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Never too old to boogie? Here’s how beginner DJs of all ages get their shot on stage

March 31, 2026

On the day Alun Thomas was set to make his DJ debut, he locked himself away from his family in the garage of his San Fernando Valley home and ran through his set some five or six times.

Still, he was, admittedly, “a little freaked out” when he arrived at Jewel’s Catch One, where he was scheduled to play 25 minutes of music, weaving the songs together without pause. Right before he hit the stage, the teacher who had been working with Thomas for the past few weeks gave him a pep talk. That case of the nerves, though, didn’t quite subside until a few songs into his set.

Out in the crowd, you could see relief cross the face of the bearded DJ as he played a house remix of “Weak Become Heroes” from the English hip-hop artist The Streets. It was a bold choice — a 20-something-year-old song from someone who never quite broke through in the U.S. — but the audience stayed with him. He followed this with pop singer Sam Smith’s faithful cover of the Donna Summer classic, “I Feel Love.” The transition between the two songs was seamless. Thomas, headphones still pulled over his hot pink beanie, clapped his hands together. He knew he nailed that mix, too.

“That was the transition that I was more afraid of,” Thomas confessed when we connected by phone sometime after the event. The day before his performance, Thomas played for his friend, a longtime DJ, who gave him a pointer for fitting those two songs together. The advice worked.

Thomas, who is 64, moved to Los Angeles from Wales in 1987 and, a few years later, started going to raves in the city. It was the early 1990s, when underground parties were a new phenomenon. Some of his friends became DJs. Thomas didn’t, but, last fall, he took his shot.

“I think I’m going to be 40 years too late, but it’s something that I’ve always wanted to do,” Thomas said when we first met a few weeks before the competition.

In the fall of 2025, DJ competition Your Shot landed in Los Angeles and brought together 250 competitors to play 25-minute sets across eight stages inside the historic dance club Jewel’s Catch One over the course of two days. The top prize: A slot on the bill at a major electronic music festival.

Launched in Australia in 2010, Your Shot is unique amongst DJ competitions in that all of the performers are green. This wasn’t just the first proper gig for Thomas, but for every DJ who crossed the stages that weekend. For Your Shot, competitors go through a bootcamp where they learn the basics of the hardware — what DJs refer to as decks — and software that’s now standard for playing digital music. They work with instructors as they figure out how to build and play their first DJ set.

Then, it’s showtime.

Your Shot participants come from all walks of life, but there’s a thread that connects them all. “Each of these people has a willingness and a desire to challenge themselves and put themselves out there,” said Pillemer.

After attending Your Shot's bootcamp, novice DJs competed at Jewel's Catch One in Los Angeles. (Photo by Angus Bell Young @brewcasa) — After attending Your Shot’s bootcamp, novice DJs competed at Jewel’s Catch One in Los Angeles.
(Photo by Angus Bell Young @brewcasa)

Yes, some alumni of the program have gone on to successful DJ careers. And, yes, the winner of the inaugural L.A. competition, a DJ named Jelly Bean, will go on to play a gig-of-a-lifetime alongside marquee talent like Subtronics and Porter Robinson at this year’s Elements Festival in Pennsylvania. But, that’s not really the point of Your Shot. The point is to get up and try something new, something that you never thought you would be able to do.

There are many different ways to DJ, with specific techniques and performance styles varying according to what type of music you’re playing and where you’re playing it. The goal, though, is always the same. That’s to elicit a response from the crowd and the response is usually dancing.

Years ago, Steve Pillemer, the founder of Your Shot, saw David Guetta play to a crowd of 75,000 people in Melbourne. “I was just looking at this guy, he has confidence that I don’t have,” Pillemer, now based in L.A., recalled on a video call. “He’s surrounded by people who are loving what he was doing and he had the crowd completely in the palm of his hand. I couldn’t understand what was going on.”

Pillemer had a friend teach him DJ basics, and quickly realized that it wasn’t for him. However, he was willing to bet that there were a lot of people who would love to DJ if only they knew where to begin.

And, he was right. In Your Shot’s first year, more than 1,100 people applied for a slot in the first 24 hours. Eventually, Your Shot would draw about 14,500 annual applicants in Australia.

Meanwhile, they saw demand for the program in the U.S. So, last fall, Your Shot launched pilot programs in Los Angeles and New York. Those who registered were invited to a selection day, where potential participants met with promoters and DJs who would decide who made the cut for the program. The plan was to admit between 50-60 student DJs in L.A. and about the same number in New York. “We ended up with over 250 in each city because we couldn’t say no,” says Pillemer.

Within the labyrinth of stages, most of L.A.’s party scenes were represented. DJs played techno and house, hip-hop and reggaeton and everything in between. Some DJs were ready for TikTok, performing for the livestreamers in wild outfits and full makeup. Others relied on the music, and their careful manipulation of it, to hype the crowd.

At some point early in the evening, I wandered into a narrow room where the DJ, a young woman dressed in nondescript clothing, immediately caught my attention. She already had an ability to read the room. With every song, more people filled the dance floor and the energy swelled. I walked up to the mezzanine as she played a slow, bass-heavy track with vocals pulled from the Princess Superstar song “Perfect” (if you’ve seen the movie “Saltburn,” you’ve heard the song) and looked down to see the front row of dancers bouncing and fist-pumping.

Underneath the boom of the bass, I heard some singing along, “One, two, three, four, let me hear you scream if you want some more.” Then, suddenly, the tempo shifted to a buoyant house rhythm. The crowd immediately sprung up in near-unison, like an army of Jack-in-the-boxes. They unleashed a stream of screams and disco chants that carried loud and clear up to the mezzanine.

Emily Lai, a recent USC graduate, started going to see electronic music DJs play while she was a student. She wanted to learn to DJ, but didn’t know where to start. Then, she saw an ad for Your Shot on TikTok. “I signed up not really knowing what I was getting myself into,” says Lai, whose DJ stage name is Ellai. “The journey was awesome.”

Lai wasn’t expecting much to happen after her set that Sunday evening. When friends asked if they should stay for the final round at the end of the night, she responded, “Nah, it’s not going to happen.”

Then, when her name was announced as a finalist, Lai realized that she didn’t have the USB with her music collection. She ran to find her friend, who threw Lai her bag, USB inside, towards her. “I think the set went even better the second time around, maybe because I had done it earlier that day,” Lai recalled, “but I was really feeling the energy … and it was definitely an experience I’ll never forget.

“Now I’m really starting to think about how I want to get out there and maybe play some gigs,” said Lai. “I don’t care if it’s 10 people or 100 people or 1,000 people. I just want to keep playing music for people and sharing the love of EDM that I have.”

Thomas says that, while he doesn’t see himself as a career DJ, it is something that he now enjoys doing. During the second week of Your Shot, a friend asked him to play her New Year’s Eve party. “Maybe you should see my set, it might be crap,” he recalled telling her. It wasn’t. “As soon as I finished, she said, you’re on for New Year’s Eve.”

Never too old to boogie? Here’s how beginner DJs of all ages get their shot on stage Orange County Register

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Never too old to boogie? Here’s how beginner DJs of all ages get their shot on stage

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