1st Gig, D&B, a little advice needed please

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

1st Gig, D&B, a little advice needed please

Hi All,
I’ve gotten lucky and landed an opening set at with my local dnb promoter at the only decent dnb night in town.

Ive gotten myself all the gear I need and, after much ado with windows-bloody-XP, now have a proper gigging laptop too.

As its my first gig, and an opening set at a small bar, im gonna stick with a premade setlist. I think its the best idea as no-one there is gonna care about the mixing at that time apart from the promoter & fellow DJ’s. I want to impress so I get repeat bookings.

Im playing with a bunch of people that probably dont know what traktor is or think its the devil. they mostly play on TT’s/CDJ’s and generally dont phrasematch, they need educating in midi. So im planning on getting some perfect phrasematching, 3 deck acapella action going down with some cue juggling and a regulated dose of fader FX mode :wink:.

Im on at 10 till 10:45 and ive been told to play a chilled/liquid set. Ive got some wicked tunes that fit the bill perfectly, but ive also got a few im not so sure on.
So, do you think the following songs would be suitable to play around 10:30 in a small bar/club as a warmup to some heavier dnb?

High Contrast - If we ever
Camo & krooked - Verve
Nu:tone - Balaclava in my system
sonic - All I wanna do
Netsky - Iron Heart

2

Congrats on getting your first gig.
Check out Bone Structure by Rockwell & Zero Tolerance, huge chilled out tune.
London Elektricity does some good liquid as does Logistics. Consequence, DBridge and Instra:mental all do some chilled out stuff too. For some more warm-up stuff to get a little heavier play some stuff like Join the Dots by Sub Focus?

If you wanna throw in an awesome old tune maybe Wickaman’s remix of Space Invader by Hatiras, it’s pretty epic.

If you were asking for Neurofunk or Techstep I could probably write you an essay of suggestions lol.

Let us know how the gig goes :slight_smile:

3

Thanks for the suggestions mate, I’ll do some digging on beatport :slight_smile:

Already got some logistics, dbridge, eveson, zero T, calibre, bop.
I think my setlist’s got a good flow and a nice progression of energy, but Ive got 2 hours of tunes that need squeezing into 45 mins. I don’t wanna push out any big tunes too early either.

4

I think you seem to have it pretty sorted there mate - last thing a promoter is going to want to see you do is go to big too early, so keep a nice vibe with plenty of vocals to get the girls dancing - I allways find liquid/light jump up tunes with an electro section good towards the end of a warm up set. Girls allways squeal for Camo & krookeds History of the future.

5

No offense mate, you chose a few great tunes there, but I personally don’t think all of them fit the bill for a “chill/liquid” opening set.
As the location is a bar , the owner/promoter probably wants you to start of smoothly so the guests can smoothly get in the right mood but stili buy plenty of drinks. A crowd that is rocking hard at 10pm does not spend money on drinks.
And don’t go too far with cue juggling and FX action that early. You don’t wanna look like the little show-off, you want to impress with your skills a little, but more with music choice. So use them wisely, don’t overuse them. Music choice is more important.

Again, just my opinion and my guess, but when someone requests a chill/liquid set, he probably means something like this:

When you get to the end, something like this might be okay to make a move towards the less “chilly” set of the next DJ

This is just a random choice of tracks.

Keep Bataclava and for the later part of your set I refuse, drop If we ever (great track, but much, much too powerful for a “chilled liquid” set). You get the idea: No “hits” or huge dancefloor filler tunes.
You don’t want to play the big tunes when you open for other DJs anyway, because they might want to play them, and if they do and you “take them away” from them, they won’t like that, which is bad news for follow-up gigs.

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Thanks for your input mate. I had a bad feeling about if we ever too. the only reason for having it in there was the harmonic mix from the tune before.

I’m still trying to find that right tune to slot in there. ill keep digging. I’d love to use verve too, but I’m still thinking its a bit too heavy.

I got hold of some mutt and blu mar ten the other day. I’m pretty sure they’d be appropriate. Time to rewrite the second half of my playlist again! Heh.

Thanks for your constructive criticism guys, its helping me feel a lot more confident about whats appropriate.

