On Djing...

xxp i agree with all of that. i'm trying hard to get better at detaching from lack of communication and things like that because it was making me really bitter for a few years there. it's also a big part of the reason why i'm starting my own thing now - and god does it feel good to be doing that instead of hitting dead ends and not playing anything for months at a time. i was very close to asking this friend (the one who's silent whenever i ask about djing at one of his events) to dj at our next fundraiser we're going to do, because he plays good music, but i deleted the message at the last minute because i realized that working with him would be a real bummer and a slog. it feels a little weird to be avoiding the guy doing every event in this small city, but i just don't like him, like at all! lol. civil frienemies is the way it's got to go.

on vinyl - yeah, sheesh, it's gotten a little ridiculous. also pressing quality is uniformly shitty for new releases right now, it's expeensive as fuck (another gatekeeping aspect), the shortages are real so artists who want to put stuff out are facing insane backlogs, etc etc. cdjs and uncompressed audio are the way to go imo. though one thing i LOVED about traktor was how flexible the master tempo was - you could transition from 124 bpm to 100 bpm and make it sound really good. that's a bit harder to do on cdjs afaict.

Bring WAY too many tunes - you'll need them because as you play, you'll change your mind about how it's supposed to go and you want to e equipped....watch the crowd....don't play too loud - leave a a bit of headroom for chat. Bring lots of formats (cd/vinyl/mp3/digital) because shit always breaks down when you least expect it...don't let people leave liquids near your set-up....bring a solid center adapater for 45's if needed....bring your own headphones with proper connections for the mixer...

― ^TwIn*InFiNiTiVeS^, Friday, September 10, 2021 1:24 PM

speaking as someone who has DJd on radio and in public for decades, this is A+ advice all around

also, bring tape for running cable connections across a floor with foot traffic

tape, yes!

i used to say bring a flashlight but now that every phone has one...

also, consider bringing scissors to cut the tape if you're as manually challenged as i am

get someone to teach you how to wrap and unwrap cables. i still can't really do it very well.

love all the advice, this is very helpful!

This is a big problem I'm encountering again and again and yet haven't found a real solution for. I use a Pioneer DDJ-SR controller and Mac running Serato at home. Often I'm invited to play at places where I'm expected to bring a USB and plug it into CDJs. As well as not having much experience on these, it's touch and go whether my files will appear with any track information when I plug it in, even if I go through the ballache of analysing the tracks in Rekordbox before I go out. There's even a free program that's supposed to help with this, but I've watched a bunch of YouTube tutorials and I'm still confused about a few things

hmmmm i used to have that problem! tracks would show up in alphabetical order by file name or something like that. no playlist order at all. a real nightmare. i'm pretty sure it eventually started working when i switched to a pc laptop :(. if i remember right, it was something to do with the way the usb key was formatted. but i think i reformatted it as fat32 and it still gave me the same issue.

you know what, now that i think about it, i think what finally solved the problem was getting a new usb drive and formatting it to fat32 right out of the gate. sorry, my memory is kind of fuzzy on this, no idea if it would actually help solve your problem.

my advice would be to try getting a new usb key (if you haven't done that already)

(all my playlist info would be gone and tracks would show up alphabetical by artist name. it happened a few times, so i actually went to the trouble of inserting a number in order before the artist name to designate the order it should show up on the cdjs, replicating the playlist, so now i have a bunch of tracks that are like 48Carl Craig etc. because i'm too lazy to clean anything up)

Yes that's what would happen to me. All in filename order

making some progress i guess. keeping my goal of a gig a month. one in october at the venue i have previously shit-talked on this board. i just straight up asked them on instagram and they straight up gave me an opening spot for l4ur3n l0 sung. idk they're nice kids. what to play on a saturday night before anyone shows up...

trying to put together another party/fundraiser for nov 5. the org is qtbipoc-supporting. still waiting to hear back from the dj we want to feature. it should be interesting. i'm happy with the direction these parties are headed and it feels like it could grow into something really positive and interesting.

sometimes i crave more gigs. looking at the bar scene regulars though, they have it on lock and i don't know that i have a good bar sound down for this city tbh. i've reached out to a few bars but no bites. i wish our two gay bars weren't so abysmal. the one is not interested in anything that isn't lady gaga (barry harris remix) and the other, the 80-year-old owner's boyfriend is the dj every weekend, and i pissed that queen off a long time ago.

anyone else go through a 'i should be playing other stuff' crisis every few months or so? sometimes i just have no idea what i want to play.

