There’s a fairly standard way of measuring a DJ’s career. Count the clubs, festivals, releases, and followers. It’s tidy, quantifiable, and it misses the number that matters most to DJ Toons: the number of people who started because of him. That number currently sits above 120. Since founding the Boom Shankar Projekt (BSP) DJ Academy in 2007, Toons has trained more than 120 students to professional performance standard, with alumni now working across India, the UK, the USA, the UAE, Germany, Thailand and New Zealand. It’s an unusual lens for a DJ career, and possibly a more interesting one, because Toons isn’t only teaching people how to operate a controller. He’s circling a harder question: what does someone actually need in order to become a DJ?
A Practical Problem, Not a Grand Plan
BSP didn’t start as a mission statement. It started because Toons’ own career was still developing when he began teaching, and the two grew up together. Teaching, in other words, emerged out of performing, not alongside it as a separate ambition. What he found early on was that the mechanical side of DJing, the buttons, the software, the workflow, was the easy part to teach. The harder part was judgement. When should a track be mixed in? Why does one transition land and another feel forced? When does a crowd want the familiar, and when is it ready to be pushed somewhere else? And underneath all of that, the hardest question of all: what makes a DJ sound like themselves, rather than like everyone else who learned the same software?
“Information is easy to find now,” Toons says. “Judgement is much harder to teach.” It’s a useful distinction for a moment in music education where tutorials can teach a technical process in minutes. The information problem has largely solved itself. The identity problem hasn’t, and it’s the one Toons has spent 17 years trying to teach around.
A School That Refuses to Produce Copies
There’s a philosophy sitting underneath BSP that’s worth pulling out on its own, because it runs against the instinct most mentors have. Toons doesn’t want his students to sound like him. He considers that an outcome close to failure.
“If I’ve taught someone well, they should eventually become more themselves, not more like me,” he says. It’s a simple idea to state and a genuinely difficult one to practise, because it means measuring success by distance from the teacher rather than resemblance to them. Good mentorship, on this account, isn’t in the business of producing replicas. It’s in the business of producing independence. That reframes what BSP’s alumni number actually means. A headcount of 120-plus students is one thing. What those students went on to do afterward is the more useful question, and the fact that they’re now scattered across seven countries suggests something beyond a single local training programme. Geography alone doesn’t prove teaching quality. But it does give a tangible shape to whether something that began as a local initiative has developed a longer professional life of its own.
Teaching and Performing Share More Than You’d Think
There’s an interesting irony sitting at the centre of Toons’ dual role. A performer spends a set reading a crowd. A teacher spends a lesson reading a student. On paper those look like different skills. In practice, they overlap more than expected: both require close observation, both require timing, both require knowing precisely when to step in and when to let someone find their own way through a problem.
Toons believes teaching has quietly reshaped his own performing. When a student asks why he pulled back a track, or held a transition longer than expected, or shifted the energy of a set at a particular moment, he’s forced to turn instinct into language. And once instinct has been put into words, it becomes something that can be examined, questioned, refined. Teaching, in that sense, functions as a form of ongoing self-analysis, one he didn’t necessarily set out to build for himself.
Two Genres, Two Different Lessons
Toons’ own musical identity complicates the usual DJ-teacher narrative in a useful way. His work sits primarily across Bollywood and Psy-Trance, two genres that ask completely different things of an audience. Bollywood leans on recognition, melody, immediate emotional response. Psy-Trance is more immersive, built through repetition, rhythm and a slow accumulation of atmosphere rather than a quick payoff. Both, he says, have shaped how he teaches. Bollywood taught him the importance of audience connection, of reading a room in real time. Psy-Trance gave him a deeper technical understanding of rhythm, repetition and the architecture of energy over a longer arc. The point was never to train students to imitate either genre. It was to give them enough grounding in both approaches to decide, on their own terms, what kind of DJ they actually want to become.
