How to approach. *Please read*

Need these?

I like pussy



cats.

Then... why come here asking for help?

You seem to work really hard, and for people who do that, you earned your money and you bought your gear. I'm getting a job this summer and doing the exact same thing.

As for your music collection, don't go bragging about your "10,000 song collection" as a badge of music love, then go telling us about how you "got a hard drive from your brother with all of his music on it." For one, getting your brother's hard drive like that is piracy, just like downloading off of the internet would be. Unless he no longer has access to the songs and he gifted them to you, you've duplicated the file and shared it - i.e. piracy. That is regardless of whether he even purchased them to begin with. The songs are coming from a USB connection instead of an ethernet connection does not get around the fact that you did not purchase or legally obtain them. Furthermore, it's not a measuring contest; more songs in your collection does not necessarily make you a better DJ. In fact, it probably just means you have a lot more terrible/inappropriate-for-DJing songs that you'll (hopefully) never play. The only reason this fact would have been relevant is if you had put significant money into the purchase of these songs; as a sign that you're willing to throw the money down on music, so you're probably actually serious about it.

I thought it when I saw the article and this only made me believe it once more; Your parents are your parents. Aside from being courteous, thoughtful about what you're asking for(including explanations), and respectful you're not going to get specific advice from a community . There are two main factors here:

1) No matter what advice you get, there is no "magic bullet advice" that's going to overwhelm your parents' tendencies or attitudes. DJing is a very expensive hobby and aside from that it's usually a fairly intrusive hobby to those around you as we DJs tend to like to play music loudly.

2) These are your parents. We don't know them from Adam and Eve, so any specific advice we give is at best only going to be semi-effective and at worst it's going to lead you down the wrong path.

Again, the best thing you can do is to be polite and courteous. Explain why you not only want these things/DJing in general, but why they would benefit your development as a person (parents usually care about this type of thing; go figure) and possibly how it could benefit your parents as well. I'm not going to spoonfeed you answers here, but there you go. Also, I'd suggest not talking about allowance money as though you've, "earned it." Managing to live through another week or even doing chores around the house does not earn you money, it gives your parents an excuse to give you money. If you'd like to argue that, get a job in a year and come back and tell us about how you used to "earn" your allowance.

I know you didn't buy the music, but this rant stands: For the record, my parents aren't poor by any means but it still would have taken me literally over ten years worth of allowance and birthdays to get $10,000 together. Even the $1,000 you're talking about spending would have taken about a year and a half. Nevermind how long it would take to have that much extra in my budget for DJ gear. Let me trounce your entitlement a little bit here: It may be money that you chose not to spend, but it's money your parents earned and allowed you to have - do you see now where the term allowance comes from? Allowances are intended to show children the value of money by limiting its supply similar to a weekly paycheck. Teenagers blow money on dumb stuff all the time (I know I did) so parents are rightfully cautious about this.

I'm also going to wager here that if you hadn't been impatient and blown your money on the gear you settled on, your parents might have come around in terms of the gear you wanted; it's entirely likely that they were testing you to see if you had the strength of will to firmly stand behind what you were asking for; instead you buckled and essentially told them, "well, I'd rather have my gear now, so I guess the better gear isn't that big of a deal." Realistically this has probably already sealed your fate. I know it may not have gone down exactly like this, but I strongly suggest you evaluate the similarities between what I just wrote and how it did, in fact, go down.

At age 21 I asked for/received a VCI-100 for my birthday and bought the upgrade from Traktor LE, headphones, and a soundcard myself from my savings. I asked for/received an APC40 for Christmas a year later and got that. I started out slowly and I used my 2.1 computer speakers to DJ for some time. You can spread it out - you don't need the best of everything all at once. Can't afford solid DJ headphones? Use the headphones you have lying around until you can! Can't buy studio monitors right off the bat? Wait a year and a half into DJing to get them like I did. Your "using my room's sound system speakers" is the epitome of a "first world problem." Your room has a sound system already and you're bitching that you can't use studio monitors?

