first club gig tonight: advice?

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

first club gig tonight: advice?

It’s not that glorious, my friends and I have organized our own gig at a local club let us use their facilities (hey, free promotion and good business for them)

I’m playing a closing set, trance, progressive house/trance. Do you guys have any tips? Sound-wise, how to keep the volumes not too loud? How do I stay fresh and not get tired (have to be there at 8:30 for a sound check but not playing till 12:30)? How do I keep my hearing? How do I hear what I’m doing in my headphones? (last time at a house party I was next to a speaker and had to turn headphone volume all the way up - bad for hearing)

2

Wear ear plugs during everyone else’s sets. That can be a big help. I have the same problem with having to turn up the headphone way too much, so it may be that my headphones don’t dampen the outside noise enough, or maybe I’m too close to my PA.

Are you bringing your own PA, or using their’s? If they have a sound guy there to set you up, you shouldn’t have a problem. Just make sure that you have enough head room in the main mixer to raise the volume for your final set. Basically what this means is that you want the volume of the sound system set for louder than you would ever need to go. That way you can control the volume on your mixer, and as you turn it up you will not have to worry about clipping the signal at your mixer. If you do start clipping the songs, but the volume needs to go louder, keep the master gain on your mixer low enough to keep the sound clean, then turn up the gain on the main PA (or have the sound guy do it).

*A word of caution: I’ve ran into trouble with clipping and earplugs. When the very high frequencies get clipped, you will not hear it if you have ear plugs in. You will just have the crowd looking at you very funny, like you just put on a Garth Brooks album or something. If you do use earplugs on and off during your set, be sure to take them out for a moment when turning up the gain. So you can briefly check the sound quality.

3

Oh yeah, and limit yourself to like one drink. Just one to ease the nerves, but not to make you sloppy when you come on for the last set.

4

Yeah, don’t go crazy on the drinks. And watch your levels… there’s a tendency to start getting louder as time passes. Don’t do it.

5

Watch yourself on the drinking. After you’ve done it a lot and get comfortable you might find out you spin better drunk, but now you need your wits about you.

As said above, leave yourself headroom. I don’t know about mastering levels of the music you’re spinning, but older stuff is usually quieter than newer stuff, so it needs to be turned up.

Make sure you have good headphones. If you have them on and you have to crank it to hear anything, get new ones. Trust me, this will improve your mixing astronomically.

Before people start showing up, after you’ve got everything set up, put one of your great songs that you love on, that peak of your set, and go to the dance floor and walk around it. How does it sound? Would you dance to it? Does it need more bass? Are the highs too low? Where does the sound flange? Tweak a bit from there, turn it off, and have that drink. Also, coffee. Eventually the euphoria of spinning will hit you and you’ll be good.

There is a tendency to get louder, as said above. Try really hard not to. Compare your PFL levels, make sure they aren’t too loud, make sure they line up.

Um… my trick is to look like I’m having fun. I’m sick of those DJs that stand behind the decks, arms crossed, no smile, like they are god’s gift to mixing. Have fun. Sing lyrics, fist pump, dance, jump around. I’ve found that when I am making a fool of myself in the booth people get a bit more relaxed and start having more fun cause, well, they can’t possibly look stupider than me. :slight_smile:

6

Use your dynamics - breakdowns and beatless sections are a time to “reset” the volume. Plan to drop to silence and start back up with a “simple” track (a track made of only a few simple elements like a simple breakbeat or a single unprocessed mono lead).

Layering overproduced sound over overproduced sound is what leads to “mushy” mixes. Think of it as clearing your sonic palette before the next course in the meal. If you listen to the truly great DJs working without the constraints of having to play just new tracks on a compilation, you can see them selecting their tracks based on:

  • Tonality - bright&shiny vs. noisy&gritty vs. bass-heavy&dark.
  • Tempo vs. Energy - sometimes a slower track with a bouncy groove carries more energy than a frantic cutup one.
  • Simplicity vs. Complexity - sometimes the best thing is to it’s good to drop out of a track and bring back just the kickdrum.

