Transmuting basic metals into gold remained a dream to medieval chemists, but DJ Alchemy spins up magic on the turntables. Maine native Jesse Tutor has a passion for the experience he shares with people while DJing. Until college, he didn’t know where to start.
“If you know someone who can, sort of, show you things, that’s like a really good way to get over the barrier of entry,” he said. “I never had that.”
He did have older brothers in the age of Napster, and they shared a library of music files with him. Thanks to eBay, as a sophomore at Ithaca College he found a used Novation Twitch. The Twitch is a unique controller released in 2011 with touchstrips instead of jog wheels. The stars aligned, and Tutor’s order arrived just before Spring Break – a Spring Break that Ithaca received three feet of snow. So, he spent the next two weeks teaching himself to use the controller.
It’s an approach that he recommends to anyone hoping to learn the craft. “Buy the cheapest piece of gear,” he said. “Yeah, the audio quality isn’t great. Yeah, it doesn’t have all the features, but most of the time what I’ve seen, the biggest pitfall for new DJs is that they get enamored with the fancy bells and whistles and they just do the bells and whistles. They don’t focus on the fundamentals.”
He spent the next year practicing and gaining experience by DJing college parties where he could. Then he decided to take the next step.
“I can very, very vividly remember my first gig,” Tutor said. “They probably paid me like 75 bucks or something, 50 bucks. It was like the bar near Cornell. I didn’t know anyone, I just literally walked in one day and they’re like, sure, man, you can have a gig. My like six friends showed up and that was like, that was it the whole night.”
Like anything, the more you do it, the better you get. Tutor says that he’s a lot more experienced than when he graduated college, but technical ability is the base from which true alchemy can be performed.
“The actual craft is subtler than most people want it to be when they’re first getting started,” he said. “If you listen to interviews of the old school DJs, the big thing that they talk about is that 60-70% of it doesn’t have anything to do with any of the technology – it’s song selection.”
That is where experience comes into play. He points out that many DJs early in their career understand that a good show builds in intensity as the evening goes on, but that it takes time to realize the nuance needed to bring a crowd on a four-hour journey.
He explained that he thinks it’s helpful to visualize energy levels as a line graph. “You start here,” he said, gesturing with his hand, “ramp up and then a slight dip. Then you come up a little bit higher, and then it’s another slight dip, and you come up a little bit higher, and it’s a little slight dip, to the point where at the peak of the night, it is the highest energy, but you haven’t just had a linear ramp to that point.”
What keeps him going, though, is the experience he shares with those on the dance floor. “I feel like those are my best moments,” he said. “The times where I played a song and a lot of people felt a similar thing at the same time, and that feeling was – complex.” That is a type of alchemy – transmuting a simple visit to a bar into a collective experience.