Read interviews with DJs or club promoters lately and a lot of people will tell you that “people are bored of hearing one sound all night”. And I agree: the general mood in clubland right now does seem to be in favour of more musical variety. Which I think is great: I’ve always bought all sorts of music, and as a DJ, I’ve been playing house and breaks for years. And if you too want to get into DJing with a range of styles of music, then I’ve got one word for you: planning.

Mixing house and breaks (for instance) is a much harder thing to do than the straight 4/4 mixing that 99 per cent of DJs do, or even straight breaks mixing. With house, it’s quite easy to just turn up with a box of records and throw them down, and the spontaneity will go in your favour. But once you start to mix up breaks and 4/4, it gets a bit more tricky. I tend to plan my sets in sections – not every single record in order, but I’ll know roughly that I’m going to play an hour of house, say, then move up into breaks (or vice versa), and I’ll know which records I’ll use to link the two. There’ll be a few set pieces in there to hop from one genre to another. For instance, a lot of Timo Maas’s breaks tracks are basically a 4/4 rhythm, but with one kick taken out, and they’re really easy to mix with, so I might use one of them as a bridging track.

Another thing to remember is that with 4/4 mixing, you can run mixes for up to two or three minutes at a time, but that tends not to work as well with breaks. The style of mixing’s different: with breaks mixing you tend to use the crossfader more instead of the faders, and it’s a much faster mix than you’d get from some like Sasha or Tenaglia who does long blends. Keep in mind that it’s a different style of DJing – it’s not as important to have long smooth mixes.