It's not that hard to learn to mix well with turntables, especially if you have a background in music production or instruments. It's a logarithmic curve, I thi

It's not that hard to learn to mix well with turntables, especially if you have a background in music production or instruments. It's a logarithmic curve, I think you can get there in ~2 months, putting in some time daily. Compared to learning how to play any musical instrument well, it's rather trivial. It's probably harder to get good at handling the mixer, levels and EQ as DJ software abstracts this away with auto-gain (again if you have no solid experience in sound engineering). Learning how to choose good cue points (phrasing) will again take some time if you have no idea about musical composition, but it can be simplified (usually 16-32 bars, outro -> intro, breakdown -> buildup). On top of that, add 'harmonic mixing'. The thing is, if you don't put in the time to learn beatmatching by ear and hands, you likely won't learn how to listen attentively. Even if you auto-match the tempos based on BPM, you'll get ugly phase mismatches on the kicks and snares/claps that will sound bad and you won't even be able to notice how a small nudge could make it all gel much better. Another tendency is to simply mix and switch tracks too fast because you have nothing else to do, the software makes it instant. The audience always takes a longer time to get into a track than you. But in the end, I've seen no correlation between skill and event lineups. Source: 15+ years of experience