Announcer: Welcome to watchmojo.com, I am your host Laila. Tonight I go one on one with Kanye West's supporting DJ A-Trak.
DJ A-Trak: When I was first DJing and I was doing like the more technical stuff like if I want to do something live, I would practice it for literally for three weeks at home like everyday. Three weeks is like my comfort period but now it's like I do gigs all the time, I rarely have time to even practice, strictly DJing and then play with Kanye where everything moves really fast.
Host: And how has working with Kanye West impacted your solo performance?
DJ A-Trak: Seeing him in the studio and seeing the pace at which he works and seeing the amount of effort that it takes to get to the visibility he has, I think, has rubbed off on me to a certain extent. And even it being part of his so I think forced me to learn how to perform for an audience that didn't necessarily have a background in the type of the DJing that I am from.
Like I was used to DJing for people that went to an A-Trak show and then you put me in front of a Kanye audience. Especially, the first tour I did with him, we opened for Usher so it was like a basically teenage girls, they don't know what a scratch DJ is and he were who wanted to showcase me so I had a solo and my solos very technical. The solos I was used to doing took for granted that my audience had seen other DJs and had certain reference points. Then you put that in front of like a crowd that doesn't really know that one thing in the first place and then they were just like, "what?" And then I had to like simplify it but simplify it in a way as that didn't really hurt my integrity that I was still comfortable with.
Host: When did you discover that DJing was more than a hobby for you?
Speaker: I entered my first DJ battle when I had only been DJing for maybe like a year and a half and I won the first one that I entered in, that took me to road to finals. And from that point on, as soon as I won the local competition going up against guys that were doing it for years and were way older than me, that's what told me and also convinced my parents that like this thing is serious.
The first couple of years in my career I was really all about the more technical side like turntablism and doing DJ tricks and in that round there was patterns and techniques that you can just learn and you can teach a guy how to do a scratch and you got to practice it everyday for hours and hours and then you master it.
What I do as a DJ now in my career isn't really that anymore, I mean that I know how to do that because it's where I started for the first few years but what I work on now is a lot more in terms of doing DJ sets and like the compositional side of it. When I do a DJ set figuring out new ways to bring in the techniques that I know into that context without it being in the forefront.
If you make something look easy and that sounds the way people think it should be sounding then they think it's good. And then whether or not it actually is easy or hard, that's your end of the bargain. And I happen to make some of my things kind of hard to pull off and that's for me to deal with when I do my stuff like -- I just want the audience to see and hear and be like, "Yup, he has got it" kind of thing.
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