We’re doing our thing here at Dbmlabs and constantly coming up with fresh designs to keep your juices flowing. We just printed our new Sonic Tee, the first of our newest season of shirts. DJ Etronik competed in the recent DMC 2010 West Coast finals sporting the shirt just hours after it left the presses — and he won! He’s heading to NYC for the finals so we’ll keep an eye out to see how he does. We know he just needs to wear some more Dbmlabs tees and it’s a guaranteed win. BAM!

Sonic Tee in its full glory –

Our boy Timofey has a new video out on his famous and popular youtube channel where educates others on remixing and producing electro/house/dance tracks with ableton.  He’s well known in the youtube community and has been featured in publications including Beatportal.   He currently resides in Belgium but is making his mark on the world with his youtube channel.  Here’s a short biography:

“Living in Belgium since 2002, it hasn’t taken long for Timofey to make a name for himself in this flat country. A native of Russia, Timofey, at 27 years old, has become a local favourite in the Belgian clubbing scene, thanks to his personality, his extensive music production training and experience, and his DJ skills. 2006 saw Timofey release his album BREATHING, where the quality is found in the blend of various music styles such as Funk, Trip-hop, Jazz and Ambient. Following its release, he performed several ECHOES shows in close collaboration with the French band Woodish. Currently, Timofey spends a lot of time clubbing. He regularly mixes his electro house set live at Brussels. Apart from mixing, Timofey also remixes for other artists, composes and produces his own tracks, and has collaborated with well-known DJ’s such as Kylian Mash, Dave Lambert, Elektrokid, Goachim Garraud, Bartosz Brenes, Dave McCullen, etc.”

When deadmau5 put out his smashing hit “Ghosts N stuff“, Timofey recreated it with ableton, just showcasing the power of software production tools and the reality that you don’t need tens of thousands of moola to make dope tracks.  Sure, this created quite a controversy at beatportal with people arguing the “newsworthiness” of the track. Regardless, you can’t help but appreciate the precision and attention of this re-creation of a song from one of the biggest producers in the industry. Learn something from him and check out all his goods, not to mention ours.

DJ Geometrix hit up me the other day to tell me that he was featured in one of America’s most popular newspapers, The Washington Post. I’m sure you all have heard of the Washington Post but they delivered an article showcasing his latest DJ school Geometrix is opening up in DC. It’s called Beat Refinery. He’s doing big things over there and leveraging his years of experience to teach others the art and skill of mixing and remixing records.

From Washington Post

“Great DJs are like demigods around here: You depend on them to drop beats you’ve never heard before, and, if they’re really on, to keep you moving long past last call. They provide the soundtrack for almost every night that we’re out.

It’s no wonder that practically everyone in this town with a full iPod and 15 records wants be a DJ, too.

Banking on the idea that the area is teeming with wannabe DJ Shadows, a pair of D.C.’s better-known turntablists are helping to launch a local DJ school modeled after New York’s famed Scratch DJ Academy (which has branches in Miami and L.A.).

The Beat Refinery will be run by Chris Stiles (who, as DJ Stylus Chris, has regular gigs at Modern, Current and the 95 Live party at Steve’s Barroom;) and Brian Sadiarin (better known by Eyebar and Ibiza patrons as DJ Geometrix or, for short, DJ Geo). It will be run out of Bethesda’s Bach 2 Rock music school, and it opens May 3.

Stiles, who was one of the proprietors of DJ Hut, the late-great Dupont Circle go-to-spot for equipment and records, says he sees the school as the next step in his career (being a club DJ at age 50, he says, is not).

“Isn’t this what we’re supposed to be doing? Each one teach one?” he told me when I went to check out Beat Refinery’s turntable-filled classroom last week. He was handpicked by Bach 2 Rock’s chief exec Michael Chung last summer to curate the curriculum; Chung, a former DJ himself, had long wanted to launch a school for turntablists, and the moment seemed ripe.

For now, the school is offering an introductory course, Basic DJ Techniques. (Intermediate classes and a pair of Scratching & Turntablism courses are on the way). The classes — each accommodating 8 to 10 students — will be 90 minutes apiece, once a week for six weeks. Students can sign up for 18-and-older sessions, 18-and-younger sessions or choose one of the mixed classes. Sadiarin told me that every class, beginning on Day 1, will incorporate both traditional techniques and Serato Scratch Live, a “DJ emulation” software that some DJs publicly balk at, but if you look closely, many are using.

Which brings us to the pricetag: $375 for the intro course (private lessons are $76 an hour). It seemed pricey to me, so I checked in with Scratch in New York. The six-week introductory course there is $300, with each class clocking in at 70 minutes. So, it turns out, they’re pretty comparable.

With so many self-taught DJs in town — and I mean everyone from the fuzzy rockers playing vinyl-only nights at Velvet Lounge to the club DJs spinning “Single Ladies” — we want you to weigh in.

D.C. DJs: Do you think would-be DJs need lessons to get in the booth? Do you wish you had something like this when you were cutting your teeth?

– Lavanya Ramanathan”