First actual dj gig this weekend – and the stakes are HIGH
This Saturday will be an epic one for sure. I’ve been into this dj stuff for about 5 years now, as in actually mixing my own music, but I never ever had any intentions of making a career, or even performing in clubs, at all. My day job is in IT, I’m hitting 30 very soon, and I just don’t care.
Over the years, i’ve bought a lot of hardware, selft-taught myelf how to mix, beatmatch, read and watched tons of videos online, and practiced non stop. As in few hours a day. I got pretty damn good at this. I like dong those mix tracks for friends or to put as background music for when I have people over, and people always comment about how professional the mixing is, and if its from some sort of commercial mix cd bla bl bla. But I have never ‘performed’ in front of people. Except for my girlfriend or people who wanted to watch me doing this.
After two months of personal hell (more on this later), my girlfriends asked me if i could dj for her huge halloween party at her house. There’s going to be a lot of people for a house party, around 70-80. The twist is.. My girlfriend works in the music industry. Those people are all going to be personal friends and local music industry people. People from all sorts of walks of life, metal guitarists, big time hip hop guys, folk signers, session musicians, etc.
Holy crap!
She is having some guy bringing in all sort of smoke and light systems, lasers, etc; and her parties are always known to be batshit insane. This is going to be a HUGEEE thing.. and she asked me to dj.
She asked me not to actual spin all night, to just put on some playlist (..this explain the random thread I made earlier this week about using traktor in shuffle mode :eek
, because she wants to introduce me to all her friends, but that she wants me to do an insane set at around midnight.
So basically, yeah, my first gig will be an epic one..tons of industry people, at a huge bash. It wont be a formal formal party, just a huge bash between friends who will want to get drunk and laugh, but still.. Damn. We also had some very thought times in the past month (random pregnancy, miscarriage, I spare you the details) but we are slowly rebuilding things up, so this party will be an important waypoint in our relationship.
Anyhow, sorry for the long post, here are the dirty tech details!:
I was planning at first to go there with a classic setup, my trusty DENON DH-HS5500 and my DENON DS-1500 mixer with an efx unit; I ended up ordering an odyssey flight case online and of course the idiots manage to somehow DAMAGE the case while shipping, and theres no way in hell i’m going to bring my turntable setup all ‘loose’ like that. It will look stupid and its not safe.
So I’ll be going in with my Dell VCI-100 with the 1.3 firmware and Ean’s red led limited edition of the Midi Fighter. It’s going to be interesting to use a midi controller to perform instead of a more classical turntable setup, and i’m sure that people are going to be :eek: at my setup. I just hope that everything will turn out well and faultless.
I’ll be bringing tons of extra usb and audio cables, powerbars, and so on.
Stress stress stress!
I have all the ‘mainstream background music’ playlist ready, but my set isnt even read yet. I usually just improvise when I do my mixes, but I’m not sure its a good idea when you are doing this live, possibly drunk, and wearing a full gladiator armor outfit complete with cape and helmet.
I still have two days to work on this.