Too much "giging" in the same weekend !

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

Too much “giging” in the same weekend !

Hoyhoyhoy

I’m leaving in 30 mins for a gig tonight (GMT+1) , and then at 7:00 am i have to take the bus with people from my university, we are going on a “party weekend”. I’ll DJ tomorrow night too.

I guess that until Saturday at 4 or 5 am i won’t have a single minute of sleep :smiley:
There might be a streaming video of tonight’s party, i’ll post a link if this is confirmed. And i’ll post some videos/photos to if i find good ones.

Never had something like 7/8 hours of DJing in 2 days.
Wish me luck to survive this :disappointed:

2

Sounds like a lot of fun! Try to catch some shut eye on the bus? I’m sure you’ll get through it. Best of luck man!

3

When I was fully into DJ’ing in my mid 20’s. I had a residency at 3 different clubs. Weds. Thurs and Fri. There were a few times I would also pick up a mobile gig or sub for another DJ on a Sat. night. :slight_smile:

4

good luck matey. im sure youll be fine, i had to play 18 hours in 3 days the other week, i was more shattered than ive ever been, the killer was just under 10 hours on the friday, it was 6 till 10pm in one room then change to the main room and do 10 till 4 am.

5

I had something like that a couple weeks ago. Had promised a friend to play for a while at her home party on friday, did that and did not manage to get any sleep that night (but my own stupidity was at fault, so who cares). The next day we were doing an open air party where I was in charge of the musical side of things (so coordinating the timetable, seeing to it that everything goes smoothly on the DJs’ technical side, blablabla), so I was well involved in everything going on. Played for 1,5h in the early evening (from like 6pm) and took over again around midnight and played till 5:30. I clearly was no big help when taking down all the stuff the next morning, but that was okay as I’d served my duty. We went to another open air that afternoon just to chill (but went home in the early evening and caught some well-deserved sleep), then on monday (it was a public holiday in Germany) we went yet to another open air and finally partied a bit (a bit might be an understatement) for ourselves. Harsh weekend, but loads of fun :sunglasses:

I have to add: our open air party was quite spontaneous, decided to do it like 2 days beforehand. Still worked out wonderful, went down more smoothly than most of the other parties we organized this year. Beautiful ending for the open air season as well as it was awesome weather on the first weekend of October.

6

Said i was gonna give some feedback so here we go, but i won’t talk too much since it really sucked, and i don’t want to think about this again.

Thursday night gig :
Was playing electro mainly after a raggae band (you are allowed to say WTF).
Loads of people wanted to dance and were pissed of by the raggae band, it was a good starting point.
But they all were a bunch of stupid narrow minded people. I pretty quickly saw they wanted the tracks they knew, Top 40 LFMAO etc…
And since i don’t have these tracks, i decided to use all the remixes of Top 40 i had, like Calvin Harris - Awooga (ANT remix) or Avicii - Levels (Clockwork remix).
After 30 mins, the party was still not going as it was supposed to.

I let the other DJ play his stuff (he was top 40 mainly) and came back after 1h or so. Then i was like, “fuck it” and threw my usual stuff like Mikkas - Syndrome or Bart B More - Listen to this.
Some people enjoyed it. Some didn’t. I was really pissed off anyway.

Why was I pissed off ? Beside the bad crowd, the organisation and the place was a real mess.
We had no booth monitors, and the dancefloor was far away (15 meters). Plus the fact that sound was pretty bad and low. Result : bad mixing = pissed off
Add to this the narrow minded crowd and yeah, bad night.

Friday night : (reminder : my school did a “integration weekend” to welcome newcomers.)

Just, OMG. Even more narrow minded people but this time i was so tired i decided to let go. I mean, they were kids not intrested by music so after spinning for 20 mins, annoyed by their multiple requests, i plugged a 3.5 minijack cable in my mixer and gave them “It’s for your iPods, so you can put the raggaeton/rap/whatever you want.”
I had to “DJ” that night cause i’m a part of the organisation staff, and they lacked money to hire someone, so i said i was gonna bring my gear etc…

And they ended up really happy about the night. I acted as a sound engeneer for 6 hours, but time goes fast when you are totally drunk.

I just hope that i’ll soon get booked for a night where i can have decent DJing conditions, and a crowd that is here to party and have fun.

7

look at u rockstar

8

why is the crowd narrow minded when they know what they wanted to hear and listen too? Is it the crowds fault they are not into the music you normally play? I think whoever booked you, should know crowed they are going to expect and book a DJ that plays to that crowd…not the other way around. book an electro DJ and make the crowd listen to whatever he wants to play. That’s bad business.

9

You are totally right. I was booked for pure electro (based on a previous gig where the guy saw me and at the end asked me to play at his gig) but i quickly saw that i was a bad idea to throw pure electro bangers.

That’s why i played all i had to please them, but even my remixes didn’t fit very well.

It’s not the crowd fault for booking me when it should be someone more generic. Not at all.
But i wouldn’t have mind if they were a bit more open to listen to something else (and i saw rock oriented people jump to electro tracks one day, they decided to give a shot and liked it), because i was really stuck.

The promoter asked me for electro VS crowd doesn’t want electro.

You don’t want to disapoint the promoter, but you don’t want to feel stupind jumping alone in the booth. I did my best to please both, but for sure I shouldn’t have played at this gig.

10

The usual top 40 vs. my DJ tastes situation.
Solutions:

  • mash ups
  • acapellas

It’s cheap. It’s easy (cheating?), but at least you can still have a bit of fun while preventing those especially young crowds from running away, or coming at you with a strong alcohol smell like: “OMAGAD YOU GOTTA PLAY DAT SONG BRU”. Sometimes you have to compromise, it’s all about having enough fun and share it with the people in front of you. :slight_smile: