Salt Lake City is quickly becoming a hub for electronic dance music, with plenty of music collectives and venues booking up-and-coming talent. If you want to learn about DJing and music production, Salt Lake City DJ & Production School (SLDP) is the place to go.

The director of SLDP, Derek Beck, first opened the school in 2013 at a home studio in the Avenues. As a lifelong lover and learner of music, Beck had already been working in various areas of the music industry for a decade. The list of people asking Beck for music production, mixing, mastering and DJ advice became so long that he decided to start a school himself.

Now located at 430 E. South Temple, SLDP offers several courses from Music Production with the Ableton Live audio workstation (MPAL); Advanced Production, Mixing and Mastering (APMM); as well as DJing and Business of Music (BOM). This year, two new courses are rolling out. One (SONO) is an end-all, be-all course for music production, songwriting, sound design, mixing and mastering, and is being taught upon request in one-on-one settings. The other is Advanced DJing, which gives students the drills they need to master rhythm, preparation, understanding genres and blending between them to perfect the performance aspect of DJing that can set them apart.

There are several rooms in the school, each with its own title. There's the Wasatch (classroom) and The Tank (recording studio), which connects to the King's Peak (production) room. In King's Peak, there's a production, mix and master space built around a UA Apollo system with Barefoot Footprint01s as the main monitors.

"Being able to plug in and listen to your favorite music in a treated space will open your eyes and ears to what you want your music to sound like," Beck explained. With several diffusion boards, the room is built so that no sound goes out or in. In the Alta (DJ) room, there are CDJ 3000s, 2000s, a DJM A9, various 2-channel mixers, vinyl turntables and a variety of MIDI and FX controllers.

Although 12 years have gone by, Beck says that the goals and mission have remained the same: "to teach more DJs and producers, and build the next generation of successful artists." To achieve this, the school has focused on balance.

Being a student at SLDP requires a significant monetary investment. "Not so much that you're going six figures into debt, forcing yourself into a hole that takes decades to climb out of," Beck said. The time commitment is also flexible. "If it required students to quit their jobs, and have no idea how they were going to eat, pay rent and car payments, that's too much pressure to be able to focus on creative endeavors," he added.

The school boasts alumni such as dubstep/riddim producer Mile32, who is playing all over the country, including big festivals and has notable releases on labels like Space Yacht, Bypass and Indefinite Recordings. Trance producer Bixx is also playing across the US and internationally, while approaching 100k monthly listeners on Spotify. One of the current teachers, Allen Salazar (one-half of the DJ duo ZANDZ), was also a past student.

"ZANDZ is our favorite group here locally, and has a special place at SLDP as Allen was one of the very first students in the new studio, nearly a decade ago," Beck said. "The story comes full circle, and now he's helping teach the next great generation of producers here now."

Other past teachers include Gaszia (formerly half of X&G) who has collaborated with A-list producers like Flosstradamus and Skrillex, local DJ and producer Nate Lowpass and Ryan Chisolm (DJ Bangarang and talent buyer for LNE Presents). Ian Hiscock (artist relations manager, public relations manager and talent buyer for V2 Presents) has also come into the studio to provide knowledge to our students and the community. Will Flakes, a concert pianist, has also taught songwriting and music theory at SLDP.

Beck highly encourages studio tours, reiterating, "If you can see what is possible, you can start to build a long-term vision of what you want to do with music, what you want to become. Then it's up to you to make the changes you need to make that goal a reality—no one else is going to do that for you, and there are no shortcuts."

For those interested in signing up, check out Instagram @sldp__ and SLDP.com for course information and to complete a student application.