FACTORY ZERO

FZ-010 · MUSIC

Groove Guru

A DJ tutor for learning to mix on Pioneer decks.

In development VALIDATION
Visit groove.guru Launched: NOT YET
Status
In development
Pipeline stage
VALIDATION
Sector
MUSIC
Autonomy target
LEVEL 4 · SELF-OPTIMIZING
Built with
3 live · 1 planned

The problem

Learning to DJ alone, nobody tells you why a mix sounded off or where the beat drifted.

What it does

Groove Guru is designed to listen to Pioneer decks and call out key clashes, missed phrases and drifting beats.

How it works

  1. A small app on the booth network reads your CDJs and mixer, and never touches your mix
  2. Mirrors your decks in the browser
  3. Six drills take you from zero to your first mix, free on the site at groove.guru

The booth app will be free and open source (MIT). Pro coaching at launch: $6.99 a month.

Stop guessing what went wrong in your practice sets.

TodayBeing built. The booth app and the coach are not released yet. Needs Pioneer Pro DJ Link gear.

The film

Hear your mix before the room does.

Aims

Autonomous operation
Teaching is the automation target. A small harness on the booth LAN reads what Pioneer Pro DJ Link gear already announces (beat, tempo, sync, master, on-air, crossfader) and a coach speaks one note at a time when the mix drifts: a Camelot clash, a blend that misses the phrase, a deck sliding off the grid. It listens and never sends control, so there is nothing for it to break in a live set.
Intelligence
Deterministic where timing matters, language where it does not. Beat, phrase and key checks are rules over packet data and run locally; a model only turns a finding into a sentence, because speech arrives 300 to 800 milliseconds late and cannot coach a downbeat. The click stays on the laptop.
Growth
Practice-led. Free, open-source harness first, a $6.99 a month Pro tier for hosted history and sessions at launch. Growth is drills completed on real gear, counted from the first booth that is not the author’s.
The technical detail

A DJ tutor for Pioneer Pro DJ Link gear. A harness on a machine plugged into the booth switch listens to the CDJs and mixer on UDP 50000 to 50002, mirrors the decks in a browser, and coaches key, phrase and timing in a calm voice, then gets out of the way. It needs the gear: it is not a browser DJ app. The site at groove.guru has six zero-to-booth drills on a visual beat clock (count the bar, cue on the one, ride the phrase, blend on the Camelot wheel, the first mix). The rest is being built: the harness, one Rust binary under MIT; the spoken coach; Pro hosted in the cloud; and an iPad and iPhone companion over local Wi-Fi or the internet. Independent, and not affiliated with Pioneer DJ.

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