Photo by Justin Gladney/The Collegian
By Justin Gladney/reporter
NE Campus student Jake Hensarling, aka DJ Tic Tac, loves music and loves helping other people love music.
“I like the feeling of knowing that you can control a crowd, like you can go through all their emotions they let out on the dance floor,” he said. “You can steer them one way and make them happy, then chill them out, then let them go at it hard. When you look out over a crowd and they’re digging your stuff, you can’t beat that.”
Hensarling has been a DJ for 10 years and, for the last three, has been focusing his skills into a career.
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“You need to do what you’re passionate about because if you do your passion, you’ll never work a day in your life,” he said.
Hensarling also plays guitar and uses types of music such as jazz, hip-hop, classical and acoustic in the music he creates instead of focusing only on electronic music.
“I love every kind of music. I love all sound,” he said. “When I DJ, how I feel that day is how I leave my mark. I put a piece of me into it every time.”
Hensarling described DJ-ing and all music as tools to express oneself. DJ-ing specifically, he said, can give other artists leeway to get inspired and build their own musical talent.
Hensarling has played at Dallas clubs such as Insomnia, Lizard Lounge, Club Zouks, Club Afterlife, Zoobar and Club Relapse. He started DJ-ing after getting into raves.
“To me, it was like a neo-hippie counterculture,” he said. “Everything was peaceful and loving.”
He attends NE Campus for radio and television classes. He said his time at TCC has helped him learn technical aspects of mixing equipment, reading music and promoting events.
“I’ve learned so much more here in the last semester and a half than I have in my whole life,” he said “It’s opened it up [DJ skills] and given it an avenue to promote myself.”
He wants to do sound mixing for motion pictures with hopes of making a soundtrack for a major film and eventually having his own studio while continuing with DJ performances. He has been accepted to Full Sail University in Florida and will enroll next spring to seek a bachelor of music degree.
Hensarling will perform his first major event at an American Cancer Society Rally For Life May 5 at Trinity High School.
His most memorable event on NE Campus, he said, was when another student came up to him after he finished demonstrating his skills outside the Student Center.
“‘I just wanted to say thank you. I was having a really bad day, and you made me smile,’” Hensarling quoted the student as having told him.
“To me that was the greatest feeling on the planet [knowing that] I brought a little bit of sunshine into someone’s life,” he said.
