“I’m So Dallas,” a track from hip-hop duo A.Dd+ ‘s recent album When Pigs Fly, sets forth their Big D credentials with snippets of some of the city’s biggest rap anthems. They don’t come any more Dallas than the producer of the track — and A.Dd+’s official DJ — DJ Sober. The co-founder of the game-changing and genre-defying crew The Party, Sober can be found holding down the turntables everywhere in Dallas from Cowboys and Mavericks games to hometown hero Erykah Badu’s birthday party. Between A.Dd+’s rising profile on the national hip-hop scene and Sober’s expanding rep as a party DJ and graphic designer (he hand designs his flyers and event posters, and runs a T-shirt company called Decade Clothing) expect to see him soon in a city near you, too.

Like many DJs, Sober took time to develop his talents in his basement and at house parties before stepping out into clubs. “I practiced for years and honed the craft before I ever deejayed out,” he says. “It was never, ‘I want to be a DJ’ career-wise or to get attention. I just liked vinyl and collecting records and being around it.” While working a job overseeing Dallas area promotions for Red Bull in the mid 2000s, he began organizing special events and deejaying more frequently on the side. In 2006, he combined his mixing and marketing expertise to develop The Party with fellow DJs Select and Nature. The Party bridged the Big D’s musical and cultural gaps while bringing acts from Smif N Wessun to Justice to Blaq Starr to the city. “We kind of took over Dallas pretty quick,” Sober says. “Before, it was just hip-hop events or house, dance-related stuff. Nobody was really playing multiple genres or doing anything different. We started introducing new music like Baltimore club and different things that people weren’t messing with here.”

The members of The Party went their separate ways in 2009, but Sober is more active in Texas’ nightlife scene than ever, running the weekly Big Bang party at Dallas’ Beauty Bar, and deejaying his Top Notch events with DJs Dayta and El Roy Boogie every last Saturday of the month in Houston. Sober also runs a traveling event, Dope on Plastic, in which he only spins vinyl.

Over the last several years, Sober has opened Dallas shows for bands such as the Flaming Lips and Cut Copy, deejayed alongside ?uestlove and Pete Rock and backed up Devin the Dude onstage. Through his association with New York City’s Scratch Academy, he also teaches youth deejaying clinics, including one memorable one alongside hip-hop pioneer Grand Wizzard Theodore at Steve Harvey’s house. The most interesting of his many gigs might be his one at the Absolut Club inside Cowboys Stadium, the world’s largest domed stadium. “It gets pretty jumping in there,” Sober says. “My whole thing is, I’m a DJ and I’m gonna rock the party. [Even] if the other team wins, all the Cowboys fans are gonna go home and the other fans are gonna stay and party. When New Orleans won, I played all this New Orleans bounce and it was insane. There were Saints fans with umbrellas and crazy outfits and it turned into a dance party.”

In 2010, Sober connected with Slim Gravy and Paris Pershun of A.Dd+ through their producer Picnic Tyme, and became their official DJ. He also provided the cuts on “I’m So Dallas,” a DJ track made from snippets of classic Dallas rap anthems, from their recent LP, When Pigs Fly. Having a consummate DJ like Sober in their corner has helped A.Dd+ elevate their stage show. With A.Dd+, he says, “it felt so natural once we got in the studio. We had a bunch of ideas we were bouncing ideas off of each other, and it was exactly how I thought it should be.”