DJing for Dummies: Headphones
, by Graig Upton, 4 min reading time
Watch any DJ at work and one image tends to stick: a single headphone cup pressed against one ear while the other side is left open. It looks like a habit, or a pose. It is neither. Those headphones are doing the most important job in the booth, and once you understand what the DJ is listening to, the whole craft starts to make sense.
What the crowd never hears
A DJ is always working with two separate outputs at once. One is the master, the sound leaving the speakers for everyone in the room. The other is a private channel that reaches your headphones alone. That private channel is where you line up the next track, confirm it is in time and decide the exact moment to bring it in, all while the current song keeps playing to the floor. In short, headphones are how you audition the future while the present rolls on.
The controls that make it work
This monitoring lives on the mixer, or the mixer section of a controller. Press the cue button on a channel and that track is sent to your headphones without touching what the audience hears. Two further controls shape the result: a headphone level knob for volume, and a cue/mix knob, sometimes labelled monitor mix, that blends between the cued track and the master. Turned fully to cue, you hear only the track you are preparing. Turned toward mix, you hear both at once, which is how many DJs beatmatch by ear. If the cue button itself is still new to you, our guide to Play & Cue covers where to place those points; here we are dealing with what happens after you press it.
Why one ear
This is the reason for that one-cup pose. You keep one ear on the headphones to hear the incoming track, and one ear open to hear what is actually coming out of the speakers. Beatmatching is the act of getting those two to agree. Lift the cup away and you lose your reference; clamp both cups down and you lose the room. One on, one off is the working position, and it is exactly why DJ headphones are built with cups that swivel and a headband flexible enough to be worn half on.
Shutting the room out
A booth is loud, and the speakers are usually aimed away from you and out at the crowd. That is why the great majority of DJ headphones are closed-back: the ear cups seal against your head and block outside noise so you can genuinely hear the track you are cueing. Studio and hi-fi models are often open-backed, which sounds wonderful at home but lets the room leak straight into your ear on a loud stage. For cueing in front of a crowd, isolation matters more than anything else.
Choosing your first pair
A few things matter more than the badge on the side. Look first for strong isolation and a firm seal, so a loud room cannot drown out the cue. Check that the pair can go loud, because ordinary earbuds rarely produce enough volume from a booth headphone output. Favour swivel cups and a sturdy, ideally replaceable cable, since one-ear monitoring and a busy gig bag punish weak hinges and fixed leads. Finally, weigh up comfort across a long set, because a heavy clamp that feels fine for five minutes becomes a headache by the third hour. Over-ear, closed-back models are the standard starting point, and you can browse the current range of DJ headphones to compare them. If you play in very tight spaces, or in-ear monitoring appeals, in-ear monitors are worth a look, though most people starting out are better served by a solid pair of on-ears first.
The takeaway
Headphones are not an accessory bolted onto DJing; they are the tool that lets you prepare the next track in private while the crowd stays with the last one. Learn the one-ear position, get comfortable with the cue and cue/mix controls, and choose a closed-back pair that seals well and goes loud. Do that and mixing stops being guesswork. For the rest of this series and more starting points, head to the DJ advice blog.