Musical Journey - Need Your Opinion

[tekki]

"Can you play me some Brittney?"


WTF? :eek:

[EYENSEE]

"Can you play me some Brittney?"


WTF? :eek:

HAHAHAHAHA!!

[DvlsAdvct]

I swear to god... I was playing some straight out gabber powernoise packed dance floor, like, one of the few good nights in a while...

some chick walks up to me and says "Can you play any old school Madonna?" I literally was in shock. I couldn't speak. CAUSE THERE'S A FUCKING 80'S NIGHT UPSTAIRS! (phew, glad I got that outta me)

So I said no, and she looked down and said "Well, okay, I guess that doesn't fit. What about Michael Jackson"

I think a little bit of me died that night

[4nT1]

yeah i know what you mean, I have had people ask for Daft Punk when I was playing all out techno / tech-house / minimal... gave them a death stare for sure

tips that I have picked up:

read the crowd
specifically for the energy and emotion - not the track selection itself

know your music
this is invaluable, if you know your tracks inside out you automatically have more confidence when playing them and your next move is much easier to choose cause you know what the current track is doing and how the next one goes

know your tools
(extremely important for a digital dj, anyone who stuffs up on a laptop type setup beat matching wise is frowned upon, but having said that it does prove that you are really beat matching or you just dont know how to beat grid

set progression
I tend to limit myself to 50 or so tracks for a night so I have a rough idea of what I want to play but not a set specifically laid out. having a general direction will help you choose your tracks and let you concentrate on reading the crowd.

other djs
if you are playing after other djs its usually a good idea to know what kind of stuff they playy, either check out some of their sets, or just listen to them before you go on to prepare yourself to continue the energy / flow of the night

set times
not enough people pay attention to the time slot they are on, example: warm up sets are seldom done well, usually people just want to slam things asap, when you should be respectful of the people ahead of you and start to create a mood and atmosphere for the rest of the night.

making use of time
if you are playing for 1.5 hours then try to keep an eye on the clock if you know you want to cover a few genres / emotions / styles / tempos / jouney's etc... if you know you have 30 minutes left then it might be time to start moving in a certain direction

I am far from a great dj but keen as mustard to improve - practice is key...

[ryan catcher]

Yeah thats why humans mix and not computers

yet..

[tekki]

[..]

some chick walks up to me and says "Can you play any old school Madonna?" I literally was in shock. [..]

Ahhhhh that was it... Madonna, I forgot. :P

[DvlsAdvct]

haha yeah, it's still my favorite DJ story :-)

That and when some dumb chick who only got booked cause she was hot showed up with a 40 minute pre-mixxed cd, nothing else, and had an hour set.

That was kind of entertaining

[BentoSan]

haha yeah, it's still my favorite DJ story :-)

That and when some dumb chick who only got booked cause she was hot showed up with a 40 minute pre-mixxed cd, nothing else, and had an hour set.

That was kind of entertaining

Lol ! that is a classic story.
What did she do for the last 20 min ?

[tekki]

Well, this actually looked like some gigs I saw DJ Jean do. (you know the dutch guy who put his nametag on that "The Launch" song)

[Wuz]

Lol ! that is a classic story.
What did she do for the last 20 min ?

showed her tits?

Ontopic:
I pretty much just go to genre specific events/nights and it would be fairly easy to make track selection to an extent. Example: It's trance/prog/hard trance... you have middle time slot.
Tunes Should be harder than the act before you, but softer than the act following you. But at least you know what genre you need to stick to. I'm not a pro but to me what i do with traktor is just trance, I do it for people that dig what i dig and thats it.

Offtopic story:
I did a private birthday function and was requested to do trance, went on at about 12:20 for 2 hours.

Mid set some coke-fiend chick comes up and asks for this "awesome track from 2005"
She comes back 10 minutes later and says "SNEAKY SOUND SYSTEM"

following this she entered the booth and proceeded to grind against me, along with the chick i already had in there... i wish there was a photo of this