OK, maybe a bit too much philosophy there.
Just drop tunes the kids like, get the drunk girls to dance and the rest will follow!

7

Have fun dude.

Try not to be too nervous. You were asked to do this gig for a reason.

Be professional (this is more in line with other comments about drinking).

And HAVE FUN!

Good luck man.

8

heres my tips: all of them mostly said before

  1. get there early. do a sound check. play some of your favorite songs…see how they sound.

  2. take pics of your friends djn! and of the event!

  3. when its your turn to spin..lets the previous djs song play out until the end. if you want to announce your name and be a superstar…let that previous djs song play until the beat stops, and have somone announce your name and drop the beat… i have seen this both work and also not work!

  4. headphone levels should just be just enough that it overrsahdows the dancefloors speakers…it would greatly help if you have monitor speakers so when your mixing you can really hear whats going on! whats coming through those monitors is whats coming out on the dancefloor.

  5. drink a redbull

  6. watch the crowd! if you play a song and the crowd aint feelin it you will know! adjust the music to the crowd!

  7. umm i am sure i left some things out…oh yeah when your done..make sure you pack all your gear back up…i have lost my firewire ( 4pin to 6pin) cord 4 times now!! cause i always forget to pack it!

  8. have fun! even if you trainwreck for a couple seconds the crowd will barely notice…however the other djs will!

  9. get the crowd hypeed up!! do a lil dance! do something…even though donald glaude looks like a funny duddy in the beggining of this video the crowd loves it!!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1675932400425471596&q=donald+glaude&ei=m9sISLHIEZSw4QKx6Y20AQ

9

Thats a great simple tip. Always wear them when walking around and not djing in the club. Then your ears dont get acclimated to the noise and what you think is normal ends up being way too high for everyone else

also dont forget to check out our DJ TT rules for setting up in the club:

10

Thanks, fellas, a lot of good advice here

Hehe, that’s true. I noticed that one drink helps me relax and pick better flow of tunes, but alcohol also makes me tired, so there’s a tradeoff.

I think you’re digging at, perhaps, the most important part of DJing - set flow & programming. This probably deserves its own thread, what with the harmonic mixing and not. But the last part of what you said I think is key - get the girls to dance and the guys will follow. Then again, where do I draw the line between playing what I was like playing and playing vocal tracks that Armin Van Buuren plays and becoming his clone (because that’s what everybody wants)?

That’s pretty awesome that he dances like that, I actually have the same headphones as Donald (SONY MDRv6)

11

Forgot to add, take a bag of spare cables of all shapes and sizes and an extra power strip.

12

OH Yeah, an extra power strip is essential.

Over the years I have so many cords that I could probably connect a microwave into my setup for some crazy effects loop if I tried. I always think that I will no longer need this cable or that, but it never fails that some friend I’m mixing with will have RCA outs, and no 1/4" patch cables. Keep all the cords you collect, and they will save your ass someday.

13

Bring a flashlight.

14

Yup, had one, the unfortunate thing was that one of the DJs accidentally stepped on and unplugged the power cord from the wall (I was concerned that a single cord for everyone is a single point of failure), and one of the DJs had to reboot because his MAudio Firewire froze itself and the operating system, so I had to cover for him for one song. Computers…

So now I wanted to share some of my experiences:

  1. Very tough crowd, they did not like minimal Techno / House much (this was a warmup DJ, so not a big crowd), they seemed to dislike Electro House a lot (I received a number of complaints, some of the people said, “This DJ sucks!”… sad). The majority didn’t seem to know how to dance to this kind of music. Closing the night, I have to say I played a little out of genre. I was going to start is slow with progressive house, around 129-132 BPM, and then build it up, but people wanted “good music” and “something they can dance to” so after a couple of slower tunes, I notched it up and started playing melodic & vocal stuff.
    Here’s where the philosophical question comes in - do you ‘sell out’ and give people what they want (in a sense reading the crowd) or do you make a stand and risk being criticized/disliked and risk the chance of a lower turnout next time? I have heard advice that said, when you’re starting out, play anywhere and everywhere and play whatever the crowd wants to hear. It’s when you’re starting to become more of an individual DJ and you have people coming to see you, then you can play whatever you want (but what if people come to see you play trance and you play progressive house?)