Then Came the Blindfold
In 2018, Toons performed a blindfolded DJ set at Pragna Mandir School in Gujarat, for more than 100 visually impaired students. The set ran 1 hour, 16 minutes and 57 seconds, and was certified by the World Book of Records (UK) and the Incredible Book of Records (India). Viewed on its own, it reads as a performance challenge, a technical feat, a strange and impressive record. Viewed through the lens of his teaching career, it becomes something more significant. The set forced Toons to reconsider what role sight actually plays in DJing. And if he could perform without relying on visual information at all, what did that imply about how DJing could be taught to people who never had access to it in the first place? The question stayed with him for years.
From “Can I Do It?” to “Can Someone Else Learn It?”
In March 2026, Toons returned to Pragna Mandir School. This time, the goal wasn’t demonstration, it was instruction. Working with more than 100 visually impaired students, he built the session around an audio-first methodology, tactile equipment mapping and peer learning.
The distance between the two visits is subtle but important. The 2018 performance asked one question: can a DJ work without sight? The 2026 workshop asked a different one: can DJing be taught without assuming sight in the first place? That second question moves the conversation away from individual achievement and toward access, and it fits naturally into the philosophy that’s underpinned BSP from day one, that DJing is a discipline that can be learned, by more people, in more ways, than the industry’s current teaching model tends to assume.
Have We Confused the Tools With the Skill?
Modern DJing is an extraordinarily visual discipline: waveforms, screens, beat grids, track displays, software interfaces built around constant visual feedback. Those tools are genuinely useful. But Toons’ accessibility work raises an uncomfortable question underneath all of it: have we confused the tools used to teach DJing with the actual skills required to DJ? At its core, the discipline still runs on listening, timing, rhythm, musical judgement and the ability to communicate with a room. The equipment facilitates those things. It doesn’t create them. That distinction matters for visually impaired students specifically, but it may matter for how DJ education gets designed more broadly, screens included.
So Is Teaching Part of an Artist’s Legacy?
The obvious answer is yes. Toons won’t quite say it. “I’d be very careful about calling it a legacy myself,” he says, and the restraint is telling. More than 120 students is evidence of scale. Seventeen-plus years is evidence of longevity. An international alumni base is evidence of reach. None of those facts, individually, proves that BSP has fundamentally reshaped the DJ landscape.
The more careful claim is narrower: Toons has sustained an educational practice alongside his own performing career for close to two decades, and that practice has produced a genuine international network of former students. Whether that adds up to a lasting artistic legacy is something only time, and the careers of those students, will actually decide.
Maybe Legacy Isn’t the Right Word
There’s something revealing in Toons’ reluctance to reach for that word. He’s still performing, still producing, still teaching, still experimenting. His UK career has been developing since 2022. His musical work continues across both Bollywood and Psy-Trance. His educational work is now expanding into accessibility. Nothing about the picture looks finished.
Maybe the better word isn’t legacy. Maybe it’s continuity. A performance lasts a few hours. A record lasts on paper. A track lasts as long as someone keeps listening to it. But teaching travels through another person entirely, one student teaches another, one technique gets adapted and reshaped, one musical idea becomes someone else’s starting point, and eventually the original teacher may no longer be visible anywhere in the chain. That, perhaps, is the more interesting possibility sitting inside this story.
The Measure of a Teacher Is What Happens When They Leave the Room
Toons doesn’t want 120 students who sound like him. He wants 120 students who became more themselves. It’s a deceptively ambitious definition of what teaching is for, and it reframes how his own career should be read. His professional story isn’t only about the audiences standing in front of his booth. It’s also about the people who eventually go on to stand behind their own.
Which leaves one question worth sitting with: if an artist’s influence can keep travelling through the people they helped create, where exactly does the performance end? For DJ Toons, the honest answer might be that it doesn’t. It just moves to another booth.
Follow on Instagram: @djtoonsofficial @bspdjs
Website: www.djtoons.com
