Those who can't, teach. I'd like a word.

There's an old line that goes: those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. I've been teaching DJing and music production for a while now. Between that and the title of my book, it's easy to work out which side of the coin I assumed I was on.

Terrible, and loving it

Most of my students are beginners and beginners, by definition, are pretty bad... usually. Their mixes are off and their first tracks sound like a fridge falling down the stairs. None of this bothers them in the slightest.

They grin through every trainwreck mix. They play me eight bars of something they made and they're buzzing, because last week they couldn't make anything at all.

I was just as bad when I started. The difference perhaps was that I was miserable about it, even when I was a kid. Every rough mix was evidence of my failure. Every unfinished track was proof I didn't have ‘it’. I wasn't comparing myself to last week's version of my skill level. I was comparing myself to whoever was headlining that week which meant I was measuring against someone else’s success.

I don't give answers, I ask questions

If I have a philosophy about DJing and making music, it's that nobody learns much by being told what to do all the time. So I ask questions instead.

What did you hear just then? Why did that mix work and the last one didn't? What's this track missing? Where would you take it next?

I'm not doing it to be awkward. Usually if I tell a student the answer, they know one thing. If they find it themselves, they know how to find the next one without me in the room. Teach someone how to think, not what to think, springs to mind.

Here's what I didn't see coming: You can't ask a good question unless you already know the answer properly. Not roughly, properly. Well enough to lead someone there without saying it out loud.

The other saying

There's a second line people like to quote: if you want to learn something, teach it.

That one turned out to be true as well. Teaching made me explain things I'd only ever done on instinct. Why you bring a track in on the one. Why we switch at this point exactly. Why we compress. I'd been doing all of it for years without ever having to put it into words that another brain could understand.

And once I had begun to put it into words, I noticed another thing that was awkward. There were a lot of words spilling out of my mouth. I knew a lot.

That’s nice thing to learn about yourself right?

Same coin

So I've got two sayings here I guess. One says teaching is where you end up when you've failed. The other says teaching is how you get good. For a while there I thought only the first one applied to me.

They're the same coin. I taught because I thought I couldn't but teaching is the thing that showed me I could. The "can't" in that old line was never about ability for my story. It was about the outcome. I couldn't make a living off of it, fine, but I could DJ and I could always produce.

My students worked this out before I did. They turn up, they're bad, they have a brilliant time, and they come back a bit less bad, week after week.

It took me about ten years, several careers, 2 million streams, a whole book written and this blog post to realise this about myself. So yeah, that’s good innit?