Jeroen 'Lead' Groenendijk Story  History and Information

Who is Lead

Lead is the artist name and (internet) handle of Jeroen Groenendijk, coming from the Netherlands. The name Lead found its origin in a history of programming on Commodore C64 computers and it was actually @PERCY who founded it in 1988

The Artist

Born in 1973, Lead started DJing around his 19th and in 1992 he purchased his first set of belt driven turntables. With those decks he had to learn the trick as back in the time there was no internet as it is known now. You learned by just trying out things and talking to others that where doing the same thing.

In 1994 Lead did his first performance for a real audience in a real club (Locomotion in Zoetermeer/NL), it went so well that the main resident DJ Deaz D decided Lead could stick around. That was the beginning of a 4 years residency of DJing in Locomotion on the famous 'Hardcore Fridays' parties, held every last Friday of the month.

It took a while but in 1995 Lead finally was able to purchase his first set of Technics turntables, they where second hand (previous owner Midtown Records in Utrecht) and are still his main decks in the 2020's.

Through the mid and late 1990's Lead performed as Hardcore DJ at almost all major location like :

Vechtse Banen Utrecht,
Energie Hal Rotterdam,
Sporthallen Zuid Amsterdam
Hemkade Amsterdam
Triavium Nijmegen to name a few.

But also international like on the Reincarnation Rave - Hannover Germany where scheduled.

Music Choice

When Lead started DJing for real in 1992, there where only 2 types of music around : Radio music and House. The first few records he bought new would later be classified as Oldschool Classics.

Soon after that, the music in general started to develop and quickly after that there was a junction in house music the Netherlands, you either went for the softer 'Mellow' or for the faster 'Gabber', so Hardcore it would be throughout the nineties.

As music styles in general evolved over time so did Lead's playing style, in the 2000's the mainstream Hardcore went very dark so Lead started playing Hardstyle music. This had the impactful kicks of hardcore, but with a more melodic touch.

During this time his job at Pioneer DJ started taking more and more time so at some point he had to decide to DJ less as it was very hard combining the two.

But in the 2020's Lead is still DJing and again his style has changed, nowadays he's playing Techno as he feels modern techno has the feeling of the old hardcore.

Technical

Jeroen Groenendijk's education : Technical degree, Jeroen studied to become an electronics repair guy but his job would be selling professional audio equipment.

Before the end of the nineties Lead modified his own decks and labelled them Technics SL-1210LTD), just to look different. It would be many years later before somebody else would be spotted having Blue LEDs and no 0% pitch lock click.

The technical side of things always interested Jeroen so whenever something is broken or could be improved the toolbox and soldering welt are taken at hand for an investigation. This mentality turned out to be key in his later life in problem solving and product improvements.

Audio Experience

After school in 1996, Jeroen Groenendijk started working full-time for a pro-audio selling company called Heuff Sound & Vision. His job was sales of Pro Audio and DJ Equipment.

After a few months he got the free hand of his boss and he created a dedicated DJ department within this company. From there work and hobby (heavily DJing at that time) worked well together. During the years at Heuff Sound & Vision Jeroen got lots of experience as all equipment sold needed to be tested. It's always nice to check out a (now) classic Electro Voice MT-4 system to it's fullest. But also jobs like mixing bands, choirs, roady work and such needed to be done so he turned out to be an all-rounder.

Pioneer DJ

From 1999 onward Jeroen started working for Pioneer Electronics and was responsible for Sales in the Netherlands. In the early days there was no dedicated DJ division, there was a Pro division that had DJ Equipment, Optical Drives, WORM drives, Plasma displays and DVD burners. Over time the DJ department grew in size as other product lines developed but it took until around 2012 before the DJ department got expansion.

During all these years (until 2022 and still counting) Jeroen introduced all DJ products to the Dutch market. In the beginning there was no internet and the sales guy that visited the dealers brought the news. The relations and knowledge Jeroen had as a performing artist worked very well and the majority of famous Dutch DJs got a training or workshop or demonstration from Jeroen at some point in time of their career.

After 2015 his job got more oriented in the direction of Products Specialist for Europe, but he is still introducing all the latest gear to DJs, but now in a larger area and also via streams and videos.

Most of these videos can be found on Youtube. This has been the place since one of the oldest product-review-videos around might be this one for the CDJ-200 in 2005 (Youtube Link).

Programming

The foundation for DJResource was laid down by Jeroen's first own HTML website, online since 1997, but this was nothing in comparison to what DJResource grew out to be. It was in 2001 when W.i.M and Lead decided to start build and run their own website that would be named DJResource.

All programming of DJResource was done by both Jeroen (Lead) and W.i.M and so did the development of all the modules/sections you can now browse here on DJResource.

A full history about how DJResource developed over time can be found in a dedicated article : DJResource About Us.

Jeroen's knowledge is what turned out to be the foundation of the information where DJResource would be build around. With then already years of experience selling DJ equipment, and using it for almost 10 years in practice as a performing artist, he decided to find a way to share this knowledge. This would become the DJ Topics section, now known as Articles and the Gearbase.

Content

Jeroen is the content writer of all the Articles, he also collected and wrote most of the information (with help of some members) that can now be found in the Gearbase.

The Gearbase was build around user contributed data in the DJ Booths section, a gallery of DJ booths that is now linked with gear in the Gearbase. The gear items shown in the DJ Booths is linked with gear in the Gearbase.

The Gearbase gives an overview of product intention, features and the product specifications. This for future reference as most product information on the websites of the manufacturer gets lost over time.

More info on DJResource about Lead:
Lead's DJ Booths over the years
Lead's Personal Gallery images
Lead's Product Demo videos, all on Youtube DJResource Channel
Lead's Productions (don't dare to shar that stuff from the 90's)
DJResource Articles, all written by Lead
Gearbase, Pioneer DJ full history