For regular visitors to the site, you will have noticed my lack of commitment to writing new articles over the last two months. The reason for this might be two fold, or even three fold.

I felt compelled to write something today in an attempt to explain why, or maybe perhaps what, I have learned from not writing about Traktor, reading about Traktor, or even using Traktor over the last few months.

That’s right, I haven’t opened up Traktor since mid March!

“But how can the person who created ‘Traktor Tips’, not use Traktor for so long?!” I hear you ask.

To be honest, I just got fed up of it. I have spent a lot of time over the previous years creating free and paid tutorials to help people like yourself learn the necessary skills to get you to a level of skill that is required to perform at a professional level with Traktor and I then lost the direction.

Whilst I understand Traktor is still ‘innovating’, with certain changes to the software, these changes do not reflect my DJ style and as such have not yet felt compelled to delve any further into new features.

Putting Pressure on Yourself

Our current society pushes us all to ‘perform’, there’s a subtle energy underneath our society that encourages ‘productivity’ and frowns upon ‘laziness’. Due to these pressures we push ourselves to ‘create’ or to ‘work hard’. We are told we will amount to nothing if we don’t put the work in. Well I decided to test this theory and slowed down on the productivity.

The space that I created allowed me to take things in, in a more organic way. The pace of life slowed down somewhat and I started to enjoy the journey a little more, you know, ‘smell the roses’, as the saying goes.

I have no idea what the ‘productive’ parallel universe would have been, but I sure don’t feel any lack in my life for just taking it easy and slowing up the pace for a while.

It’s time to Slow Down

So this is the lesson in todays first post in months.

Slow it all down.

The usual caffeinated, hyped up, urgent DJ learning process looks like this, and occurs in the time frame of one hour:

• receive marketing material
• Eyes open up – I wanna do that!
• scour internet sites gazing at equipment
• ask a million questions about what equipment you should buy
• borrow money from the future to buy over-hyped, unnecessary equipment
• ask for drone delivery from amazon as you just can’t wait to receive your new DJ toy
• receive toy
• throw manual away
• scour internet for the quickest most direct tutorial on how to use new toy
• get frustrated with slow internet speeds
• jump on a forum to ask someone else how to DJ
• realise there’s a sync button
• create mix recording
• Get bored
• Search for more marketing on new equipment to buy.
• Repeat process

The above process is a cycle that many seem to be a part of and it adds no value to your life. Constantly searching and pushing, urging in some form of entertainment hoping for some form of excitement, a new experience, a fleeting moment of joy.

But here’s the kicker, you can’t find it.

There are a few reasons you can’t find it:

1. You are rushing through life without truly feeling into the depth of your experience. You want to be pleased on the surface only, which you manage to do, but it is only temporary.
2. You are comparing yourself to others. This will never lead to joy, only pain. When you pitch yourself against other people you forget to tread your own unique path and instead follow someone else. Their path is unique to them and you can not follow and should never compare.
3. You’re a victim of the system. Capitalism wants you to be working hard, so they can claim more taxes. They want you to be sad and frightened so that you live in fear and can be more easily controlled. They want you to be sick as it generates more income through pharmaceutical drugs. They want to pit you against each other, because the old saying still stands, ‘divide and conquer’.

So it’s time to slow down, feel into yourself and who you truly are, without the false beliefs that have been fed to you over the years.

It’s time to feel into what you TRULY want to do with your life. It might not even be DJ’ing, it could be something completely different, you’ve just been led to believe it’s DJ’ing for whatever reason.

Start living your own life, not one that someone else thinks you should be living.

There are plenty of tutorials on the site to get you from knowing nothing about Traktor to becoming competent. From that point, it’s time to be your own teacher. The best way to learn is by doing. Slow it down, there’s no rush.

Those best at what they do, took their time, developed patience and got stuck in without paying too much attention to what others are doing.

Enjoy the process of life, let it organically unfold and let’s drop the urgency to be so productive, it’s not healthy.