It started with my son and a pair of borrowed decks.

Thirty years, and the same first lesson

I learned on borrowed 1210s in the mid‑90s. No YouTube, no waveforms, no sync button. You put the needle down, you listened, and you nudged the platter until the two records breathed together. When it locked, you felt it in your chest. When it didn't, everyone in the room knew.

That's still the best lesson in this craft, and it's the one that's quietly disappearing.

Then I taught Bear

My son Bear got serious about music, and I started teaching him the way I was taught — ears first. Not because I'm a purist, but because once you can hear it, every bit of gear you ever touch makes sense. The button does the job; the ear does the music.

Teaching him is where this whole thing came from. Every time I explained something and watched it land, I'd think: why isn't this written down anywhere in plain English? The manufacturer manuals read like legal documents. The YouTube tutorials skip the bit that actually matters. So I started writing it down for him.

What that turned into

The scribbled explanations became the guides. The "let me show you on the decks" moments became the free interactive tools — the beatmatch trainer, the phrase counter, the Camelot wheel. The Saturday afternoon we spent building him somewhere decent to play became The Bear Booth, which is exactly what it sounds like: the booth we built for Bear, written up so you can build your own.

And here's the bit I'm properly proud of: he took it and ran. Self-taught from there — mixing first, then production, and now he's in Ableton making his own records. Not covers, not edits. His own music. He goes by Chewbear, and it's genuinely good.

That's the whole point, isn't it. You don't teach someone to copy you — you teach them enough that they go past you and don't need you any more.

Why it's free

The lessons, the tools, the trainers — free, no signup, no email harvesting. I'm not building a mailing list, I'm building the thing I wish I'd had. If you want the deep-dive gear manuals, they're a few quid and they pay for the hosting. If you never buy a thing, brilliant — go and practise.

No sponsors telling me what to recommend. No "official" badge from any manufacturer. Just thirty years of doing it, written down honestly, including the bits I got wrong.

Where we're at

I'm still learning too. I'm currently posting a daily diary of getting my own ear back to where it should be — the trainwrecks included — because the polished-expert act helps nobody. If you're at the start of this, you're not behind. You're exactly where everyone starts.

Come and learn something. Then go and make a mess of it, like the rest of us did.