Nothing like having 250 people sing along to “As The Rush Comes,” however cheesy it may be :stuck_out_tongue:

  1. We got many requests for ‘pop’ club music, like Benny Benassi and David Guetta, a number of requests for ATB and Scooter. I brought a legal pad and let people write their requests, most of the tracks requested we didn’t know / didn’t have, so perhaps people were disappointed in the end, but I think the ability to write down their requests has made them feel acknowledged and made it easier for us not to shout “Who? What’s the title?” and be distracted all the time. Best request at the end of the night was “House/Dance every week” :slight_smile:

  2. Nobody, nobody cares about mixing. Or at least it seems so. My roommate said he noticed my first trainwreck, but that was the only one he noticed (and I believe I had a few more). It just isn’t scary anymore, you always think people are going to look at you weird… not the case last night, or in fact, any of the previous house parties I was at. I guess if you’re playing for more hardcore ravers, trainspotters, they might look at you funny and even boo you.

  3. The ear plugs were a god send. The system was not very loud, we kept it far below the red line, but ear plugs were very useful for keeping my ears fresh.

  4. Adapters / connectors / cables were useful. I didn’t need any, but my fellow DJs did.

  5. Nobody cared about laptops / Traktor. A few semi-curious people took a look, but nobody asked any questions, nobody complained that we were ‘checking our email’ (in fact, some girl wanted me to get online to look up the name of some track).

Now the more technical issues:

I did exactly that, but

  1. Once again, I could not hear what I was doing. I kept headphone volume just slightly above the main levels, like in Ean’s Headphone cuing 101 guide (by the way, was there a continuation to that guide, “ways to mix entirely in the headphones for more accuracy in Dj Cuing 202.”?). I was up on stage in front of the dance floor - the speakers didn’t drown out the sound completely, but the loud bass made it difficult to hear subtle changes when I was EQing (especially because it almost completely canceled the bass of my headphones). When I do it in my room, I can hear EVERY little change in my headphones, this helps with having tighter, smoother transitions. Up on stage, I could not hear most of the changes in headphones, so I also listened to the speakers, which, in tur, were quite muddy and didn’t give me much resolution on the frequencies either. I wish we had a monitor speaker up on stage, but even then it might have been drowned out by the dancefloor speakers. Now, I can’t go out on the floor and listen to how I’m transitioning, because I can’t be in two places at once, but it seemed like sometimes, when I was switching basslines (blending / fading instead of cutting), there would be extra punch in the system and it sounded a little scary (am I wrecking the transition?).
    So the questions are: is a big soundsystem more forgiving, as people say? Or if I heard the extra punch that wasn’t supposed to be there, does that mean everybody else heard it too?
    My headphones are Sony MDR-V6, a favorite in the industry, so I must be misusing them? I did a stupid thing and did not ask to borrow my fellow DJs’ headphones to check them out.

Thanks for all your replies, guys, you helped make it less nervous and more professional for me. I hope this discussion will help all the newcomers. To all bedroom DJs starting out: it’s hard work, and there will be disappointments, but just keep at it and don’t give up.

15

I listen to damn near everything, and I play damn near everything. BUT, you do have to have some standards. Even though mine are low, I do not take all request, and I am not a wedding DJ. Sometimes you just can’t please everyone, but I do focus on pleasing the majority.

I got into this because first and foremost, I’m a dancer. Madison has a great scene of kids ready and willing to go into your dirty old basement and dance till 5am, known as the “Dance party scene”. After one regular basement was getting too much heat from the cops, I started my own. It started with one full-range Yorkville bass amp, Winamp, and a collection of all my roommate’s Mp3’s.

