So, I want to know how many people tend to do this?
I’ve been asked to play a 4 hour gig which is much longer than I usually would do…The audience won’t be expecting a ‘house night’, ‘electro night’, or ‘dubstep night’…it will just be another night at a club but I have the whole time 10-2am.
I can say that I truly enjoy a wide range of music and think I have a good understanding of how to mix different genres but is it to risky to be playing house, electro, dubstep, hip-hop, top40 etc… all in 4 hours?
I have good ideas for transitions as well as good songs for transitioning (like hip-hop to dubstep)
Anyways, does anyone else do this? I don’t know if ppl would think… wow that was cool to get a variety or what the hell happened, I was listening to house an hour ago and now im listening to lil-wayne
Yeah im not talking about transitions so much, and when I do house parties I figure out a good way to transition. I’m just saying in this environment am I going to have ppl saying wtf to what is being mixed or will they just flow with it?
it all depends on how well you can blend and mix the genres together. On my club nights i’m all over the genre spectrum but I am able to blend it together so that it all sounds good. I dont throw in underground dubstep however I’ll drop a known dubstep song here and there or I have some good top 40 songs remixed in dubstep versions I’ll use.. Same goes with DnB, electro, house, moomba, etc.
I’ve done quite a few long sets, usually average about 4-6 hours (longest being 13 hours), and I love moving through different genres. Be creative with it. Think about the overall shape of your mix. Think about being “some guy” who shows up at the beginning of your set and what it takes to keep him there for 5 hours. Tempo and energy change is important. Do you want to build up to one huge peak? or… Obviously, take all this with a grain of salt because, ultimately, you have to read your crowd but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have an idea about what kind of story or history lesson you want to tell over 5 plus hours of time.
I would say just do you…I usually play open format sets for about 4-5 hours, and at the end of the day, people are more focused on drinking than the music. Song selection is obviously important, so if you believe in what your tracks and you’re not worried about transitions, just have some fun!
I play open format every weekend. From Hip Hop to House to Rock. It really is about song selection and energy levels of tracks. I’ve had people dancing and moving to electro tracks and then drop a transition track to Jay-Z Jigga and the whole room pauses and sings along “Jigga, What’s my muthafucking name” etc. and in one track boom we’re into hip hop then I’ll climb back up the BPM’s and they’re dancing to Dragonette Hello.
I routinely do this at a lot of shows. I play several venues where I’m the only guy there that night with what could be a very diverse crowd. Just this past weekend I was spinning at one place where my “normal” format is top 40/house/dubstep/repeat… But this night was much different, I couldn’t get anyone out on the floor for the first about half hour or so with this… So what did I do? Looked around, saw what age groups I had, then started banging the 80s and 90s… Almost instantly I had a floor.
It’s important to play to your crowd, if they just want to hear the house/dubstep then fine, but I find crowds to have more fun when you can pull in some classic gems too. My favorite tracks to pull in randomly and have a floor go wild? AC/DC - Back IN Black, Queen - Fat Bottomed Girls, B-52s - Love Shack, Cindi Lauper - Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Van Halen - Ain’t Talkin’ About Love, Twisted Sister - C’mon Feel The Noise and I Wanna Rock, The Who - Baba O’Riley, Red Hot Chili Peppers - Can’t Stop, Rage Against The Machine - Killing In The Name Of, and many many more…
It’s all about reading the crowd and picking the tracks at the right time. Track selection, that is the essence of DJing..
it’s easy i think to progress tempo wise through hiphop>pop>house>electro>dubstep>drum&bass
that will take you a couple of hours.
then, if you need to play longer you can just repeat, but doing the reset is the hard bit.
you can have a ‘reset’ playlist where any song on the list is basically going to grab the crowd however snobby they are, and you’re not mixing into this, just drop it.
if you have the crowd but need to reset then this is a pretty good way to get from 170 to 110:
I start my nights with some UK Garage, then some Ghettofunk, then it varies with house/top/40s/ and then hip hop to let the people rest a little and then bring the energy back again. I save my sets to see what worked and what didn’t and then again prepare for the next gig.
