On Djing...

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

― Urbandn hope all ye who enter here (dog latin), Tuesday, 19 October 2021 00:47 (twelve hours ago) link

lollll

I wanna go to one of map's nights

― Urbandn hope all ye who enter here (dog latin), Tuesday, 19 October 2021 00:48 (twelve hours ago) link

hey thanks! likewise, your sets always sound like a ton of fun.

re: dj pools, i used to be a member of one, i think it was dj city (i remember the red and white interface but not the name), back when i was trying to hack it in a gay bar on saturday nights. it's worth it if you're playing a fair amount from contemporary top 40 or one or two neighborhoods away (i.e. edm or reggaeton). i remember seeing a couple of surprises on the weekly lists though. they have a lot of music. i also used to be more doctrinaire about lossless vs mp3s, but i don't know, all that stuff is produced to sound just fine as an aac or 320 mp3 afaict.

i think most of the pools let you look at what they're putting out before you try them.

this "don't you want me" / "big fun" discussion is giving me serious flashbacks. i can still picture exactly who sang along to 'a little respect' every. fucking. sunday. lmao

my boyfriend at the time (the dj) used to cane "strike it up." he liked anything that had what sounded like drill sergeants in them. went apeshit over purple disco machine - "body funk". his business was making fascist sounding fitness music so it makes sense.

haha, love this

if I'm being real honest, eclecticism to me means mixing in some hard house tracks into my techno set that sound like they were recorded by the d-bags from Jersey Shore

like a good portion of my rave experiences involved sharing space with 'roided up assholes from shitty New England suburbs, and I think some aspect of that is permanently imprinted in my musical taste

I think the reason I mention "Big Fun" in particular is that obviously I love the track, but it really didn't fit with the vibe of the night or the crowd. That club was one of the last times I got the whole party on the floor around midnight with this absolutely exquisite remix

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdt8xCenLko

well that and the enormous queer warehouse party where i fucked up my triggers and ended up playing the Treasure Fingers remix of Fergie's "Glamorous" twice, but the crowd went mental when it started over again so I just let it do its thing.

truly miss deejaying.

oh man, that depeche mode remix is ungh

good ungh or bad ungh

it makes a certain type of crowd go ape, but it's also pretty lol in a lot of way.

good ungh, sorry!

i need a little lol or ridiculousness in my dance music to get me smiling you know?

yeah, that's what i thought. i love it, but i have a sort of embarrassing love for Stephan Bodzin. weird bald baby-man making very trancey tech-house.

what's the song? it's showing as unavailable

oof. it's the Bodzin/Huntemann remix of "Everything Counts"

Sounds sick

My dj gig was canceled because 'the club double-booked', oh well. At least I have a fun set ready to go for next time, or if I need to do a radio mix.

I know it's not true, but I really want to believe we are talking about slipping all 4 sides of Miles Davis - Big Fun in the middle of an industrial set because that would be amazing
― Mr. Cacciatore (Moodles), Tuesday, 19 October 2021

not miles davis but Peter brotzmann and 20 different djs playing at once, mixed signals, 4 AM pirate radio signals blending into each other. Requires a dj set to be chopped up into 20 different pieces then sloppily mixed in and out of each other, but it's fun, maximum hooligan plunderphonics. https://soundcloud.com/confccrew/tusk-mix

like a good portion of my rave experiences involved sharing space with 'roided up assholes from shitty New England suburbs, and I think some aspect of that is permanently imprinted in my musical taste
― Mr. Cacciatore (Moodles), Tuesday, 19 October 2021

of course. Dance music without arseholes is just cultural kitsch, instead of deferring to the state orator (der mussolini) it's the freedom to keep banging away, away, and away at the same mediocrity for 30 years, please allow me to pretend I think, sir.

DJ update:

- Yesterday I hired a studio just so I could use their CDJs and get to grips with getting my tracks on a USB in some usable order. It took an hour to wrap my head around the latter, and then an hour of mixing. It's all quite different from the Serato controller I use at home. It was well worth it though and now my anxiety about using club CDJs is calmed.

