Turn It Up: DJ Smokie and the Pursuit of the Heavy Beat

There are DJs who want to make you dance, and then there are DJs who seem slightly disappointed if the bass has not rearranged the furniture.

DJ Smokie belongs firmly in the second category.

A self-described “bass-head”, Smokie has spent the past year carving out a place for himself behind the virtual decks of 3DXChat. His sets favour the harder end of electronic music: hardstyle, hardcore, hard techno and the sort of basslines that are best appreciated through speakers large enough to concern the neighbours.

Yet his relatively recent arrival on the 3DX DJ scene hides a much longer relationship with music. Long before there was a Smokie behind the decks at Babylon or Unity, there was a schoolboy learning his way around an unexpectedly large collection of instruments.

“I had a dream of becoming a DJ from a young age,” he tells the Gazette. During his school years he learned violin, cello, bass, trumpet and percussion, giving him an early grounding in rhythm and musical structure. Later came electronic music classes, where the instruments gave way to BPM, beat matching and music production.

He even experimented with composing music to accompany trailers, learning how a soundtrack could change the emotion of what was happening on screen.

DJing, however, was something he largely taught himself.

Online tutorials provided some useful tips, but Smokie says most of the real learning happened through practice. Hours spent mixing, listening and trying again gradually turned the musical foundation he already had into something he could use behind a controller.

And eventually, that controller found its way into 3DX.

From Bimbo Barbie to Babylon

Smokie began DJing in 3DX in August 2025, with his first performances taking place at the Bimbo Barbie strip club.

It was a modest beginning compared with some of the venues that would follow, but it gave him somewhere to perform rather than simply practise. From there, networking brought him into contact with Gorgi The DJ, and that connection eventually led to what Smokie considers his first major opportunity: Babylon.

For a relatively new DJ, walking into a venue with more than a hundred people in the room was something of a baptism by fire.

“Performing at Babylon marked a significant milestone for me,” he recalls. “It was the very first large-scale venue I had the opportunity to play in.”

The audience had asked for Eurodance, which happened to take Smokie straight back to some of the music that had first captured his attention years earlier. The set went down well, and more opportunities followed.

Since then his name has appeared behind the decks at WetWubz, Unity Castle Beach, Station, Tru Night, Stratus, BBC & White, QOS Rooms and Sluts R Us, among others.

The growing list of venues has also given him a chance to work out what sort of DJ he actually wants to be.

That answer involves bass. Quite a lot of it.

Raised on Eurodance

Smokie traces his musical tastes back to the Eurodance and techno that surrounded his younger years. Tiësto was there, alongside names such as 666, 2 Unlimited, La Bouche, Ace of Base, SNAP!, Culture Beat, Corona and Eiffel 65.

For anyone who remembers the dance charts of the 1990s and early 2000s, it is an eclectic but very recognisable musical education: huge hooks, relentless rhythms and absolutely no embarrassment about making a dance floor move.

From there his tastes gradually became harder.

Headhunterz provided the gateway into hardstyle. Discovering Angerfist pushed him further into hardcore, and the attraction to heavier sounds never really went away.

“I’m a true bass-head at heart,” he says. “Anything that features heavy, pulsating basslines.”

It is something Smokie now deliberately brings into his own sets. 3DX has never suffered from a shortage of electronic music, but he believes there is room to explore beyond the techno and trance that dominate many clubs. Hardstyle, hardcore and hard techno give him his own territory.

There is also an element of musical archaeology involved. Smokie has accumulated a collection mixing new releases with older and less familiar tracks, and he enjoys putting something into a set that the audience may not already have heard dozens of times elsewhere.

For him, keeping a crowd interested isn't simply a matter of playing whatever happens to be popular. It is about finding tracks capable of surprising them while still delivering the physical, bass-heavy experience people have come expecting from him.

“Many of my fans come specifically for the heavy bass beats,” he says. “It’s incredibly rewarding to see them fully immersed in the music I love to share.”

Behind the Decks

For the technically curious, Smokie currently mixes using VirtualDJ and a Numark MixTrack Pro FX controller.

He considers the combination particularly well suited to somebody learning the craft. It is accessible enough for a beginner while still teaching the fundamentals of mixing and live performance, and it is the setup he recommends to people who want to find out whether DJing is for them without immediately disappearing down the rabbit hole of increasingly elaborate equipment.

Smokie, however, is already eyeing the next step.

His planned upgrade is a Pioneer DJ DDJ-FLX10, a four-deck controller that would give him considerably more room to experiment, together with a move from VirtualDJ to Serato.

The equipment is changing because his ambitions are changing too.

What started inside 3DX is no longer confined to it. Over the past few months, Smokie has been practising with a real-world performance in mind. The virtual clubs have effectively become part classroom and part proving ground: somewhere to develop sets, learn how audiences react and gain the confidence that only comes from performing in front of other people.

That crossover between virtual and physical is perhaps one of the more interesting parts of his story. It is easy to dismiss standing behind a set of virtual decks as simply roleplay, but the person controlling the music is still making real decisions. Tracks have to be selected. Transitions have to work. A crowd has to be read. When something falls flat, the DJ has to recover.

The room may be made of polygons, but the practice isn't.

More Than Something to Dance To

Behind all the talk of controllers, venues and subwoofers, however, Smokie has a more personal reason for caring about music. He sees it as a language people can use when ordinary conversation fails them.

“Music has a profound ability to convey emotions and insights about an individual, often without the need for spoken words,” he says. “Many people, including myself, find solace in using music as a medium to express their feelings.”

It has also been a social force throughout his life. Shared tastes lead to conversations; conversations turn into friendships. His experience in 3DX is, in many ways, another version of something music had already been doing for him long before he arrived there.

The clubs and names may be virtual, but the people he has met through them are not. His own closing words to the Gazette perhaps say it better than we could:

"Life is like a long night behind the turntables—you won’t always know what track is coming next, and sometimes the beat will drop when you least expect it. But never let a bad moment make you walk away from your purpose."

For Smokie, the answer is to keep working when nobody is watching, remain humble when people finally are, and resist changing yourself merely to fit somebody else's rhythm.

"Your time will come. Keep pushing, keep believing, and when your moment finally arrives, turn your dreams all the way up and let the whole world hear what you came to do."

Considering his preferred volume levels, we suspect the world will hear him coming.

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