Juggling between varsity basketball, school work and extra-curricular activities, junior Nirali Shah also has a passion for DJing. Introduced to this hobby at a young age, Shah has  been Djing for the past four years

“I started DJing when I was 11 or 12 when I saw an ad for a beginner controller at Best Buy so I got it for Christmas and just went from there,” Shah said.

Starting out with a beginner’s control, Shah expanded her skills and now uses a Denon MC-6000, which is hooked up to an Apple MacBook Pro. The average DJ mixer can range from around $100 to more than $1000.

“You have to have a DJ controller of some kind and a laptop if it’s digital based so that all the music can be taken from your iTunes library CDs or USB sound banks,” Shah said. “Then you plug songs into each deck and mix them by beat matching.”

Shah’s family also has the same passion for music and encourages her to expand her skills and talk to other people in the industry. Even though starting out can be a bit tricky, just like any other skill, with lots of practice and the support of your loved ones, it gets easier.

“Yeah, my family is into music as well, especially my cousins, so they definitely support me and have led me to talk to other individuals in the music industry as well,” Shah said, “not just limited to performance like DJing but also music business.”

Shah has received no professional training on how to DJ; everything she’s learned has come from  online resources.

“I pretty much just learned by trial and error on my own time,” Shah said. “I also watched some  YouTube tutorials when I was just starting out.”

DJ equipment can be bulky, but for Shah it hardly takes up any space in her room. With her set up in her room and her laptop on her desk and the accompanying equipment surrounding it, it doesn’t seem to bother Shah at all.

“My set up is in my room on my desk,” Shah said. ”I have a stand for my laptop so it sits above the controller and doesn’t take up much space with my speakers on the left and right of me and subwoofer on the ground.”

Being distracted from school work or basketball is out of question for Shah , because unlike most people, it’s school and extra curriculars, which distract her from her passion of DJing.  Although as of now she just considers it a pastime and hasn’t gotten any jobs, Shah hopes to take her knowledge to a higher level and hopefully secure some gigs in the future.