I definitely wonder if the stuff I want to play is actually anything that anyone else wants to dance to or if I need to shift towards more trendy stuff

I played my first little residency gig in the pub I mentioned above last Saturday and I'm playing again on Thursday.
My friend joined me as guest DJ. Unfortunately for the first half of the night we didn't realise they'd turned the volume down at the source and the more we tried to crank the sound up to an audible level, the worse it sounded. Luckily we worked it out in the end.
It's also the kind of place where most people just go outside and smoke weed in the back yard area until they close it, so we only really had people getting up and dancing from 11pm and had to finish at 12. So I guess my job is background sounds and then a pre-club warm up.

i hope they're at least paying you

i had a pretty good warmup thing tonight. had some people going for a few tracks. i played this front 242 thing that sounded even better than i imagined but i think it may have cleared the room? i had two different conversations with people about what i played, and like, "indie dance" was mentioned - god i hate that term lol. i think i got negged by the booking manager for playing a disco track. my city is soooo small. there are these huge gaps between like 3 small tribes along dance music genre lines. you get the impression that they're competing for dancers. it's almost like people here are scared of music that might fall outside the lines of their social positioning and it just .. it's all so dispiriting lol. which is the opposite of what dance music and djing is supposed to be. i see people everywhere else being as eclectic as hell? anyway, yeah my city sucks. i don't see how i can keep staggering into that sucky headwind. one day i'll get out of here.

I definitely have this fear that what I want to do doesn't stay strictly enough within genre lines to have an audience. I feel like techno right now is very much about honing in on your very specific micro genre and not deviating from it, and that's just not where my head's at whatsoever. I want to make it eclectic and interesting and full of surprises, and not worry about genre purity.

that's what i love about the djs who post here.. everyone likes to draw from outside those boundaries! and like is it 'indie dance' to play lots of everything? was it 'indie dance' when electrifying mojo played kraftwerk?

there is a lack of the spirit of musical adventure and yet everyone thinks they know what 'good music' is. the tech house people had a party a few years ago that they called 'qu4l1ty c0ntr0l' ffs. nothing says fun like naming your party after a department at work that no one wants to deal with.

the dj who bridged me to the gig last night, sweet kid, was adamant to me about how 'tech house' was bad and over and that he's really into 'deep tech' whatever tf that is. i told him my line that there's a little bit of the good stuff in every microgenre. i mean, he's young, but there's almost like this obsessive attachment to certain sounds that people in a certain stage of development have and i just don't relate to it anymore. give me the universe instead please.

Damn that sounds infuriating.

Amazingly I got a gig here - some kids are starting a club night and they know my music, and hit me up out of nowhere when they found out I lived here. Never thought that would actually happen. I'm fully prepared for no one to be there, but glad to be asked and that that won't my responsibility. :) Looking forward to getting a set together.

xp the trouble is DJs have to figure out how to create atmosphere and find a cohesive flow that builds momentum and while getting the hang of that it's easy to learn the wrong lesson, which is to stick to an already established subgenre as a shortcut to cohesion rather than to form unique and creative connections between tracks that are particular to one's own taste and way of hearing. it's riskier ignoring genre in front of a dancefloor, but the best is when all boundaries cease to exist and the music is all one timeless cosmic soup of rhythm and sound and individual egos and bodies break down into a single amorphous pool of desirous flesh etc

does anyone else here do bar/restaurant gigs where the focus isn't dancing but rather a kind of pleasant background ambience that increases in tempo and intensity as the place fills up, then ramp back down by closing? that type of gig is even more amenable to genre-hopping.

so many mixes right now sound like someone picked a really specific sound and then found every last track that matches that and they just become interchangeable parts in the mix. I get that this is good for giving people a clear, reliable idea of what your "brand" is, creating very smooth mixes that put people in a zone, and not confusing people with things they haven't heard, but it just gets dull to me, especially when I'm mostly just listening at home right now.

I agree with map about each microgenre having a little bit to offer. I look at each one as a different color/mood/personality that can contrast with other moods to tell a story and build some kind of arc full of ups and downs and surprises, but I also get that you need a receptive audience to pull that off, and not a bunch of people who will tell you "that's not real [X]"

does anyone else here do bar/restaurant gigs where the focus isn't dancing but rather a kind of pleasant background ambience that increases in tempo and intensity as the place fills up, then ramp back down by closing? that type of gig is even more amenable to genre-hopping.

― Communist Hockey Goblin (sleeve), Sunday, October 17, 2021 3:10 PM (fifteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this was my regular gig for a couple years. it was fun and i had a lot of freedom, but it did become unsatisfying playing in a setting not really designed for dancing

the dj who bridged me to the gig last night, sweet kid, was adamant to me about how 'tech house' was bad and over and that he's really into 'deep tech' whatever tf that is

This fellow needs reminding, genres are for police informants

saer otm, as usual

haha, great posts everyone :)

Amazingly I got a gig here - some kids are starting a club night and they know my music, and hit me up out of nowhere when they found out I lived here. Never thought that would actually happen. I'm fully prepared for no one to be there, but glad to be asked and that that won't my responsibility. :) Looking forward to getting a set together.

― change display name (Jordan), Sunday, October 17, 2021 8:03 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is really cool! way to go.

and karl otm. that moment where everything melts away into collective ecstasy.

I've been playing out almost once a week recently which is fantastic, although I'm starting to worry I can't rely on the same group of friends to keep coming to my gigs.

I played after an Afrobeat band a couple of weeks ago.

