Ph.D.-Jays

0

Student bodies don’t get more diverse than the one at Scratch DJ Academy in West Los Angeles.


On a given night, you can find 12-year-olds and senior citizens, accountants and janitors, all rubbing elbows in class. They are aspiring disc jockeys, learning the fine art of working a turntable from local radio fixture DJ Hapa, whose real name is Brandon Perdue. He runs the academy that he opened in 2004 out of his Rehab Records warehouse space.


“It’s really a music appreciation class, as much as a DJ-ing class,” Perdue said. “People just open their eyes, or ears, to a new way of listening to it.”


Regardless of the students’ motivation, things are spinning quickly at the academy. It has turned out about 2,500 graduates to date and now has six classes in the course catalog, including an introduction to mixing, advanced scratching, beat juggling and beat-making on a computer.


Perdue opened Rehab Records in 2001 in conjunction with online vinyl record sales operation, DJcity.com, that Perdue and two college buddies started while studying at UCLA. The business grew to the point where the trio shipped more than 100 orders a day, so they moved into the warehouse.


Once they got into the 2,500-square-foot space on Cotner Avenue, Perdue and his pals realized that they had the potential to go beyond a record sales operation and affiliated themselves with a DJ school in New York.


“We wanted to actually interact with people, with other DJs in the community,” Perdue said. “Despite its size, the DJ-ing world is very niche, very tight knit.”


They trolled junkyards to remodel the space by hand and give it an urban flavor that fits the name Rehab, an acronym for Real Experiences in Hip-hop and Beats. And the first semester the school opened there were 68 students who signed up not quite the 120 students per session Scratch has now, but a fast start.


The classes may come relatively cheap at $300 a semester, but the goods a DJ needs to get the job do not. A basic setup of two turntables, a mixer, and speakers runs $1,600, and that’s before building a significant record collection to use in the pursuit of mix mastery. Some of the 18 staff members and instructors are paid out of enrollment fees (some of the staff is volunteer, though). The business clears $350,000 a year and awards scholarships to eligible students.


“I had been searching for the place like Neo looking for the Matrix,” said Tosh Biko, a Scratch student who works side jobs to afford classes and commutes to the school each week via bus and train from his Orange County apartment. “I had always been looking for my instrument. It wasn’t drums and wasn’t guitar it’s the turntables and records. This is serious if you are an artist; you love it with a passion.”


Aside from spinning gigs at regular shows and at special engagements internationally, Hapa is also currently the resident DJ on the KTLA (Channel 5) “Morning Show” in Los Angeles.


“All of our professors are working DJs,” he said. “If you take piano lessons you probably won’t be taking them from Elton John, but here you are learning from big names.”


Each student must have a DJ name upon enrollment, and staff rarely knows any student’s formal name. One student, a freelance writer whom Perdue describes as “well over 50” a testament to the age diversity welcomed at the institution chose the moniker DJ Icy Hot.

No posts to display