When do you know its the right time to start looking for giggs?
So i’ve been practicing my mixing techniques quite a bit. On & Off for over a year and I was thinking about going to some hookah bars and playing for free just to get comfortable with the live experience. But how do I know if i’m ready? I don’t want to make a fool out of myself.
You will know when you are ready AFTER you have made a fool of yourself a few times and gotten over it.
X
Put a demo together and go for it. You won’t know if you suck till you try eh 
make sure you can play for 6 hours if necessary.
lol sounds good, now it’s time to phone some of the local hookah bars to try and book a gigg.
I’m not sure if a hookah bar is the correct spot for some psychedelic trance but i’ll try it out anyways.
mate, leave the psy for the last hour or so, the folks will dig it (thats what we do). the main thing when you step out of the bedroom is you gotta learn to gauge the vibe of the place, what peeps are into etc. all comes with some experience.
Maybe some house music then to start it off?
Take it one step at a time, my first “gigs” were switching cds out of the stereo at house parties. You might go at a quicker pace than I, but the idea is to make playing music in front of people so natural that you don’t bat an eye at it. Start small, and let your gigs grow with your abilities.
That being said, my best bit of technical advice for getting through the turbulence of your first few gigs is to have as wide a variety of music as you can afford. I have been gigging out for years, and every night I still come home with a list of songs that I feel stupid for not having already!
I have hundreds of songs. That’s not the problem, I literally dig through my music collection and it never ends. It’s like a puzzle I spend hours trying to find songs that fit well with each other for smooth solid transitions.
You have no idea buddy! There’s nothing worse than building an awesome set, and playing it for a crowd, and having them just tune out totally stone faced! Two posts back you were questioning what genre of music to play, but you think you can confidently build a set that will please the crowd simply based off of your “solid transitions”? At this point in your career, there’s no such thing as being overly prepared, it can’t hurt to keep your music selection flexible.
It’s blunt, but I’ve got to agree. The best way to look at it is that you’re not any better at DJing than the crowd thinks you are. They don’t care about your smooth transitions. They don’t know what transitions are. All they care about is what the sound coming out of the speakers is at the uneven intervals of their conversation going silent. The most important thing for a gig like this is the music you’re playing. Unfortunately, the way you’re playing it almost doesn’t matter.
True I will keep practicing and probably hold off on the hookah bars. I don’t want to turn peoples night into a shit fest. If I’m not confident on what genre to play then I’m probably not ready anyways.
you may be the best troll we’ve got. kudos!
you know its time when your wife or parents keep screaming at you to find a job and help with the bills lolol 
actually when you feel comfortable, you will want to go out and do shows and find gigs
Hey man, I’m not trying to bring you or your confidence down, I still think you should go for it! Don’t let the fear of not getting everything perfect stop you from giving it a shot. Heck, don’t let the fear of the night being a total failure stop you. Just try and find a place that isn’t out of your league, and give it a shot. The kind of place that would hire a newbie dj with no experience or references isn’t going to kill your resume if it doesn’t work out anyway.
I had a buddy ask me to start djing at his rock venue between bands, he likes the music between bands to contrast against the music that the bands play, so as long as I’m not spinning hard rock, I’m pretty much on the ball. It’s at most twenty minutes between each band, four to six times a night.
If there’s any kind of place like that around you, maybe talk to them. Low key performances, in a place that is already all about the music! hand out some business cards, talk to some folks?
Eh I think I need to come up with more tricks up my sleeve anyways, the only way of mixing I know how to do. Is the simple transition when track is 16 counts away from ending start new track. That’s probably not that entertaining for a crowd. I’ll keep watching the 5 basic transitions and keep practicing them.
Hola amigos is the DJ Qbert of trolls.
have you done any house parties or anything like that? get lots of those under your belt.
normally you’re ready to DJ out at clubs right after you unpack your mixtrack out of it’s box and download the beatport top 100 from a blog. At least that’s what it seems like in my town
Once you feel you are comfortable mixing tracks, you just have to get out and do it live. Playing live in front of people is way different then practicing at home and you will learn more about reading the crowd and know what to play next.
Yep. Get a few of those first.