- Been asked to do an hour long guest mix for a local digital station which is great cos I had a mix of ravey bangers I wanted to make anyway. I'm trying to get better at mixing to different tempos rather than just blithely going up the BPM column as I'm wont to do. It means I have to be a lot more dextrous and creative about what I do each time. Had a go at the mix yesterday and it's actually pretty good but I'm gonna have another crack at it today

I like the idea of testing out the CDJs. Were they Pioneer? What were some things you figured out about them?

I'm trying to get better at mixing to different tempos rather than just blithely going up the BPM column as I'm wont to do.

I'm curious about what you mean by this

i have literally never mixed on CDJs 😮

same

the nice thing about mixing poppy dance music is that you can cut to a different bpm track at the end of a riser/drop and sound good easily. don't know how you do it from one track-y dance thing into another without some clunkiness.

i think maybe i should have gone the vinyl direction sometimes but it is what it is. i sold it all off and don't have the budget for it.

still an uphill slog trying to get gigs but we're moving toward winter now, slc goes to sleep. next thing is another fundraiser 12/3 for a houseless support org. i asked a newish guy to dj, more indie dance, has a good grasp of what makes for fun music imo.

all the cool djs here are playing records. a long-time party-thrower here likes what i play but vinyl is a requirement for their nights.

I guess my position there would be "lossless is ok" but I have also encountered issues where club owners are (justifiably) wary of those 1/8" headphone jacks as laptop outputs into a large house system.

(even with e.g. a Dragonfly, which I have, it still uses a 1/8" stereo cable out)

oh I sorta missed the CDJ part of that, I assume they have their own dedicated outputs w/like RCA cables or similar, so not the same as coming in with a laptop and a hard drive (like I usually do, plus one turntable and a few crates)

iirc even though I had my own mixer, the issue was the 1/8" laptop output, so I ended up playing all vinyl. n.b. this was like 10 years ago but the club is still there

a friend of mine was teaching me to use cdjs in her studio the fall/winter before the pandemic. djed once a few days before nye 2020 at a friends night and it was super fun. really wanna get back at it now that bars are reopening but dancing is still illegal indoors in british columbia (there’s actually a law that you have to have both hands on the table at all times lol). still have 2 usbs on my keychain full of heaters

both hands on the table at all times

:O :O :O

both hands on the table at all times

crazy!

(even with e.g. a Dragonfly, which I have, it still uses a 1/8" stereo cable out

have you had any issues with your Dragonfly?

They are wonderful things but i have had a ridiculously high number of them fail on me. i am speculating that high levels of bass might be blowing out the analogue circuit.

i have literally never mixed on CDJs either. i think i should maybe learn how to use a CDJ-3000 as there are some wild things one can do on them.

high levels of bass as in the vibration the bass creates is blowing them out.

the nice thing about mixing poppy dance music is that you can cut to a different bpm track at the end of a riser/drop and sound good easily. don't know how you do it from one track-y dance thing into another without some clunkiness.

― Linda and Jodie Rocco (map), Saturday, 6 November 2021

hip hop style mixing, meine junge! wack the crossfader und scratch the bit you want to mix in, then spin back first track if you want to. Sasha style mixing is a CIA psyop.

My Pioneer controller has RCA outs, and I have RCA to XLR cables.

The few times I've had to use CDJs I've always been nervous and looked up the manual and dumb tutorial videos to make sure I remember the deal. I've also used a controller/laptop a couple times even when they were an option, but have resolved not to do that in the future. :)

Also you can still twerk with both hands on the table. Well, I can't, but some can.

stir I have not had any issues with my Dragonfly so far, and it's been maybe 4 years or more? fingers crossed I guess.

wow! i have got through 10+ in that time. expensive! i'm starting to think i may have a DAC curse on me.

that is insane, you should talk to the company!

i should.

