The best DJ school in the world is located in Glendale, CA, a turntable dojo that may just be the unlikely key to sharpening and broadening any role within the music business. That includes, but is not limited to, people who work as an engineer, producer, drummer, singer, songwriter and A&R exec.
Take it from me: I’m a journalist, professional DJ and budding beatmaker who has been thriving in private lessons at the Beat Junkie Institute of Sound since shortly after it opened in April 2017. My incredible teachers Babu and Mr Choc have helped me bloom into the music artist I never knew I could be.
I’m now working on a debut album called The Peace Suite, inspired by this year’s close work with Choc, who I called to help me with my first-ever DJ battle in January. The turntables have since become a command center for creating original productions. Babu is considered to have coined the term “turntablism.”
My 30-plus year interview archive of brilliant musicians has also provided incredible guidance in making music, and I’m having the time of my life being the writer of my own multidimensional artist story. If you told me in 2025 that I’d be releasing original music now, I’d have laughed loudly, but it will come out soon on Oxygen Music Works, a New York label that has worked with legends of house and hip-hop. None of this would have happened without this year’s studies at BJIOS.
J.Rocc started the Beat Junkies as a friendly but deadly crew back in 1992. He now DJs on Sunday nights on the popular Santa Monica radio station KCRW. Rhettmatic, one of the earliest members, teaches at BJIOS. He recalls when the fellow Beat Junkie known as D-Styles suggested that they open a school in the first place.
“He put into the perspective of all the champion boxers who open up a school after they retire to coach the next generation right,” Rhettmatic says of D-Styles.
Mr Choc, who previously was a director at another DJ school for over 10 years, taught his fellow Beat Junkies how to become instructors, which includes taking deep dives into the history and cultural context of hip-hop and music as a whole. In turn, students absorb that institutional knowledge and learn to unlock their own musicality, stage presence, poise and confidence.
When Beat Junkies like Rhett and Babu mopped the floor at the international DMC and ITF DJ battles back in the day, they weren’t in the habit of sharing their secret sounds or techniques with would-be rivals. Now, all of their secrets and tricks of the trade are openly shared at school. Those who take them to heart and apply them to their own creativity will experience continual breakthroughs.
Speaking of breakthroughs, BJIOS is helping to bring DJ education to other schools. Mr Choc as well as general manager and instructor C-Los teach junior high students in California’s Palmdale School District. Babu is now also a professor of the craft of DJing at the oldest music school in the country, the Peabody Conservatory of Music at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD.
“They loved the idea of us having our own school,” Babu says. “I think that really was a big factor in them looking toward me.” DJ Baby B, one of Babu’s longtime students who started spinning in grade school, is currently in her first year at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.
Samantha Garong went to college to be a music engineer, but she found DJing to be a better fit after taking classes with Mr Choc and Babu at BJIOS. She became an intern and then a paid staffer at BJIOS for six years, finding family in the coaches and their kids — some of whom, like Mr Choc’s son and Garong’s best friend, Thurston, are also headlining DJs. Garong helped enlist many women as students and make sure they felt powerful in a traditionally masculine environment.
Now, DJing has been Garong’s full-time concern for almost three years and she has returned to BJIOS to host paid DJ business seminars. She makes music as Midi Riperton and is the touring DJ for the R&B singer Joyce Wrice.
“I’ve just noticed how far DJing alone has been able to take me,” she says.
“I love their mission statement: Building Better DJs,” says David Faustino, the actor best known for playing Bud Bundy on the TV sitcom Married… with Children. “I think that’s exactly what they are doing.”
Faustino’s DJ name is Grandmaster B, and he just finished the 10-month Foundation Program at BJIOS. There are also eight-week group classes that cover introductory topics, Ableton production, battle prep and other evolving practical instruction. Faustino is looking forward to some big gigs in 2027, and is proud of stepping up at the school’s Longtagon, an eight-turntable setup for round robin scratch jam sessions that can look very intimidating.
DJing can be about more than fun, profit and libido. Skills like split-listening to multiple tracks with headphones as well as cutting and scratching sounds and phrases in songs helps keep brains sharp. Programming sets enlighten the connection between seemingly disparate sounds. Forever students are highly likely to find this craft to be a fascinating way to understand their rate of learning at their age.
Students also learn intricate mechanics with both of their hands. The muscle memory that develops can lead to more ambidextrous activities off of the decks, like writing with one’s non-dominant hand. For left-handed students living in a right-handed world, that is an incredible revelation.
BJIOS serves the wired world well, too, with over 1200 how-to and other educational DJ videos available to watch on a phone, tablet or computer for monthly or yearly subscription at Beatjunkies.TV. There’s also an online record pool, with exclusive edits, remixes, instrumental and acapella versions of new and classic tracks available to download and keep in your party arsenal.
This season’s in-person group classes are already in progress, but hourly private lessons are available for the rest of the year and beyond.
Visit beatjunkiesound.com for new class announcements for 2027, the school’s 10th year in business!
