DJ Gear Is the New Guitar (And That Means More Than You Think)
From the underground to a universal language.
by Philipp 'DJ Kitsune' Senkpiel
There was a time when the electric guitar wasn’t considered a real instrument. Too loud. Too raw. Too easy to pick up and too hard to tame. Classical musicians scoffed at it. Schools ignored it. But the guitar didn’t need approval. It had culture. Emotion. Rebellion. It gave entire generations a way to speak without asking for permission. Does that sound familiar? DJing followed the same arc. And now, just like the guitar before it, DJing has gone from subculture to stage, from underground to hobby, from “not real music” to a universal language. And if you think that it sounds like a cheap punch line to say DJing is the new guitar playing, here’s why I’m convinced that this means more than you think.
A Shared Origin Story: Scrappy, Loud, Misunderstood
The electric guitar was once a tool for those without orchestras. Blues players and jazz kids bent its strings and overloaded its amps not for theory, but for feel. They used what they had — hand-me-down axes, garage amps, broken cables — and made the best out of it for the purposes they had in mind. DJs did the same, whether they were using coins to increase the weight on the needle to make sure the record didn’t skip all the way to Grandmaster Flash constructing the very first split headphone signal on a mixer to preview the song he was going to play next.
No one called it an “instrument” when Kool Herc looped breakbeats using two copies of the same record in the Bronx of the late ’70s. Or when Flash pushed the limits of timing and control. Or when Grand Wizzard Theodore stopped the vinyl record with his hand only to discover the magic sound that comes from pushing the wax back and forth. The founding fathers of turntablism weren’t composing in the traditional sense, but they were inventing something entirely new. A way of playing the past into the present. Much like early guitarists, these early DJs weren’t seen as musicians. They were seen as “playing other people’s music.” Which is exactly what people said about guitarists who only knew power chords and blues licks. But here’s the twist: History doesn’t honor the gatekeepers. It celebrates the people who changed the rules.
The Rise of the Virtuoso: Turntables as Instrument
The guitar had Hendrix and Clapton, players who transcended the tool and elevated it into art. DJing had the turntablists. In the ’90s and early 2000s, a global movement led by crews like Invisibl Skratch Piklz, the X-Ecutioners, Beat Junkies, and the Allies turned the turntable into a legitimate instrument. They weren’t just mixing; they were cutting, scratching, juggling, battling. They developed complex techniques, deep vocabularies, notation methods and performance formats that required precision, feel and endless hours of practice. This was the DJ’s answer to guitar solos. To shredding. To pushing a tool to its expressive edge. And just like in the guitar world, the debates about purity and realness were right around the corner. Real vinyl vs digital DJing. Turntables vs CDJs vs controllers. But those debates missed the point: an instrument isn’t defined by what it’s made of. It’s defined by what it makes possible.
The Age of Software and the Sound of the World
And just as the guitar evolved through pedals, amps and digital effects, DJing underwent its own technological revolution. CDJs. Traktor. USBs. Serato. rekordbox. Phase. Stems. Controllers. iPads. Sound became infinitely tweakable and DJing became more and more accessible. At first, it raised eyebrows. You didn’t need to beatmatch by ear anymore? A sync button? Where was the skill? But evolution rarely waits for permission. And just like teenagers once picked up cheap guitars and learned “Smoke on the Water,” today’s aspiring DJs can pick up a $300 controller, download rekordbox or Serato, and recreate DJ Jazzy Jeff’s “Peter Piper” routine or Four Color Zack’s infamous tone plays. Some of those kids go on to produce tracks. Some become club-rocking superstars. Some just do it for love. That’s what happens when an instrument matures: it becomes part of everyday life.
But Let’s Be Honest: DJing Isn’t the Guitar
And of course there are differences too, rather foundational ones. A guitar is a compositional instrument. You can write a song from scratch, shape harmony, create melody, build something unique from silence. Most DJing doesn’t work that way. It’s not about writing from nothing. It’s about reframing what already exists, digging, selecting, blending, transitioning. It’s about context, timing and mood. It’s more like collage than canvas. And that’s okay. Because in a world drowning in content, the ability to curate meaningfully might have become just as rare as the ability to write it. And to expect to be creating something entirely new just because the canvas was blank when you started might not be completely honest either.
No Protest Songs, But Something Else
Another thing the guitar had, especially in the ’60s and ’70s, was its alignment with politics. It soundtracked resistance. Vietnam protests. Civil rights marches. Punk revolutions. The guitar gave voice to generations who felt unheard and took it around the world when the internet didn’t exist. The protest lineage of DJing might be more subtle, but no less powerful, even if you remove DJing as the backbone of hip-hop, one of the most political genres to this day. DJing wasn’t built in coffeehouses or protest circles. It came up through dance floors and block parties. But the people in attendance were just as politically engaged as the generations before. And in 2025, the radical act might not be writing the perfect protest lyric — it might be a DJ in Johannesburg mixing amapiano into techno. Or a queer DJ in Istanbul mixing baile funk edits. Or a teenage girl in Japan cutting up funk 45s on TikTok that are twice as old as she is. When people from different sides of the world use the same tools to express totally different musical identities, and find common ground through sound, that’s not just music. That’s cultural negotiation. That’s soft resistance. That’s a kind of global intimacy we’ve never had before.
The New Campfire
The guitar gave us the garage band. The campfire sing-along. The moment where someone picks up six strings and brings a room together. We are currently witnessing DJing becoming just that. The portable, wireless controller connected to a bluetooth speaker is the new acoustic. The aux is the new amp. The curated vibe is the new sing-along song. You don’t need to be in a club or at a festival. You can DJ for a few friends in your room, at a house party, in a parking lot. It’s not about scale, it’s about community. The same way we once passed around guitars, we now pass the aux. The same way someone once said “play that song you wrote,” they now say, “bring that record back.”
What Happens When Everyone Can Play?
I’m not saying DJing is better than guitar playing. I’m saying it has become what the guitar already is: A tool for identity and musical expression. A pathway to community. The guitar was the instrument of the 20th century. It helped define individuality in an analog age. The DJ deck is the instrument of the 21st. It helps define collective expression in a digital, globalized world. So maybe the question isn’t, “Is DJing the new guitar playing?” Maybe it’s, “What kind of world are we building now that everyone can play something?”
