Started from the Bottom
Kyle Montoya aka DJ Hijinx, may not strike you as a guy who started from the bottom. But by listening to him talk for five minutes you’ll hear it: the puke, the ice runs, the fabrication that launched a career.
“I was hired as a bar back 25 years ago,” Kyle says, sitting inside Mile High DJ Supply, one of the stores he built from scratch. “That meant I had to clean up the puke, go get ice and deal with wasted customers. It was the most drunken bar in downtown Denver. A total shit show.”
That well known bar was B-52’s in downtown Denver. Kyle worked under a general manager named Sean Kenyon (“Colorado’s Cocktail King” now famous for later owning amazing Denver bar’s like “Williams and Graham” and “American Bonded”), who later took the B52 crew with him to a sports bar in Parker CO, Jocks & Jills. Kyle followed. After a couple years Kyle had moved up to bar management, which put him in charge of hiring DJs.
“They were paying the DJs more than I was making,” he recalls. “I was like, man, they have a way better job than me.”
A Star is Born
Across the street was another spot called Funugyz. So when a DJ slot opened at Funugyz, Kyle walked in and said, “I’m a DJ.”
He had zero skills. No controller. No turntables. Nothing but a love for music and great playlists on an iMac.
“I was literally playing song for song off the computer—QuickTime from one side to another, not mixing anything. It was trash,” he admits. “But I was a good selector. I kept the bar moving.”
The lie worked. They hired him for $250 a night. That was 25 years ago, and Kyle notes dryly: “The payment amount hasn’t changed since in some bars. It’s like, yo, they gotta cough up a little more, now 25 years later!”
For a while, the playlist was enough. But there was this security guard who kept clowning on Kyle. “Still not a real DJ,” he’d say. That prodding became gasoline.
“Sometimes those negative things are all it takes to create something positive,” Kyle says.
He bought his first controller—a Hercules, the first with a built-in sound card. He learned on the job, bringing it to gigs he’d already landed without knowing how to mix. “I got the gig before actually learning how to DJ,” he says. “The motivation for me was the job side of it, but the side of me that loved DJing knew I needed to learn on turntables.”
Going Back to go Forward
So he went back and bought turntables. The wrong ones. The wrong mixer. “I’ve had so many failures along my DJ career that makes it easy to help other people hopefully before it happens to them,” he says.
Those failures led to an idea. For years, Kyle had been frustrated with the big guitar stores that treated DJs like second-class citizens. “You’re in the pro audio section like you’re in the dirty back room. They don’t give a shit—they’re selling guitars. Poorly stocked without one knowledgeable DJ in the store!”
So he bought the domain MileHighDJSupply.com. That was 21 years ago, a full decade before he opened the physical store.
“I saw a need,” he says. “One of my first ideas for the store was emergency equipment delivery. Because I’d forget my Mac power cord all the time, and my gig would be over after two hours.”
Today, MHDS is more than a shop. It’s a practice space, place for learning, a rental house, and gear repair hub. A young DJ named Corbin told Kyle that the guitar store would kick him off the decks for checking his playlist on his flash drive. Kyle built a practice room where DJs can do just that. Another DJ couldn’t afford speakers because of bad credit. Kyle made rentals cheap, $75 for two speakers with stands.
The Community Embraces the Shop
“I don’t think you have a choice to plug into this community,” Kyle says. “I think you’re born into it. I can see a young DJ across the parking lot when they’re walking in. We usually wear black. We move different. We have a coolness about us.”
He pauses. Then smiles. “Ninety-five percent of DJs also have ADHD. We take a bunch of pressure and squeeze out a diamond. It can be a very stressful job. But we love it.”
MHDS has become a hub of culture and camaraderie. A safe haven for people who want to buy the gear, and get a tutorial from someone who actually knows how to use it. Their incredible staff includes extremely knowledgeable DJs and repair technicians as well as General Manager, Christie Z, with over 20+ years of DJ battle organization experience with the world famous brand DMC. Between the legendary DJ Masterclasses and weekly Scratch sessions (coming up on their 500th weekly session in August), Kyle takes pride on watching people grow into the best version of themselves.
When MHDS launched in 2015, it was the first of it’s kind and brought something the area had never seen before. “I think that this was the first of its kind in Colorado…correct me if we’re wrong. And if anybody was out there (before us) I might have thought twice about stepping on local toes.” Now with a store in Arvada as well as one in Boulder Colorado, MHDS supplies the DJ community with several million dollars in DJ equipment every year!
Covering Dreams in Wax
Montoya not only brought this dynamic store to fruition, but with co-creator DMC World DJ Champion Chris Karns (of Pretty Lights) launched the highly successful “Visual Vinyl” Series: the worlds first where you can visually see the audio on a vinyl record. The latest version, Volume 4, dropped this week. Currently it’s going viral on Instagram with a video from Chris Karns that has over 40k likes and 600k views in 24 hours. MHDS is really about innovation and application.
Montoya had a vision and created a new lane, while being a backbone of knowledge from the store to support the people who love music just like him. His dedication and hard work did give him some amazing perks. He got to meet all his DJ heroes, from DJ Jazzy Jeff to GrandWizzard Theodore (inventor of Scratching) amongst many others, just by pursuing his own dream. That’s the real story. Not the gear. Not the store. A bar back with a love for music who found his way onto the decks, learned all the in and outs of the industry, and built a home for everyone else who was born to be a DJ.
Visit the store on 6652 Wadsworth Blvd in Arvada, Co their store in Boulder Colorado at 2888 Bluff Street or call or visit their website to book practice space.
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