I recently did a classroom workshop on DJing and demonstrated how early pioneers of this art were able to loop up a portion of a record without using anything other than two turntables and two copies of the same record.

I showed the students how this was done using a song by Led Zeppelin. Basically, the DJs figured out that we could create drum loops without samplers or any of the high tech features we have now in DJ software.

This was done in a time when we had to buy physical copies of records. If we wanted to create a loop, we had to buy two copies of the same record. This allowed us to play one record while queueing up another copy of it. If we moved quickly enough, we could start the portion of the record at just the right time and make it sound like a seamless loop.

You can watch a small clip of my classroom visit and see how I showed off this technique. Press play on the video in this post to see it.

We have a rich history of DJing and it is important to show how creative early pioneers were in creating some of the stuff we take for granted today.

If you would like me to come visit your school, please reach out. I can do workshops that will inspire students to be creative while giving them a chance to write, perform, and even record songs and music videos.

For privacy reasons, I will not be sharing the work the students did here, but it was incredible to see them shine. They wrote some amazing verses, had great questions for me. It was a great afternoon!