Doing my first gig on saturday

[Woah]

holland ^^

[Vandalus]

Since it's relevant - I had my first "gig" in over a decade this last weekend. My first gig ever was a small rave in the late 90's - had 2 rather large full range monitors to my left and right - I played DnB for an hour, and all was good. This party I played over the weekend I had two rather small monitors facing me, a sub cabinet right below me, and another (larger) sub cabinet across the room from me. An interesting thing occurred with this setup that I have never had to deal with before while at home (or the aforementioned rave) - a crazy sound delay / reflection.

I noticed it just prior to mixing my first record in - everything was sounding great, cue mix was beatmatched to the master and all was well. Before I brought in the cued track, just to check as a habit of mine, I cued in the master mix into my headphones on top of the cued track and bam - its a trainwreak in my ear. I'm like - WTF, this is crazy. I un-cued the master mix, and it was perfect. Despite the nerves, I determined that what I was hearing in my ears was early by a fraction of a second over what I was hearing out of the main mix, so I phrase shifted behind what I would normally do - checked back with full headphones on to ensure that the tracks were matched accordingly and then began to do the mix live. Luckily it all sounded great out of the mains, and I went on with my 2+ hour set with this adjustment in place, but it made for an interesting night because I had to train my headphone ears to get used to hearing a beat slightly behind what I was hearing out of the mains - like they were out of phrase since what was being sent to the master had this delay. Basically - I would get it beatmatched in terms of tempo and then do the last minute adjustment seemingly out of phase, and continued as if all was perfect (which it was in the end despite sounding weird as hell in the headphones). It was actually interesting to cue the master mix in the headphones and hear how much of a delay there was. It was crazy (for me at least).

Has anyone else dealt with this? If so - was my workaround the correct solution, or is there something else experienced DJ's do to fix this?

To the best of my senses, the smallish monitors facing me were not able to overpower the echo being produced from the mains and the large subs sitting across the room from me. Does this sound accurate? I almost switched over to split cue'ing the rest of the night, but I have not done that more than maybe 3 minutes on a whim just to try it, so I wasn't about to do it live in front of a bunch of people to potentially disastrous effects.