Hoping some of my more seasoned mobile DJ vets can help me out with this one. I’m doing a high school homecoming dance this Saturday night for a private school. I come from a mainly club background here, and the school has apparently specifically requested us to go heavy on the EDM side of things. I was going to do a lot of top-40/billboard remixes and touch on some popular trap and hip-hop. My question here is this:
Back during these dances when I was in high school (long before I started DJing), I noticed there was at least one or two slow songs peppered in throughout the night. Is this still pretty standard, or should I avoid it and treat it like a bar/club and go high energy all the way through? On one hand, it would give me a chance to kind of break the night into segments, and give me a chance to see where I want to take things next. On the other hand, I worry that with it only being like 3-4 hours, it would completely kill the floor vibe if I’m at a high energy point. Worst still, people could think it was over and start to leave.
Anyone have experiences doing these kinds of things? If the verdict comes down to throw at least 1-2 in, any good recommendations? (US side of things here).
TL;DR: High school homecoming dance. Should I play a few slow songs or keep it upbeat the entire time?
Don’t do it dude. You’ll lose em. It’s really risky to drop below 115bpm (unless your hitting the hip hop range) at a high school function. Kids these days don’t know what a slow dance even is. Seriously… It will be really awkward and uncomfortable, and tough to get the floor back.
Once you play Levels and get the energy going, back spin levels and drop only time by Enya, after that just do what any good dj would do, run the trap.
You wait till you move onto the cheese before you start dropping your slow-dance bombs. In fact, finish on those epic slow romance songs, like Aerosmith - Don’t Want To Miss A Thing.
Well guys, it was a great success, and all the kids had a great time. Here’s a time-lapsed video of the insane A/V production we implemented for the event. Enjoy!
Load in was at 3, we had everything set up by about 7. Dance went from 8-11pm, then strike took just under 2 hours. We recently built a cadillac, so that helped IMMENSELY with the strike portion. Our last strike of this magnitude probably took about twice the amount of time.
Sure no problem! All in all, it was basically just a really big flight case that we constructed out of some ply and hardware. It let us just toss all the lights, cables, etc. into it without having to worry about putting XLRs in one box, DMX in one box, power/IEC cables in another box, etc. then moving each of those boxes out to the trailer (a process we did the last time I mentioned earlier, which resulted in a 3-4hr strike time).
We are going to build another one shortly and will add in dividers into that one, as it would be nice to separate power, audio, and DMX equipment. I’m at work at the moment, but I’ll see if I can dig up some pictures of the caddy up close when I get home. Definitely a good investment, especially if you have the tools and knowledge to build it yourself.
