A DJ is by nature a technician, using his skills with a wide variety of DJ equipment in order to ensure that an audience has only the finest and the freshest beats as it parties the night away. Sometimes, though, the shear amount of DJ equipment available you can be overwhelming for someone just trying to break into the game. Here are the absolute basics you need to get started.
The most basic piece of DJ equipment you need is, naturally, music. While you can still use CDs, and some DJs are quite partial to vinyl because you can "scratch" it to create new beats, at an introductory level you probably want to go with something off an mp3 player. This way, you will not have to fumble around with physical CDs, and a change in music is as simple as clicking through a menu. If you do decide you want to use CDs or vinyl, though, you will need two of each (two CD players or two turntables) in order make smooth transitions between songs.
The next most basic item of DJ equipment you need is something to play the music loud enough so that everyone in a large hall can hear it (and at a close range, can hear nothing else) - namely, speakers. You will want to buy speakers that are specifically for use by DJs in playing pre-recorded music rather than live music, ones that will work well with monitoring systems and mixers.
While its not absolutely essential to a DJs job of playing music, the microphone is nonetheless an indispensable piece of DJ equipment. It will allow you to easy interact with the audience, get them exited and encourage them to dance if they cannot seem to do so themselves. Remember that the DJ is in charge of creating a party atmosphere, and music is not the only way to do this.
Now that you have the basics, it is time to get into your first DJ-exclusive DJ equipment, the DJ mixer. This will is an audio mixing console, a device that lets control things like sound level, rooting, and timbre, among other things. What makes the DJ mixer specifically a piece of DJ equipment is that it includes a crossfader, which allows for smooth transitions between songs in order to keep the flow of music to the crowd constant and vibrant.
A piece of DJ equipment that goes hand in hand with the DJ mixer is a set of headphones. Unlike a regular audio mixing console, a DJ mixer allows you to feed a track not currently being played to a set of headphones, which allows you to sample the tracks you want without disturbing anyone in your audience
If, after you have gathered all this equipment, you still have some money to burn, you might want to consider investing in a Sequencer. This handy piece of DJ equipment runs on a computer, and allows you to mix MIDI sound with Digital Audio, which can be used to dramatically change the sound of a song, allowing you to create practically original music on the spot.
There are countless other pieces of DJ equipment you can purchase, such as samplers, vinyl emulation software and drum machines. But if you have these basic pieces, you should be well on your way to being DJ.
