We Delved Into the Weird World of Ellaskins, YouTube's Greatest DJ Instructor

Do you? Do you really? Do you want to spend night after night hunching over a pair of Numark turntables from Cash Converters waiting for that big break? Of course you do. Everyone wants to be a DJ. The thing is, DJing is more difficult than it looks. It takes patience, time, dedication, determination, resilience, equipment, space and money. You cannot will a DJ into being.

Ellaskins, real name Jonathan Lewis, is a man who loves DJing and lives to instill that passion for selecting in others. He's got the childlike enthusiasm of the pre-crash Richard Hammond and shares the dress sense of the man who emerged from the wreckage. He's part David Brent, part David Morales. He's got a webcam and he's not afraid to use it. He's got a gift and he wants to share it. Ellaskins wants to bring out the DJ lurking within you.

His videos fill the viewer with the kind of sickly sadness that seems to ooze out of every pore and orifice at this time of year. He seems like a decent bloke, but the kind of decent bloke that stands at the bar, supping his two pints of lager and trying to ingratiate himself with the bartender all night. She laughs out of politeness and you have a quick chat with him in the bathroom out of mild sympathy. You sit down with a tube of Pringles and watch him put a phone in a cup as an source of amplification and wonder where life went wrong for the both of you. He resides in the exact midpoint between Richard Madeley and Richard Bacon, a kind of sad, priggish figure.

For all that, the man's got a top line in top tips for those of you out there looking to make a living from standing on your own in dark rooms while everyone else in the vicinity gets pissed, takes drugs, dances, and gets off with each other. In the spirit of Christmas, i.e. passing on a gift you've been given to someone else, we thought we'd present you with a gift basket's worth of succulent tips and quotes from the DJ world's answer to Dear Deidre.

"You can mix a track that is 120BPM with one that's 110. Maybe not actually match the beats and do a good transition. But you can mix them."

If nothing else, he's a positive guy. For DJ Ellaskins, the fact that a transition might sound choppy or muddy or just plain shit is no reason to abandon it and do a Peter Hook. You want to mix "Ladies Night" with "Apparently Nothin'" by the Young Disciples like it was an old episode of Top of the Pops 2 without Steve Wright's arch zingers? Watch and learn.

What you've got to do is find a bit in two songs which won't sound a complete trainwreck when you fall into the mixer and accidentally nudge the crossfader too far. You've got to feel the music and just imagine that moment when worlds collide, when you too can awkwardly slam one track into another of a completely different tempo, clear the dancefloor and sit back smugly in the booth applauding yourself for another stellar moment in the history of club culture.

"The idea behind a very good mix is that you can't hear the mix… that's it!"

While he's arguably right – though not everyone enjoys the kind of dull matte finish of a perfectly linear DJ set that steps silently from room to similar sounding room – he's also succumbed to same tautology of Donald Rumsfeld. While that warmonger had his "unknown unknowns", Ellaskins has mixes that sound so seamless you can't tell they're mixes, mixes that sound unintentional through their sheer intent to sound as unintentional as possible while being intentional. But sounding like you're not being intentional. But you are being intentional.

Every DJ worth their salt knows that you've got to start a set as you mean to go on. For some selectors this involves taking things down a notch and cranking out a nice bit of warming ambient analogue bubble bath. Others slam straight into things. Ellaskins prefers a more idiosyncratic approach: looping his own voice saying "welcome to the club" over and over like a Poundland Alvin Lucier. What you see below is ten minutes of horror, the kind of thing that plays out in the mind of insomniacs the world over as morning breaks and birds start to sing.

"I'd like to start this video off by wishing my son Ryan Lewis a happy birthday. He's seventeen today and I'm sorry I can't see you mate, but I love you millions. And I hope you have a nice day. A good day. In fact, I hope you have a friggin' shit hot day. This is a DJ lesson. An intermediate DJ lesson, mainly for people looking to participate in competitions."

Spend long enough in Ellaskins' world of Pioneers and breaks mixing and you're part of the life of a man who reveals more demons as the days go by. Questions begin to cloud the mind of the formerly inquisitive viewer who initially watched with a genuine thirst for knowledge but now only wants to understand further the tortured subject of the tutorials. Who knows what's keeping father and son apart? Do we want to know? Is it his limitless passion for making single take DJ tutorials between those, presumably nation-spanning, mobile DJ slots? What drives a man to make video after video for the intermediate and beginner DJs out there? Why is he sat topless and hatted in his kitchen like a Berkshire Travis Barker?

Perhaps it's better to not dwell on these questions, to accept that even the narcissistic hordes who plaster their own moving image over the cavernous cesspit that is YouTube will never fully reveal themselves, will never be more than shimmering ciphers. Ellaskins is one of them: an oddly entertaining, oddly captivating one, but still a cipher. For thousands of people he's a teacher, an ideologue, a master of his art and craft, and that, I think, is what we should concentrate on. Now forgive me, I'm off to perfect my 80s music mixing.

Josh is on Twitter: @bain3z