I eventual built a real PA, and a monkey bar, and a stripper pole platform, and a full bar. The parties became so big that people were in line outside in the back driveway to get in. The point I’m trying to make is that I focussed more on a fun dancing experience, than what “I” wanted to listen too, or even DJ’n for that matter, and the people loved it! I’ve played in four different venues downtown (one turned into a weekly gig), and some large co-op sponsored dance parties. The owners never cared I wasn’t a real DJ, they just loved to see the crowd fired up. It seems like I was the only one who really cared that I was not DJ’n, so I finally spilled my pennies on some gear to practice with.

Now I’m in a new house that cannot hold parties, and I’m spending all my time practicing with Traktor so I will have real DJ skills. I will still read the crowd and give them what they want, but I hope to be able to add my own creative style on top of it.

I never called myself a DJ, and I’m still not there yet. I just know that for me personally, I love to give everyone a great time. There are a lot of songs I would love to dance to, but I can only play them early, or not at all, because the crowd will just go back to their bar stools.

Maybe you’re right. Cater to the crowd till someday they wont care what you are playing, cause they came specifically to see you.

16

That’s a very good insight, thanks for sharing. I guess, to club/bar owners, that’s what they want to see - large crowd buying drinks. And the crowd will come, if fun is to be had (i.e. they will hear their fav music. I guess, in the bigger sense of things, we are DJs not just because we love music, but also because we love making people dance and love seeing them have fun. So maybe playing cheesier stuff, but still throwing a curveball or two at them once in a while is the way to go. Like the eternal beatmatching argument, nobody (except elitist DJs/trainspotters) really cares whether you use CDs, vinyl, decks, your iPod, whatever, and if you’re using the sync button, as long as you get the crowd screaming your name.

17

Thanks Whiskers!

I liked what you said earlier about using a note pad for the crowd to write down request. I’ve always had an idea for a clip board and a sheet for people to write on, but I haven’t gone out and bought one yet. It is far less distracting, It’s easier to look down a list and see what may fit in with your mix at the current point in time, and if you don’t have/know the song, you can sample it online later. It may even be a good track!

I always try to remind myself I’m there to please the “crowd”, not the cute drunk girl who keeps requesting “I’m so Hood” while I’m in the middle of some 80’s dance track! If the request is a good track, then I will steer my mix in that direction so that at some point I can play it, and the crowd will be ready for it.

18

These things happen but you do have to focus on the scene your interested in and you will enjoy it more. If your a “techno” DJ then you dont want to go into a hip-hop club and start spinning techno.

19

A very good point.

This is why (like damn near everything in life) it really comes down to your personal taste and style. I have a very broad taste, and pleasing the crowd makes me feel really important. Now if my interest were more narrow, you are right, I would not want to go into a hip-hop club to play techno. It may limit where and to who I play, but I would be more refined in genre than someone who just plays crowd pleasers.

20

Nobody who isn’t a DJ really cares about mixing until it’s awful. I’ve found that people who know the songs really well and appreciate the music for what it is have a much greater understanding of mixing, and hence respect it.

People who are just there to dance couldn’t care less as long as they hear songs that make them want to dance.

But, at the same time, a DJ playing nothing but hits all night who can’t mix still might not get the cred that a DJ who plays a good mix of songs all night long who can mix.

I’m a big proponent of request lists. Take it, find stuff that was requested and you might add great tracks to your collection that you never would have known about otherwise. Sure gave me good ideas.

The headphone thing is weird, though. It could be where the speakers were pointed. I’ve found that if subs are on the floor pointed at the stage, and the stage is raised up a few feet, the bass can become overwhelming. My headphones, Sennheiser HD25-1’s, sit on your ear instead of around and cut out a lot of sound. When I was using the Stanton DJ-3000’s I had a similar problem you’re having. But another option is to use a stage monitor pointed directly at you as a reference, instead of just the headphones. You’ll have less of a delay, it’s just one more thing you need to take with you :slight_smile: