Randy Valdez

In his own words

The short version.

Randy was fifteen, teaching himself to sound like the DJs on the radio, when a friend from middle school asked him to play her quinceañera. His dad heard about the party, drove him to Brook Mays Music, and bought him his first sound system and set of lights. Twenty-six years later he hasn't put them down.

He'd been a drummer in high school before any of that, which turns out to matter more than it sounds — the timing of a handoff between two genres is a rhythm problem, and he hears it before he thinks about it. Since then he's pushed himself into rooms he wasn't comfortable in on purpose, learning the music instead of avoiding it. He grew up in a Spanish-speaking home in Irving, lives in Fort Worth now, and has taken weddings to Colorado, Miami, Arkansas, Oklahoma and all over Texas.

Ask him for a night that went perfectly and he'll tell you about the bride in Houston who wanted tambourines instead of glow sticks. He handed them out to the whole room, opened with “Tambourine,” then started cutting the music between songs so four hundred people could shake on the beat — and dropped it back in on them, over and over, for five straight songs. It ended with the entire room spinning around the floor to cumbias, still shaking.

“I'm not trying to make it about me. I want the guests hyping up the couple right along with me.”

Hear it, see it

What Randy
actually sounds like.

• Regional Mexican
• Cumbia
• Reggaetón
• Top 40
• Hip-Hop
• Open format
• Throwbacks
• EDM
• Tropical

What his best nights look like

A room that's already happy — hugs, smiles, drinks poured during cocktail hour instead of an hour late, and a floor plan that puts the DJ booth near the dance floor instead of tucked in a corner. Get those right and he'll do the rest.