Whats the biggest mistake you have ever made DJing Live ?
Just wondering what hiccups people have had whilst playing live. No matter what its inevitable people make mistakes.
Last night I was mixing a track in and accidentally pressed ‘cue’ on the wrong deck.
Somehow i managed to get it all flowing again. I guess all you can do is laugh it off Nobody seemed to notice too much, just had to mix it out really fast before people realised it was the same song haha
This I used to do a lot of times hehehe
When you use two korg nanos and a maudio oxygen 25keys all three without labels sometimes get difficult to hit the right button
left the crossfader all the way to deck B after a quick cut. was mixing in headphones, brought in track A, did not move crossfader back. mixed out of B back to A with volume fader, and proceeded to dance to silence in front of the bar for a good 30 seconds or so before realizing something was amiss.
+1… it’s the small mistakes like this that snowball into big ones. Accidentally nudging the crossfader over and then desperately troubleshooting wires when you bring up the volume fader, see levels on the LEDs but get no sound - then realising it was the crossfader
done this when recording a mix halfway through then then relized after 30mins of audio there was 30min of silence XD
Also playing for some friends I accidentally hit play again and stopped the track and loaded a song into the wrong deck fixed this one by loading into empty
Also recorded a whole mix of silence due to recording being set to external mode
I once played a festival in Thailand… was about 40C and I was dj’ing outside… my laptop started to get really hot and it suddenly blue screened on me. Luckily I had a mix cd prepared in the CDJ - hit play and no one really noticed. The big fuck up was when my laptop finally restarted and I fired up Traktor again… I didn’t properly turn the CDJ’s volume down so you could still hear part of the cd playing whilst I was dj’ing.
I didn’t notice for ages as I was playing at a festival and there were a few other sound systems nearby. It just sounded like other tunes being played in the distance (because it was quieter, off beat and out of time). I must have played for about 20 minutes like this, noticing the crowd getting less and less into it. Wasn’t until the promoter came along and told me to sort it out that I noticed my mistake.
Pushing the wrong eject button on the CDJ, that sucked.
Leaning over the deck and pushing the CUE button stopping the sound.
Knocking crossfader.
Playing a track that starts skipping.
Leaving WiFi on and Traktor stopping.
Years ago being drunk and playing the same song every 30 minutes.
Going to use CDJ jog wheel in CD mode and find out they are on VINYL mode.
Done heaps of mistakes, nowadays I do very little and if I do I know how to fix them quickly and I crowd rarley notices.
And the loved the playing dubstep as a mistake post earlier
At my first legit gig (which was a crazy dubstep rave) I was going to swap drops. It was between Woo Boost and Swagga. Woo Boost was playing, and just as that standard rusko drop is about to come in, I smash the crossfade with fairly good timing, but my hand slips and I hit play on my S4. The track was cued in my headphones, and I was really pumped off of it, but then everyone was looking at me like I was crazy, so I took off the phones to silence. Loaded 2 new tracks and started up again. Pretty humiliating. At least a large portion of the people there were my friends and not some random partygoer.
The lesson here is not to get too self indulgent… take your headphones off every now and then!! saying that ive done this more times than i care to remember.
The big one used to be lifting the arm off the wrong vinyl… although i realised this wasnt something to get too embarrassed about when i saw Paul Van Dyk do it at a gig in 2000!!
Getting smashed every week was my number one fail. I used to have residency and played pretty much two six hour slots every week, which always started off slow so encouraged me to have a drink or two. The booth used to have a pull out floor and I used to have a good stash of beer and vodka underneath. Under the influence I have proceeded to:
Pull out output leads (epic silence), change track on the wrong CDJ, nudge needles across records, blow an amp, play totally inappropriate music and was quite prone to try and gee a dance floor up by running onto the dance floor and making like Carlton from the Fresh Prince.
Amazingly I kept it up for over a year and only lost my place as I moved over 300 miles away!
Never actually done this live (yet) haha. But sometimes I like to play an acapella in the breakdown of a song. Anyways sometimes I get lazy and know that the song fits in at a certain point so I just hit play without pre-listening in my headphones.
A lot of the time the BPM is a lot lower and I still have the sync activated at times :s and so out comes a squeaky chipmunk voice. Thankfully live I tend to check in the headphones before playing.
Nobody seemed to notice too much, just had to mix it out really fast before people realised it was the same song haha
saying that ive done this more times than i care to remember.