DJ, Music Production, and Music Hardware Lessons with Julia
Julia is a DJ, live electronic performer, and music producer who brings real-world club and stage experience into every lesson. After diving into drum machines in 2019, she quickly immersed herself in hardware, production, and performance—launching her live act in 2022 and beginning to DJ in 2023, with dozens of shows across LA and beyond since. She teaches students how to operate club-standard DJ equipment, build and prepare sets in rekordbox, mix in key, and confidently perform, while also offering in-depth instruction in Ableton for dance music production and hands-on training with drum machines, samplers, sequencers, and synthesizers. Julia’s teaching style is collaborative and adaptable, shaping each lesson around her students’ interests and goals to create an engaging, creative, and confidence-building learning experience.
How It Works
Schedule a one-time intro lesson to meet an instructor, share your goals, and experience how lessons work.
1. Book an Intro Lesson
If your intro lesson feels like the right match, we’ll help you enroll. If not, we’ll set up another intro lesson to connect you with the right guide.
2. Find your Instructor
Once you’ve found your guide, start your weekly lessons—your dedicated time each week to create, learn, and grow. Enrollment renews monthly.
3. Enroll in Weekly Lessons
Meet the Instructor
What do you teach?
DJ: I teach students how to operate club standard DJ equipment and prepare DJ sets for any setting. We'll cover hot cues, looping, mixing in key, managing rekordbox software, and the best ways to gather tracks. By the end of the course, you'll have all the tools you need to perform a set and play out all your favorite songs.
Ableton: Learn the ins and outs of the Ableton software suite from the perspective of dance music production. We'll cover basic navigation, sound design, mixing, and other skills necessary to help you express yourself through music!
Hardware: Learn how to use drum machines, samplers, sequencers and synthesizers to their fullest extent! You'll learn about modulation, programming drum patterns, creating unique sounds through synthesis, and how to route and sync multiple pieces of gear.
What makes you want to share your skills and knowledge?
Music has brought an unquantifiable amount of joy into my life and I love to share this experience as frequently as possible. Even before I began teaching lessons as a career, I would regularly help my friends produce/mix/master their tracks and figure out new pieces of gear!
What is your experience in your craft and how are you evolving?
I started using drum machines in 2019 out of boredom. Despite not having much "serious" music knowledge, I picked up on everything quickly and began investing the majority of my time and money into my equipment. In 2022, I started playing small shows as a live act in San Diego and the Inland Empire, and in 2023 I began DJing. I have since played dozens of shows, both in LA and out of state, and my experience at these has deeply influenced my creative practice. Preparing for upcoming shows keeps me on my toes whether I'm creating new live material to be performed on drum machines or producing/gathering tracks to DJ with. As an artist, it's important to constantly evolve your sound to avoid stagnation, and I can confidently say that I use my performances as a way to do so.
What's your style of teaching?
My general lesson plan is easily adaptable to fit different students' needs. I'm a big proponent of keeping lessons as engaging as possible, so whatever specific production or mixing style a student wants to learn we'll figure out together. I never want to teach in a way that limits what can be taken away from the lesson.
I bring an intuitive approach to my lessons that involves a constant back-and-forth between the instructor and student, not just the instructor setting the tone and pace of the lesson. While I'm teaching, I periodically check in with the student(s) to ensure that what we're going over is engaging and interesting. At the start of a lesson, I like to ask a student what they would like to learn about and take away from the day's lesson, and I typically base everything we do off of that. Obviously in group classes this isn't as easy an approach since there's more perspectives, but I still let the class decide certain things such as the genre that we're learning to mix with (in my DJ courses).
Adapting lesson plans to students' needs and allowing them to choose certain "themes" of the lesson, I create a solid foundation for a positive experience. Positive reinforcement and having fun *while learning* are what really make the experience complete. A good example of this is during the DJ lessons I've subbed for at Louder. Typically, there are students who aren't personally interested in mixing dance music, but by the end of every lesson everyone is dancing around and cheering when someone catches a blend. While students are learning, I take great care to not put down ideas and encourage everyone to foster a fear and judgement free environment.
What keeps you creatively inspired?
My friends, listening to the radio, the sounds I hear walking around the city, traveling and constantly changing the methods I use to DJ and produce music.