I was having a chat with a friend earlier today about the different approaches to djing, as their are many different types of djs who share the title of “DJ” yet their jobs and performances may differ heavily depending on the person or gig.
i.e., some DJs are turntablists who focus on vinyl/mixer manipulation technique, then you have standard dance/club DJs who focus on smooth transitions between tracks in an “A to B” fashion. You also have the Radio DJ variety whose focus is track selection and does very minimal fade in/out transitions at the end of tracks. Now with the dawn of Controllers we now have Controllerism djs who focus on heavy audio manipulation using software effects and midi controllers… Just to name a few of the schools of thought and approaches to the craft of DJing.
So with so many different types of DJs out there, I was wondering what the digital dj market was mostly composed of and am curious to know where DJTT sits as a community.
What kind of DJ are YOU ??? The poll is multiple choice so if you belong to more than one of the categories you can choose whatever one applies to you!
I’m pretty much a mixture. Most of my bill paying nights are top-40 nights, so they have a mix of just rough basic “fade over and throw it on” mixes and longer smooth club mixes as you call them for both house/dance and hiphop. But i also like to throw in a bit of “controllerist” and throw in some samples and accapellas and stuff.
but yeah this is all dependent on what the venue wants and what style they play, so that means i’m also Multi-faceted.
I like to think of myself as a dance controllerist, I guess. shrug I just got up there and play and try to make people dance, while entertaining myself
i consider myself more of a dj/performer. Making remixes on the fly, playing my own remixes and edits. Just trying to get the people a different taste on the dance floor than your typical A to B mixing.
that’s cool to see that generally djtt has some very versatile members doin their thing!
i do different approaches depending on the occasion, but I mostly fall under the eclectic side of things even when I’m doing more straight forward club mixing because i always like to bounce around from genre to genre.
House/Electro = Lots of effects and mucking around, short transtions and cuts.
Minimal/Techno/Prog = super smooth and drawn out transtitions, also 3&4 deck loop layering, not much FX, maybe a filter sweep and some extra delay and phaser occasionally.
Psytrance/Prog-Goa/Goa = emphasis on harmonic mixing, mostly basic transitions but more use of effects than techno etc. Might drop a cool sample from some doco in there with some delay etc added.
before laptop, my sets were basic club dj / long transitions. no one around my scene/market was doing anything else. now i consider my sets controllerist/club dj with all of the options that traktor has opened up for me. just like the video, this is the shit we dreamed about, lets get to the fun stuff
DJTT rocks based on the different types of djs that share knowledge here.
i find myself enjoying any situation involving selecting and mixing. so, several of the above, i suppose.
i had a residency for most of this year where i had to exercise a pretty even split between club/dance and eclectic/mash-up, which i would have only been able to do with traktor.
at home when practicing and passing time, i’ll find myself playing around with some accidental wizardry which i suppose one would call controlleristic in nature.
usually i forget how the tricks work by the time i get to the club. i’ve never really aspired to be much of a performance dj, but it’s fun to stress test traktor and your brain once in a while.
