Kendall Campus Aims To Launch The Next Steve Aoki With New DJ Course

The New York City blackout of 1977 was a game changer for the music industry. 

At the time, disc jockey culture was heating up in homes and clubs, but equipment was expensive. 

However, when the blackout struck, people looted electronic stores for mixers, speakers and turntables. The upheaval soon mushroomed into street parties and competitions. 

“People were setting up two turntables, a mixer and huge speakers right there on the streets. And you would see DJs picking up vinyl records and dropping them and doing tricks,” said Scott S. McCartney, who developed a passion for the artform when he was nine. “I saw [DJing] from [its] birth and that’s when it became a passion for me.”

Forty-seven years later, McCartney—now a professional disc jockey known as DJ Smoove (the Rough) —is launching an introduction to DJing course at Kendall Campus this summer. 

“To be able to share my knowledge and experience and watch how these turntables are gonna change lives for this new generation of DJs…makes me excited in my soul,” McCartney said. “I really want people to be excited to go to college again, to be excited about being a musician again, to be excited about incorporating current technology in their pursuit of happiness and being successful. That lets me know I left a good mark in society and in this world.”

The idea for the course, which will run from June 17 through July 25 and is being billed as the first of its kind at Kendall Campus, bloomed two years ago while he was pursuing an associate’s degree in music business at MDC.

 At the time, McCartney was interning as a DJ instructor at Coconut Palm K-8 Academy.

“I noticed that it started to change their life; they became better people,” McCartney said. “They learned how to overcome being scared and intimidated.”

The 56-year-old wanted to bring that same excitement to MDC. So he partnered with Stephen Quinzi, a professor in the music business department at Kendall Campus, Melissa Lesniak, the chairperson of the performing arts and industries department and Timothy Brent, the former chairperson, to make that dream a reality. 

They used part of a $300,000 grant from the Carl D. Perkins Program—a federal initiative aimed at developing technical education programs—to purchase turntables, speakers, mixers and vinyl records, computers, DJ consoles, USB controllers and microphones.

McCartney—who created the S Foundation, a non-profit organization aimed at enriching the lives of students in underserved populations through music 21 years ago and has worked as a radio DJ personality at WEXY 1520 for more than three years—was an ideal candidate to teach the course. 

“His level of detail and focus into this—his personality—is such that I thought that he was the type of individual that would be accessible for our students,” said Qunzi, who helped develop the course’s curriculum and served as McCartney’s professor for six courses at MDC.

The course aims to teach the fundamentals of DJing such as mixing and beat matching, the genre’s history and how to market the craft on social media. 

Classes will be held on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11:40 a.m. to 3 p.m. in Room 8109. To register for the class—MUM 1930—students can log into their MDConnect portal by visiting https://bit.ly/3yxMaPh. 

Maria Castellanos, an international student studying music education at Kendall Campus, found out about the course from Quinzi last spring and decided to enroll. 

The 23-year-old hopes to learn about sampling—a technique in which DJ’s use part of an existing song and add it to a new piece of music—and combine her Colombian roots with hip-hop. 

“I hope [the course] allows us to play live and at least have our first chance to behave as DJs, so we can [get] the real experience of it,” Castellanos said.

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