Originally Posted by
DJSigma
I'd say there's 3 aspects to it: -
1. Know your music - not just the music you own, but the genre(s) you're into in general.
2. Know the venue/crowd - unless you're putting on your own night and trying to attract certain kinds of people to you, you need to know what the particular bar/club is like, who goes there etc.
3. Knowing what to play and when - part of it is in the preparation, i.e. doing 1 and 2 and making sure you have a good range of music. Also, it depends what time you're DJing, whether you're warming up for someone else etc., but assuming you're doing the whole evening yourself, what I used to do is start off with more chilled out stuff, while saving the big tunes - current big hits, current tracks I think are great that are not so well known, as well as the big classics - until later on. The club I used to DJ at locally was open until 2AM, so I would start cranking things up a bit about 11:30PM once the place starts to fill up and people have had a few drinks to loosen up, but what you don't want to do is drop all of your big tunes too early in the evening.
If you've never played to a crowd before, you have to use a little instinct. If a tune gets you hyped, then it's probably gonna get the crowd hyped too and you'll know the current big tunes (or you should do) so you've got some guaranteed "hits" there to save for prime time. You sometimes have to test the waters until you find a tune that works, then you can build on that and play similar tunes, but you don't want to stick to the same formula all night. For example, I used to do a "proper" hip-hop night (i.e. not just playing current top 40 crap), so I'd also throw in some old school breaks/funk as there's a crossover between that and hip-hop and it would always go down well.
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