(U-WIRE) BERKELEY, Calif. – The classroom is a crowded club, the desk is a turntable, and the 20-minute test is to dazzle the audience and get the party started. No sucking up to the graduate student instructor is necessary, and no matter how horribly you fail, your GPA will remain unscathed.

Sound like midterm heaven? It’s actually the final presentation for Instructor DJ Amber Nixon’s “Intermediate Turntable Technique” course at University of California-Berkeley.

“One time we went and I told them, ‘Oh don’t worry, it’s kind of early in the night – there won’t be that many people there,'” Nixon said. “But there was this huge group for some kind of birthday party or company party, and it was so crowded and they were horrified. And I said, well, you guys gotta do this so here you go.”

Nixon’s course is one of eight DJ and music production classes offered at the Norcal DJ Music Production Academy in San Francisco. The year-old academy is part of a pioneering movement to bring the art of turntablism to the classroom setting, which some DJs believe a DE-Cal course at UC-Berkeley helped start.

Until recently, the art of DJing had been learned individually through old-fashioned trial and error. But in recent years, more and more institutions have begun to offer courses in DJing.

In 2002, the Scratch DJ Academy opened in New York City, founded by the legendary DJ Jam Master Jay of the hip-hop group Run-DMC. And in February of this year, the Berklee College of Music in Boston announced it will be offering a course in turntable technique, becoming the first music college to include turntablism in its curriculum.

Lost in the mix of these schools – plus the smaller deejay academies opened in recent years – is UC-Berkeley’s DJ DE-Cal course, which Norcal instructor Travis Rimando, or DJ Pone, believes deserves more recognition for beginning the fusion between turntables and classrooms.

The DE-Cal course, called “DJing 101,” was the first DJ course taught in an accredited university in the nation, says Rimando, a UC-Berkeley alumnus. The course was first offered in 1998 by fellow alumnus Rodney Sino-Cruz, known as DJ Icewater, and his friend, DJ MPact.

– Staff Report

Sino-Cruz says he started the DE-Cal to give the art of DJing more legitimacy in the music arena and to help interested people get a boost in their learning process.

“A lot of the former students still teach (the course) and it gets passed on that way – and I believe it’s still going on today,” Sino-Cruz said. “For our culture to survive, you have to pass it on to other people, and part of the hope is that you passed it to somebody that does something brilliant with it. It’s all a part of a chain and being a part of it feels good because you never know, maybe I taught the next (DJ) Q-bert.”

Five of the six Norcal academy DJ instructors are UC-Berkeley graduates, and a majority of them have either gone through the DJ DE-Cal or taught it at one point, Rimando said.

A living example of Sino-Cruz’s “chain” of DJs is Norcal academy instructor Alex Ngo, who has been both a student and teacher in the DJ DE-Cal. He says that as a student the DE-Cal “really solidified” his skills. Now a TA in the course, he says he enjoys being able to help fellow students with their own struggles in DJing.

But because DJ skills are very experience-oriented and need years to be perfected, not all DJs agree that their profession should be learned in the academic atmosphere.

“Actually, we still face a lot of opposition from people who learned (without instructors) who still think that DJing is some sort of secret arcane art, and don’t think that it can be passed on in this sort of abstract way – through books and such,” Rimando said.

But Rimando and Nixon both agree that learning from experienced instructors can make the learning process easier and more accessible to everyone. Rimando says everyone from 40-year-old lawyers to 12-year-old children have taken courses.

“One thing I hear a lot of instructors say is, ‘When I see how fast the students learn I’m so jealous that I didn’t get to learn that way,'” Nixon says. “It just blows your mind how fast they pick up stuff.”

A DJ of 12 years, Neil Quintanilla – or DJ NeoGeo – took a course at the Norcal academy called “Scratching Fundamentals,” which he says helped him “improve his scratch arsenal.”

“It normally takes people months or years (to learn) what DJ Pone is teaching us at the DJ school,” Quintanilla says. “The DJ school and classes are a lot of fun. Unlike some classes or schools where people are forced to be there, it’s cool to see people there and having fun and wanting to be there – it’s an aspect that most schools don’t have.”