DJing is exciting, creative and fulfilling. DJs are on a mission to entertain and play great music. This Cheat Sheet gives you tips and information to help you DJ to the very best of your abilities.Items to Take when You’re DJingYou want to travel light when you DJ, but you also don’t want to forget any vital items.

Record collecting is easy. In fact, if you already own a few records, you already have a collection. But what you do need to know is how to care for it. This cheat sheet will help you keep your records in the very best shape.The ten cardinal rules of record collectingIn no particular order, beyond a reproachful look at anyone who is, or has been, guilty of one or more of these things, and whose records still bear the scars.

Although jazz is performed by musicians of many backgrounds, and mixes elements of many kinds of music, it's essentially African-American music. Interwoven with jazz's history is the history of the Black experience in America. However, European music and blues also influenced jazz. Adapting West African traditions Essential elements of jazz arrived in America in 1619 with the first Africans brought as slaves by Dutch sailors who landed in Jamestown, Virginia.

The rap music of today is an outgrowth of the mid-1970s hip-hop, a brash mixture of rhythm and boastful talking. Out of nowhere, the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight," rhymed over CHIC's "Good Times" and cut in 1979, became a commercial hit on the R&B, pop, and U.K. charts.By the early 1980s, hip-hop pioneers, such as Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Kurtis Blow (the first rapper signed to a major label, Mercury Records), the Funky Four Plus One, and Run-D.

Delta blues also goes by the moniker Mississippi blues, but either term refers to the blues style of playing that came out of the Delta region of Mississippi, the fertile cotton-producing area of the state (not to be confused with the Mississippi River delta).Most Delta blues is played acoustically, in the manner of the original recordings of the 1920s and 1930s, with hollow-bodied guitars that were made before the electric guitar was introduced to the blues in the late 1940s.

A musical rest is simply a pause in which you play nothing. You'll see rests all over your sheet music; it's inevitable. The beat goes on — remember it's a constant pulse — but you pause. This pause can be as short as the length of one sixteenth note or as long as several measures. However, a rest is usually not long enough to order a pizza or do anything else very useful.

The clarinet looks somewhat like an oboe, but it makes a very different sound in classical music: full, but without the edge of the oboe’s sound. One important reason for this difference is that, whereas the oboe has a double reed (a piece of shaved cane doubled over on itself), the clarinet has a single reed.

Classical music notation be confusing. If you sit down at the piano and plunk out one of Ludwig van Beethoven’s incredible sonatas, you have only his written score to work from. The notes are all there, along with the rhythms and dynamics. However, it’s impossible to say how closely this written music mirrors the brilliant ideas in the composer’s head.