Oh and yes, you are in fact complaining about your gear; or at least about how your parents won't let you spend, "your money." Let's review: You posted a thread asking about how to approach your parents for their approval to spend money on DJing gear. You already have a set of gear that they bought for you, so they've obviously okayed the idea of your DJing to begin with. They've also already bought you gear. The only problem remaining with the situation is that it's not the gear that you wanted.

I'd also argue that resale-wise and value-for-gear wise you'd be a lot better off replacing the appropriate parts in there with an S2 or S4. Buying a VCI-100 now PLUS Traktor PLUS a soundcard just seems silly with the S2 and S4 available considering the price points of the gear involved. And long term, if you need to sell off your S4, you're going to get a hell of a lot more value for it than you will for an Audio 2, a TP2 key, and a VCI. You said you researched before asking for the gear that you did. If you had researched sufficiently, I don't believe you would have ended up choosing a VCI-100 at this stage in the game (unless you found an amazing deal on a used one) with that kind of budget.

Your best step now would be to learn how to use the gear you have. You really aren't going to be actually limited by that gear probably through your first year or so of DJing, anyway. Get a mix together and show your parents what this investment in gear has allowed you to learn; then they'll see the benefit of spending that kind of money instead of just hearing, "oh, little Johnny wants to spend another $1,000." Also, I believe your biggest problem most likely lies in convincing your parents that the better gear is worth the price difference. You need to convince them that the value for money argument is there; that a VCI-100 is much more durable, that the parts feel better in actual use and you'll get better experience and a feel that's far closer to setups costing 2-3 times the money. You need to try to put yourself in your parents' shoes and try to see why they would be convinced that the gear is worth it. Your excitement does not translate to their wanting to pull money of of their wallets, despite how much you've, "earned it."

And no, a thread about helping a child (with a silver spoon firmly implanted in his mouth along with a gigantic sense of entitlement) get better DJ gear is not a "high priority" by any means to anyone here but you.

I apologize for the harsh tone; but you, young sir, are clearly in need of a bit of a dose of humility.

P.S. Honestly, we couldn't care less about your Hardwell-opening friend. Not only is opening for a big act not necessarily impressive (a lot of times openers are just filling a slot with little regard to quality), but also pointing out an isolated incident of a young person performing well does not mean that you will be able to do the same thing. DJing is, as your parents said, "[you] didn't know how hard it is and that it would be a waste of money bla bla bla." The "bla bla bla" here points out how you're just ignoring/dismissing the objections your parents are coming up with. What makes you expect anything but the same response in turn? Also no, I don't believe you know how hard DJing is. You can't know how hard it is until you've done it for a while; until you look at your setup a year in and say "why do I even do this anymore?" but then force yourself to spin and remember why you love the craft. And that's probably why your parents want you to learn on budget gear instead of blowing $1,000 on gear that you're fairly likely to not even want to use in the future. From what I've seen on DJTT and from people I've met, I'd say easily about half of the people who start DJing end up dropping the hobby within a year or two. It looks easy, and people get excited at the beginning with small successes. Once you get over the initial bit of learning though, it gets a lot more involved and requires a lot more research and practice. This craft is not easy, it is not cheap, and it will not be handed to you on a silver platter like your "brother's music collection." It requires hard work, dedication, and patience - convince your parents that you're capable of those things and they may hear your argument with more sympathetic ears.

So you have your gear, and the 10,000 tracks you paid for over the course of two years...sounds like you're all set.

So if you're trying to talk to others about how to approach parents, why don't you use this thread to tell others how you approached yours.

I'm old, but happen to be in a committed relationship with one bank account. I said I needed a turntable to listen to my record collection..."oh look, here's two for the same price as 1!" Then it was, "I have two turntables, I should just get a mixer and mess around." And then..."but it would be really neat to use my mp3 collection, I'm just going to get a cheap controller for the hell of it." Cheap mixer and cheap controller come, two days later...."these kind of suck, I'm going to return them and buy something decent." A month later, "I'm buying a new mac book pro!"