classic Technics where you get this level of control that I personally haven't seen yet in digital. So if someone's looking to get into this kind of a bare bones setup, DJing their cousin's wedding, what do they need? How much money is this going to cost? First let me say that DJing cousins' wedding is a very important DJ gig, so don't take it lightly. There's a lot at stake. The whole marriage is at stake. Do a bad job. Yeah, they may not talk to you again. One thing that's great about how DJ technology has progressed is there's always new tools available for you to sort of figure out how you can improve what you do. So I have here the Traktor DJ app on my iPad. Rather than trying to emulate turntables, it's sort of a new way of interacting with the sound. And I do know a couple professional DJs that DJ with this and one other piece of gear, just one small mixer. So the audio quality is good going to a system. But there's a lot that can be done just with your iPad. In the end, it's not about the tools at all. It's about using music to connect with an audience. That basic skill is the same whether you're using a $1000 controller or a $2 iPhone app. Of course, an entry-level mixer will help it sound a lot better, and a basic MIDI controller will let you throw in some moves. But none of that will matter if you don't have the right songs for the craft. Because it's so easy to produce music on your own and get it sounding at a level that you could really play in a club, a lot of DJs are producers, a lot of producers are DJs, and really you kind of have to be both in this day and age. Anyone can get equipment and learn how to take a track and mix it into another track. What is going to separate one person from another is that person's musical world that they create and curate. If you have skill sets to really make it your own and manipulate it and make it your own kind of performance, that's where you bring everything together. So if you can create this distinct musical world, which is excellently performed with technique, to me this is the pinnacle of DJing.