Tips for Demo Mixes?

[TheSpiral]

Hello,

I've done some work putting together some Demo mixes so that I have them available to give out or to point people to online. This is meant as a promotional tool so that possible clients can get an idea of the style I play and my mixing abilities.

My question is, what should a demo sound like? What should the length be?
I'm thinking, demos should probably be 3 to 5 minutes with as many different mixes put in as you can while still being tasteful?

[lethal_pizzle]

My opinion is that your demo mixes should reflect your actual mixing style. There's no point in frenetic mixes if you don't actually mix like this.

I'd recommend you do 3x killer 25 minute mixes in the various styles you play. This will then fit on a single CD.

[DJ ATX]

Length should be between 30-60mins. Most club owners and promoters I know will listen to CD, when and if they ever do, while in their car or tooling around doing "office stuff". Rarely do they schedule a time to listen to them. Its typically a spur of the moment thing.

You are not battling, so a 3-5min megamix is not really ideal. Most club owners and promoters will think its cool, but it will not give them an idea on how you can handle a night.

If you are an open format DJ, you should show how smoothly you can transition for slow to fast beat, tempo and/or BPM. Personally if I am making an open format mix, I would tend to try and follow what I would do in a club but fit it in a 45min set. Meaning I start off with a warm up type tempo then pick it up in the middle with some bangers, then taper off the tempo toward the end (notice I made no mention of BPM)

If your target is the electro crowd, I would go up tempo and crescendo in the middle and ease up in the end.

That's my opinion, anyways. To each his own.