So, to set the scene, I was just recording a mix on Traktor for my soundcloud page playing some funky techy eletro-y house, all going swimmingly coming towards mixing in the last track having been going for an hour nearly. Best one I had done all week so far as well, still getting to grips with Digi DJing.
I went to start the last track on the opposite deck and what did i do? Hit play on the wrong fuckin deck!!! Last cue point was nearly at the beginning so jumped straight back to it. No editing software for me so I can’t just chop in a new bit, could have chuffin screamed!!! Probably not that bad but got stressed out and had to turn it off!!!
Also, my friend had a massive house party the other night and there’s always the comments after parties that we wish we’d had a web cam set up on the booth and facing the party to catch some of the antics (as there no doubt always is), there was between 70-100 people, biggest one of the year, there so we got two set up pointing at us DJing and facing the kitchen out onto the patio where everyone gathers set to record on to my mates hard drive. It was about half an hour before all was properly due to kick off and as I’m setting up I switched some USB cables round to allow to use all of our gear and took a couple out of the hub I thought weren’t being used and you guessed it, no feed to the webcams, didn’t realise til the wee small hours the next morning!!!
I guess in a way this thread should be called Fyoog is a clutz but it got me to thinking what is your 1) most epic personal DJ fail where like my first one you have been on your own or with a couple of mates and you have done something that almost drives you to self harm but that is only influenced by you and/ or 2) something that was also completely influenced by you playing out (no random drunk guy bumping the deck in club, sound guy failing so you look stupid etc)?
I’m sure there are plenty of brilliant stories like this on here so fess up!
a bit too much booze and smoke once and i was hitting the hotcues for the wrong deck on my padkontrol. This happened 3 times and I threw in the towel, was a small house party nobody cared
last weekend i had to mix internally wich i never do…so i´m mixing nad suddenly the music turns off. i´m totally confused searching for the sound guy…we´ve been looking for about 15 min what the problem was and then i started laughing…i had my crossfade (that i never use) on the wrong deck…fail!
Had to DJ a New years eve gig a few years ago for a south Asian party – mostly Punjab crowd that wanted to hear bhangra and Bollywood all night long. I was supposed to be the warmup DJ – supposedly getting relieved just after the midnight countdown by an actual Indian DJ who the crowd knew. Before the gig I bought a pile of bhangra compilation CDs and a bunch of stuff off the net. I had tons of bhangra and bollywood on my hard drive for the gig, but its mostly stuff I had never heard before. It’s usually not my style to just wing it, but this gig I was flyin by the seat of my pants. Anyway the headline DJ, it turns out, has never DJd before, and he was piss drunk by 10pm. He plugs a mic into the mixer and starts shouting stuff like “where are all my Indians at!!!” to this crowd of about 100… he has me cut the sound and he gets the crowd hyped up as I cue the next song. I don’t recognize it but I load it into the deck, paying attention to the BPM but kind of ignoring everything else on the screen. He’s all like “Are you guys ready for some Desi music?! Some Bhangra!!! Yeahhhhh!!!” he has people shouting “bhangra, bhangra” and signals for me to start the song. On cue I drop the beat … aaaaaaaaaaand I hear congas… it’s a fucking salsa song. D’oh!!!
I quickly recovered and pretended I was just fucking with the other DJ or something but man that was embarrassing. Luckily the guy was so tanked that people quickly forgot about my screwup as they began shouting for him to shut the hell up after a while. When it did come time for him to play, he wouldn’t even touch my equipment - it was clear he’d never used it before. I asked him what software he was going to use and he didn’t understand the question. I put on a long song and plugged his laptop output into a mixer channel and figured he’d do whatever from there. A minute left in the song and I looked at him; he’s got iTunes open and is looking around the iTunes Music Store. I was like what the fuck? Needless to say I ended up playing bhangra songs I didn’t know all night long…
that’s a nice one man, i’ve re-assigned my crossfader and mix only with the volume faders, partially for this reason but also because i prefer to mix 100% with upfaders.
Get Audacity, it’s free and very easy to edit out mistakes with. Just leave your self a pause so you can easily see the mistake in the wave for, keep the levels all the same, start mix again.
Awesome, cheers for the tip!! I have heard of Audacity but as I’m still new to the game I didn’t know enough of what to do with it. I’m self teaching everything at the mo, hence the reason I love this site so much as it has realised me the love of DJing again after a 4 year gap (plus the change to Digi).
I was playing the House room of quite big Drum and Bass night…
Most of the people in the club were pretty shady types just standing round bopping their head.
This was about 12 years ago and I was using vinyl. After doing a nice long drawn out mix, carefully tweaking the bass etc, i pulled the record that was playing straight off.
there’s no getting away from that one cause you can hear the record scratch sound and i had a stupid confused expression accross my face.
Had people booing hard… managed to turn it round but i was pretty shamed.
Putting on a vinyl record with an atmospheric intro, thinking it was 45 rpm, and failing to check. Beat drops and super-cartoon hi-speed chaos ensues. Totally blow the mood and what can I do but hit the 33 switch as fast as I can. Fail.
was mixing this outdoor patio party, and I accidentally kicked the power source for my dj gear and all the backyard patio lights…everyone was like wtf? It took every bit of my concentration to get everything working again, being drunk didn’t help, and everyone around was drunk too. I would have to say the worst part of that experience was having the 100 chicks at the party all come up at once and ask “why isn’t the music playing?”…
I was in the middle of closing up my set when my girlfriend came over to makeout with me, I was wasted and all about it…all of a sudden music stops…her elbow hit my laptop shut, password protected , with 10 minutes left and the room at peak hype…ugh
Lovin your work people, all these are genius (or not as the case maybe), just lets you know that your all still, as daft punk put it, Human after all!!!
I was just telling my DJ mate about the thread and he told me that once he was playing in a particularly rough club one night back down south where I used to live, was in the middle of changing records chatting girls up across the booth and without looking caught the sleeve of his jacket on the arm of the deck and ripped the thing right off!!! He told the owner who got very shirty and forcibly ejected him from the club with no pay. Worst bit was a) he was just about to finish and b) he was doing quite well with the girls!!!
That’ll learn you for not looking what your doing flirting!!!
Just two weekends ago I was playing with a friend at a 90’s themed party, and as I’m about to load the next track, I notice how it won’t allow me because the deck is playing and I have “only load into stopped deck” enabled. Drunk as I was, I was convinced that the deck I wanted to load into was the one I had just mixed out of, so I stop it, and load the new track… silence Wrong deck, moron!
Later that night, my buddy confused the key fader we have mapped on our fx controller for the dry/wet fader That sounded a bit odd.
We were pretty drunk.
Think i have done most of the above at one occasion or another, my worst as someone else already mentioned was hanging up my headphones back in 95 until 2009!
), there was between 70-100 people, biggest one of the year, there so we got two set up pointing at us DJing and facing the kitchen out onto the patio where everyone gathers set to record on to my mates hard drive. It was about half an hour before all was properly due to kick off and as I’m setting up I switched some USB cables round to allow to use all of our gear and took a couple out of the hub I thought weren’t being used and you guessed it, no feed to the webcams, didn’t realise til the wee small hours the next morning!!!
but it got me to thinking what is your 1) most epic personal DJ fail where like my first one you have been on your own or with a couple of mates and you have done something that almost drives you to self harm but that is only influenced by you and/ or 2) something that was also completely influenced by you playing out (no random drunk guy bumping the deck in club, sound guy failing so you look stupid etc)?
