Played my first fully improv’d DJ set at my friend’s birthday (~50-60 people house party).
I was playing dubstep and DnB, had a friend open for me playing some techier stuff. I went on for 3 hours straight (while frantically sprinting for piss breaks here and there).
The first hour was pure anxiety, between some shoddy mixing, misreading the crowd, and blowing the speakers. People were making conflicting requests in the beginning, and I got the “play something we can dance to” girl along with the “PLAY SOME SKRILLEX OMFG” people and the “EVERYBODY wants to hear (obscure hip-hop song)” bois. After I filled a few requests, the dance floor became packed, and at that point I could really tell what they were after, when they wanted me to step it up, and when they were tired. It was awesome, and after that point, I got tons of complements from people I didn’t know!
To recap on some lessons learned:
DJ’s are not musicians: musicians play music to express themselves, DJ’s share music with others.
Most people (only) want to hear songs they know
Use #2 to fill the floor, and then introduce the weird shit they haven’t heard to keep people around.
In house parties, the beat dropping out in a breakdown means “smoke break”
Don’t let #4 happen so often
The music carries you, in my city, somewhere under 10% of the crowd pays attention to your mixing, including other “DJ’s”
You can always redeem yourself if things are going poorly.
People only remember the good shit, and appreciate you sometimes more than even the keg.
I need to pack more songs, and be aware of how many songs per energy level per key per BPM I have.
It’s an incredible feeling to drop your own track, and watch people get down to it more than the previous song by a known artist.
#2 sounds like my sister.. BIG TIME
I end up hearing the same old songs she likes too many times
I think I heard them all almost like 200 or so times =.=
Great post. No 2 is a must for house parties I wish my m8 would understand that concept he just plays really underground proggresive house all night and then see’s his arse when no ones dancing. Not everyone likes what u like.
I hear you. All of my gigs are at my boarding school. There are 3 DJs at my school, One kid is the son of James Newton Howard who did the scoring for the dark knight, blood diamond, chinatown, king kong, etc. This kid plays the dirtiest of the dirty in terms of grinding music. He also uses serato. Just saying. His dances end up having about 20 - 30 kids left on the dance floor after it’s over because everyone else went with a partner and cough. The other DJ besides me is a member of the forum here, and he’s only had a few gigs, but the pressure kind of kills him. He plays mostly electronic, with a bit of stuff tossed in elsewhere. We’ve jammed before and he’s a great DJ, but the stress kind of throws him off. And then there’s me. I’m all electronic most of the time, but if someone requests a song I go down to it and it normally works out. But the most annoying thing is the ridiculous inconsistency that you find in people. I’ll represent this with an image… This is obviously extremely accelerated.
Nothing against Ean or anyone else, but I personally think that’s when the DJ becomes a rockstar. You don’t have to mix from A->B, but when you’re there to show off your talent, a certain amount of ego is introduced. It then becomes more about the DJ than the music.
$.02
Also, I’ve decided to take some time to restructure my music library: to start 100 songs per genre, 20 per intensity (1-5 *'s) and some key structure (it’s difficult, because keys are sort of random, like when you buy a pack of trading cards, fuck knows what’s in it.)
Now that I think of it, DJing is a lot like a trading card game…
This can be true of false completely depending on the situation.
Lets take AndyC for exmaple (drum and bass dj), he will start a lot of his sets mixing about 100 tracks in 10 min(ok thats an exaggeration but you get the idea) - i definitely think thats some musicianship there. But then he will break out into traditional mixing.
You could also think of Djing being somewhat of a collage, artists who do collage art are still artists even if they are piecing bits of other artists work into something new.
This is a terribly personal thing though and your perfectly entitled to your opinion thinking that a DJ isn’t a musician - there really is no right or wrong answer to this question - just peoples opinions on the topic.
As for your post though, great work This sort of stuff really helps users out and even brings a smile to the faces of some of the guys who have been doing this a while as they reminisce at their days starting out mixing.