Unless there's a good reason for it (like it's a vintage music night or whatever) I feel that "strictly vinyl only" is broadly a form of gatekeeping that I'm against. The price of buying decks and mixers to practice on is way out of reach for most people, let alone buying vinyl all the time. Plus a lot of the music I play out has never and will never get released on a hard format.

The other day though I did decide to purchase some needles (even those were mad pricey) as I really fancied playing records at a night I was putting on in a nice cocktail bar. Really enjoyed it. I cant say I'm seasoned enough to mix records together, so it was more about finding nice segues between eclectic styles. But yeah, really vinyl mixing is a very different beast to digital mixing.

The weird thing about some CDJs is they don't accept WAVs, and I don't think hardly any of them play FLACs which is super annoying.

I like the idea of testing out the CDJs. Were they Pioneer? What were some things you figured out about them?

I'm trying to get better at mixing to different tempos rather than just blithely going up the BPM column as I'm wont to do.

I'm curious about what you mean by this

It's not a million miles from the Serato controller/laptop set up I have at home, but the layout is different and there's a slightly different tactility to it. I almost exclusively use hot cues at home and rarely touch the Cue button. The CDJs I were using did have Hot Cues but it's a bit fiddly and so I was mostly getting used to how the Cue works.

The other main thing was really how to get my crates from Serato onto a USB so that the CDJs understand it. So, with a lot of trial and error, here's what I learnt:

- Make sure your USB is formatted to Fat32 - not MacOS or ExFat. It took me ages to work this out.
- you may want to retitle your tracks so the tempo/key information is in there, e.g. "114 4A - Talking Heads - Once In A Lifetime", that way the info will be there when it comes to CDJing. Not essential though.
- in Serato, in the File section, copy my crate(s) onto the USB
- use Rekordbuddy2 to analyse them so that my hot cue info is on there (there is a tutorial on YouTube)
- use Rekordbox to analyse the tracks. Can take a while.
- Organise the tracks in tempo order by using the column headers, then (and this is very important) right-click on the track number column header and select Renumber (I think that's right). So what this does is it makes sure your tracks appear in Tempo order when you plug in the stick.
- Now make sure you export the playlist(s) back onto the stick. If you don't do this, nothing will work.

That all took me an hour to work out and I really wish I'd known about it beforehand because for the life of me I couldn't find any sort of online guide to show me and it was all very upsetting.

As for the BPM thing: digital DJing is very handy because it lets you sort your tracks by tempo. This is wonderful, especially when you're starting, because it means you can start slow and gradually up the tempo each time you drop a track. If course tempo isn't everything though: you might have two complementary sounding tracks that are in totally different tempos, so you can't just beatmatch them and do a smooth blend. Also, this thing of just gradually going up the tempos can make for kind of samey transitions and I'm getting a bit bored of this. So I'm trying to teach myself ways to really think about how tunes might fit together well even if they're out of step, and come up with more creative ways to mix them together.

Sorry, maybe I should have split that long post up into three separate ones.

ugh, that's good to know about FLAC since a large portion of my tracks are in that format, looks like I may have to convert them over or re-download in a different format

Yeah. I don't know if it's the case across the board but I think even Rekordbox doesn't support Flac and it's really puzzling

Rekordbox definitely supports FLAC, which is why I'm surprised so many of their CDJs do not

Ah okay. I was sure it would warn me if I had FLACs in a playlist but maybe I'm wrong

It might warn you since they are compatible with other hardware

I feel that "strictly vinyl only" is broadly a form of gatekeeping that I'm against.

do you mean if a night is being promoted as "strictly vinyl only" or if someone happens to be playing just vinyl.

if the former i'm with you 100% but i don't think playing only vinyl is gatekeeping.

Yeah the former. No problem with vinyl DJs or people who want to play vinyl, that's cool. But there's a strain of DJ snobbery that looks down on digital DJing as "not proper DJing" and it sucks. Plus, you know, people are there to dance and hear good music and that's the point

yes, absolutely. i'm pretty sure 99.999999% of people on a dancefloor couldn't care less whether it was vinyl or digital.