Then it was my first time putting on an actual paid night of dancing with my Terrain group, and that was basically the best night of my life as I got to close the night going back to back with another DJ and we just played nothing but "global bangers" as we put it. I did get pulled up in a half jokey way by a mate afterwards for slipping in a BLACKPINK track in among the harder afro and Latin riddims we were playing, but, (in his words) "you did it with guts and conviction". So maybe that's the key, map, when it comes to playing stuff outside the perceived genre lines: just fucking play it and if people don't like it, act like they are?? I dunno. I'm still getting used to this myself.

Oh and then down the pub the other day I did a nice straight up house and techno bobbins set and that was so much fun. As usual people only really started dancing half an hour before closing time but still... Oh yeah and these two students who had more or less been dancing for quite a while came up towards the end of my 4hr four-in-the-floor dance set and requested Smash Mouth. I never know what to say to those kinds of people really...

In other news, I figured I'd occasionally like to bring a few records out to play as opposed to digital decks so I've just invested in some Ortofon Concorde needles. Bloody hell, so expensive! I really hope I can justify these as it'll take about three pub gigs to pay for them

the genre restriction thing is so weird to me - I started clubbing when the 2ManyDJs style of wilful eclecticism was a big deal, and in Glasgow we've always had the Optimo/Numbers axes of DJing where the approach seems so omnivorous and unrestricted.

I think it just comes down to there being a much larger audience for dance music in the UK and Europe vs a place like SLC. Even here in Austin, which has a large music scene, it's oriented much more around live music than dance stuff.

the genre restriction thing is so weird to me

i dont see how its weird? like theres room for a plurality of approaches to playing records ... some of the most life affirming dancing experiences ive ever had were just like several hours of house music with only slight variations in groove and hi-hat patterns and chordal flourishes ... no shade to people here but i think a more heterogenous approach is a lot harder to pull of well than people think, like there's a difference between having the ability to draw from different genres and styles and reveal emergent connections between seemingly disparate records versus just throwing random shit at the dancefloor and hoping something sticks (yeah i realise this is a bit of an extreme binary but i suck at expressing myself; also just to reiterate again i dont mean this as criticism of anyone posting here because youre all great!)

sorry if that came off as combative

Eclecticism is for agent provocateurs. They try that when the police informants have drawn a blank.

Its the good cop bad cop routine don't fall for it lads

I mean more the idea of a crowd being so "against" hearing something outside narrowly defined parameters. I can't imagine being aghast at going out to hear one type of dance music and the DJ playing something from "outside" it if it made sense.

(I mean, obviously if I went to Berghain and someone was playing EDM remixes of chart pop I'd be disappointed)

oops sorry, guess i wasnt following the convo well enough. im an idiot, time to stop posting

don't be silly!

Will admit that a lot of my impressions about this are based far more on the mixes I come across online vs real life experience, although I strongly suspect there isn't a very diverse scene around here just waiting to be unearthed.

I like most approaches to deejaying, but I think that during my more active clubbing days, I usually went "for" specific genres, and would be turned off by those who strayed. I remember when I used to promote and occasionally spin for an industrial/goth/post-punk night, and while I would sometimes get a little "tech-y" or whatever, one of the other people who would spin occasionally did sets that consisted of mostly Eurodance hits of the early 90s, and i would just be fucking apoplectic at him. You have a crowd full of people who came to cruise and dance to Front 242 and Ministry and shit, please don't play "Big Fun" right now.

That said, because San Francisco is San Francisco, I also saw Optimo and crew DJ a pretty substantial number of times, and I loved every moment of it.

“meaningful eclecticism” is totally cool but “look all at me hop styles, do u see what I did there” and shit like erland oye’s dj kicks usually fucking sucks

omg i have always dreamed about playing slow moody industrial/tech/ebm at a bathhouse or private party tbqfh.

i feel like genre hopping is a very advanced skill i'm still working on? a little bit goes a long way. you've got to know your music. some jumps work very well, some not so much. underground to pop is real tricky imo. it seems kind of imperative that your crowd trusts you at least a little bit.

coincidentally i just played some optimo stuff on saturday! the severed heads dub they did sounded incredible on a big system.

my genre hopping for that set was, like, patrick cowley, a hip house track from ben cenac, the severed heads dub, some wild tech / ebm, some dark disco with hard trance flavors, and then an analog nu disco stormer. we'll see if that ended my association with this venue haha! n.b. they're getting sold for more condos next year anyway.

yeah, I'm not trying to do some crazy Naked City-style mash up of genres. My approach is more like starting off with some mid-tempo, melodic House tracks and gradually ramping up over the course of a couple hours to harder, darker, faster tech stuff, as opposed to, say, playing 100 different hard acid tracks all at 140 BPM.

I think you could totally slip "Big Fun" into a postpunk style set, but yeah you'd have to earn it, maybe put it in about three quarters of the way through when everyone's comfortable with what's going down, maybe play it after a more consolidated banger like Blue Monday or something, and then make sure you get back on piste after

I ran my own new wave / post punk night in a pub a while back and I know for certain that once you start digging out the synth pop bangers it's really hard to come back from them.
Once "Don't You Want Me" comes out and all the people who had turned up but not necessarily to hear Medium Medium start dancing and singing along, you're screwed

I wanna go to one of map's nights