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Love Random Movement, and i actually know these guys/guy, Jack left the group a few years back. They are both super cool, back when i played dnb i had the honor to tag with them on a few occasions. When it comes to mellow/jazzy dnb you can never go wrong with them.

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Here are some producers to look at for an opening set

Blu Mar Ten - Really great, back beat heavy tracks. Be warned tho that Blu Mar Ten tracks are notoriously difficult to mix. Nice Mellow vibes on most tracks tho

Red Eyes - chill liquid

Shapeshifter - soulful, vocal heavy, but live drums which make these difficult.

Sunchase - his mellower stuff

Calibre - a staple for liquid djs

Well Being - Rollers

Command Strange - funky liquid but not too hard

Specific - rollers

Eros - more rollers

Spectrasoul - generally deep rollers.

Marky

S.P.Y.

I could go on for days about liquid but this should be a good start :wink:

9

+1 for Marky…
Marky and XRS -LK was a staple in my sets during '02/'03, and is still one of my favorite tracks of all time.

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i closed my yesterday’s night with this tune. so awesome. ppl went nuts. and that was a bar gig :smiley:

to the OP> well, your selection from your first post is way too not-so-for-opening-set.

Well i’m one of those who critize opening DJs a lot, and i have to say you should seriously reconsider those tunes. You can get away with playing theese famous liquid rollers at the very end of the set, so you set a bar for energy level. until then, try going for mellow stuff as many guys over here suggested. and finaly my picks>

netsky does some great middle-set stuff

you can never miss with lenzman’s work too (beggining and middle of the set)

Alix perez like 2 years ago did some seriously deep and jazzy stuff. i am madly in love with this release:

Also, whenever ppl show up on the dancefloor, dont worry to move them and hype em up a bit by some Dub or Reggae infused songs! loads of DJs despise of cheap raggajungle, but with some digging you could find really good duby and deep stuff.

plz note some of theese tracks might have little more energy than is appropriate for opening set. But one nice trick always helps> Dont worry to organise your phrase in a way that beat gets droped - on many occasions = give songs full intro’s and such.

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Yeah, I didnt feel good about them, thats why I posted them here. Thanks for confirming my suspicions.

Im gonna ditch all the bangers and re-work the set properly including some of the suggestions here. It just so happens that Mutt, Eveson, Random movement and B-Complex have just released some lovely tunes that are currently getting tagged and sorted in Traktor :wink:

Thanks for your help guys, I’ll be sure to post back with how it goes

12

So I thought i’d give you all the update on how it went.

7pm, reading, DJ etiquette on tech tools for the second time this week :wink:

8pm, soundcheck. I got in the booth and it was chocca with TT’s and CDJ’s, luckily I had a nice big foam pad to stick over a TT and got to it. There wasnt room for all my controllers, I had to leave out the LPD8. The midifighter got some love though :wink:
I’d already stress tested all my gear to the max, so everything went nice and smoothly.

I was on at ten so had a couple of hours to kill so chatted to the promoter and helped out with some flyering.

It was pretty quiet when I started my set, all my mates showed up though and had a laugh while I brought the energy up slowly.

10:30 and the place is packed out, lots of nodding heads and happy faces, the mixing went perfectly. My mates were larging it up & I even had a few complements from train spotters :slight_smile:

The next dj was a little disorganised, so was the communication. I got another 20 mins of glory which I hadn’t planned for, but it was all good, I played a few of the heavier songs I questioned earlier in the thread and it went down a treat.

High fives all round, everyone enjoyed themselves, including and especially me :slight_smile:
It was all pro bono, got a couple of beers out of it and a warm feeling inside, proper good fun though. I loved giving my music to other people.

I got plenty of weird looks for using a controller too, the midi fighter also got loads of attention. Mostly “WTF is that!?” or “I love streetfighter man!”. The best thing about it was I got no flak for it at all, no-one had a negative comment about laptop dj’s, auto synchers, etc. I got a few of the other dj’s interested in midi too, I guess they’re all gadget nerds like me, heh.

Then I proceeded to get rather drunk, chat bullshit to strangers, and dance my ass off to some HEAVY dnb. Soul Intent rocked that place hard.

Thanks to all you guys on here that share your experiences so that others may learn. I’ve picked up a huge amount of knowledge in a short space of time that’s helped me massively and ensured my first night was a roaring success.