I personally don’t plan my live sets. Maybe small sequences of 2-3 songs that I like to plan to be together cause they sound awesome together, but that’s the max. Beyond that I work out of planned crates (styles, genre’s, etc) and play based on feeling.
Today I was watching the video of Armin van Buuren at Ultra Fest 2012 and it got me thinking regarding your article about “planning DJ sets”. Got me to wondering how large stage productions like this sequence visuals to the sets… as there was lots of correctly sequenced visual items in Armin’s set… lyrics on the screen for “Mr Brightside”, song titles, etc.
So is Armin playing a planned set, and the VJ knows the plan then knows how to play along with? Is Armin controlling both DJ and visuals? Or what’s really happening here?
Well the way i see it is that it wouldn’t be too hard to press play at the exact moment for the vocals and stuff to come up. I’m guessing that lots of the visual was ready for play if that makes sense.
I think that trance DJ’s are one of the very few groups these days who actually dj properly… Well i can hope
Most likely a Very Good VJ - I did it for many many years, and it’s not rocket science once you know the dj “might” drop XYZ track you can have a few bits and bobs pre-planned into banks.
Incidentally IMHO DJ’s make the Best VJ’s and Lighting Jocks
if you are in tight with your clubs owner/manager and have access afterhours to their lighting system, you could do it an easier way with just you controlling the video and lightshow… In vdj you can already use video so your projections are as easy as putting together a video in “after effects” or something similar, then editing the visuals together a video with an audio track in .vob format.
For the next step you can download a couple of plugins for vdj that communicate with the free dmx program “freestyler”. The plugin will send the beatgrid to freestyler, and there is a seperate plugin that allows cue points to trigger scenes in the program when they are passed in the timeline. Another great feature of the plugins is that you can even run them over a network so you audio/video and dmx programs run on seperate computers.
The problem with this setup is that you would either need to convert them to freestyler or run the light system off your rig all night (this would be a bit more setup initially but better in the long run), or you would have to blackout for a minute and change all the lights over, that’s why you need to be tight with the owner/manager because you are messing with their expensive system.
Festival sets and major headliner events are largely pre-planned. For ASOT @ ultra several artists had the tracklist updating on twitter before the tracks played. Its not like there’s any need to “read a crowd” for those kind of shows, and planning music and visuals together makes for a much better experience.
