My advice is be prepared to change the order of your playlist to fit the mood of the crowd. And also, not everyone will dance the whole night. It can be a little demotivating when you see people at the back talking and not dancing, but you can’t expect a full night of dancing from everyone.
Also, take plenty of spare cords/adaptors/usb cables and an iPod for the worst case scenario
… drinks which you shouldn’t be drinking anyway to remain at 100% (yeah, right). Pass them over to the person you have selected as your hot roadie. This will make your job easier with him/her once your set is over.
Bring extra cables, bring a backup cd player or ipod in case your computer decides to freak the fuck out and you need 15 minutes to get things re-sorted. Make sure you have all appropriate connectors for said cables so that everything fits together in an emergency (RCA → 1/4"; 1/4" → XLR; etc.)
Don’t overthink your sets cause they will change. Are you trading off with another DJ?
I’m going to be bringing an ipod as well as mix cd’s.
Cable wise, all i have are my RCAs to go straight into the mixer as well as an adaptor to hook up an ipod to an RCA cable.
I’ll be playing with my friend (we DJ as a duo) and we were thinking of swapping each hour of the set while the other ‘helps’ mix as well as strolling around so we don’t burn out!
The swapping out is a good idea. Just don’t get drunk between sets. If your renting gear you need to double check well in advance to see if your going to need any other adaptors or anything.
Could someone tell me if this would be sufficient sound for a hall with 400 people in it? I’m fairly noob with sound so I don’t really know if this is sufficient/ good quality:
4 x 18inch Nexo subwoofwrs
4 x 15inch Nexo mid-high boxes
1 x powered monitor speaker
2 x 2200 watt amplifiers
OR
4 x Mackie 1232 3 way active speakers
4 x Mackie 1801 Subs
Always use protection!!! Yes, I do mean what you dirty lot are thinking with the hot roadie as mentioned but also it’s a good idea to take some ear plugs or ear buds as warehouses unlike (most) clubs don’t have noise level meters or places to go and chill away from the music so if your there all night your ears could be getting battered.
Are the company you’re hiring the PA system off setting up the sound system?
If they offer that service i would take it. The positioning of the speakers and subs to get the best sound is not super straight forward. An experienced sound engineer setting it up would go a long way…
Basically you want to get there a fair few hours in advance to do that too.
Make sure you have a little 20 min mix on the set up before the place is even open, that’ll help settle the nerves anyway.
Also test the ipod playing through the set up for back up… then make sure you have 3 or 4 different mixes in one playlist on your ipod, different styles for different times of the night, then if shit goes down you just scroll to the relevant mix and hit play.
If you can prep everything a couple of hours before opening that’ll go a long way…
