First DJ gig with Traktor S2. Any tips?

[SirReal]

Play good tracks, phrase properly and read the crowd.

[pokerdawg]

Don't rely on the length of "music" time you have based on the calculated amount of your playlist. I did that once for one of my first gigs. Like I had a 3 hour gig so I had a playlist of 3 hours worth of music. The truth is that you won't be playing tracks from beginning to end. And if the crowd is not digging the track, you'll want to mix in something else quickly.

I had plenty of music but since I ran out of music from my planned playlist, I had to go into "search for music on the fly" mode.

[toka]

Hey Guys,

An update about my first DJ gig experience. I had the gig for a private fashion magazine party. 2 hours between 18.00-20.00

The show was interrupted by different other pre-planned small programs as catwalks etc so i did not play for straight 2 hours from my own playlist. Had to throw in different music as requested by the event planner for the small programs during the evening.

Was massive nervous 1 hour before. But once i showed up at the place everything disappeared. I set up my laptop and controller and started playing my music.

I practiced 2-3 weeks and learned both manual beat matching but still using the phrase meter and bpm calculator in Traktor. I made sure to beat grid all the tracks correctly and set up proper cue points. One function that helped me a lot is Traktors "beat to cue" countdown which you can set up in the preferences.

Once there i decided to manual beatmatch with phrase meter and BPM and also to focus on phrasing the mix ins and mix out points i set with cue points. Nothing went wrong and the small transitions which did not went smoothless was barely hearable for the audience.

It was a party where people socialized and drinking champagne so no dancing. Was playing lounge house music.