On Djing...

I did essentially my first live radio show in 2 years last Monday, it felt pretty good! I am back live for the foreseeable future.

i was spinning like 50s/early 60s mambo & rhumba-influenced r&b on 45, doo wop groups doing 'exotica' riffs, stuff like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNwdtirJUIo

(its not my main thing but its what i brought that night, figuring (correctly) that people weren't going to be looking for a big sweaty northern soul dance party. and apparently i met the one person in my town that night who absolutely lives & breathes that stuff.)

fuckin' rad

<3 <3 <3 !!!

I would totally come to this DJ night!

aw thanks sleeve & Dan. yeah i like the way that stuff sounds for certain spaces & crowds where like, theyre either done with dancing or havent gotten loose enough for it yet, but they still want to vibe

do you have any mixes of this stuff online at all?

apparently i used that track on this mix here, although the whole mix kind of oscillates between stuff with that sound & more traditional 60s latin jazz & boogaloo kinda stuff

thank you.

SO the sunday tea dance party i'm starting...

the bar has guaranteed i can use one active 12" speaker, maybe two. no subwoofer. i think this will be ok for the first few weeks as i doubt we will have more than 20 people out there at a time. if it's a runaway success we will obviously need more sound.

i am looking at purchasing a turbosound speaker on credit, the kind with a small sub and vertical tower line array. around a grand. BUT my plan is, see how this goes for a few weeks and make sure the income stream starts to flow ($100 for four hours every week, which is ridiculously low but i've got to start somewhere).

it is unclear if the bar speakers will be in use by the indoor drag brunch performers when we start at 4 pm. so i will be arriving before the drag show on 4/3 and moving at least one speaker out to the patio.

said patio is pretty cool! it is fairly small but comfortable and has pleasant seating and a nice view of the city. best of all, no concrete walls turning the sound into soupy garbage.

last of all, i need a name for this. i thought of 69th Ward Tea Dance (the ward thing is a play on mormon ward dances, the 69 refers to you know what (69, a sexual act)). is this too abstruse? the only other option i can think of is simply Sunday Tea Dance. your feedback on this matter is appreciated.

69th Ward ftw imo

it's so wild how quickly crowd noise can overtake a sound system when you start in a quiet space at what seems like a decent volume

$30-40 per hour seems like going rate so yeah I would also take $100 for 4 hrs

oops, meant to add - as a "foot in the door" starting wage kinda thing

cool, thanks for the feedback!

it really is crazy how fast the sound can get drowned out by people.

i started the tea dance gig yesterday. i really thought no one would show up, but that was not the case :). i caught this bug to dj unicorn club music at a gay bar almost four years ago and i am FINALLY back to it. it's going to be a fun spring and summer.

Congrats!

ty

2nd sunday in the bucket. another cold day but people turned up again. bar owner said afterwards he liked what i was playing and asked if i could play a night next weekend in addition to sunday. someone from local pride org wants me to do their retro party next month. i am happy and getting a little extra $. badly need a case for my controller and more hd space.

getting lots of compliments and smiles so yeah. lately feel like this is my calling tbh.

That’s awesome, map!

Love it. No djing on the horizon for me, but the Bl3ss3d M@donna played my new single at a big festival in Brazil and it "obliterated", so that's all I need. Much easier than going places and staying up late. :)

A week on Friday, after a gap of 25 months, I get my weekly vintage disco/funk/soul residency back at the bar up the road. Having sold off my vinyl during lockdown, I’ve gone digital - which, given the state of the floorboards, will significantly reduce my stress levels - and I’ll be swapping the much loved £12.99 Lidl disco ball for a proper lighting rig with strobes and lasers and shit. I’m now spending every available waking hour punching bar markers into Serato and wishing that click tracks had been invented a decade earlier.

(actually, punching bar markers into Rodgers/Edwards comp/prods kinda feels like desecration)

(and I have become all the more fondly disposed towards Dave Lee ZR remixes and Reflex revisions, even if they still kinda feel like cheating)

congrats Mike + Jordan!

Oh and map too! :)

Holy shit@Jordan! Which track? Link pls.

That is rad J.

Mike: feel you on the dave lee / reflex reliance.

Heh I posted it to two threads already and have been feeling bad for self-promo, but it's this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBM1bZwjbbA

Dope

thanks!

a new record store just opened up in my neighborhood, and they put out a call on their IG for DJs to do weekend in-store sets. i volunteered to do one and they got back to me today, offered me potential dates, and said they'd prefer it if i had a crew or friends who wanted to dj with me because they want to create a cool hangout spot vibe for the store. which i get, but the problem is...i honestly don't really know very many DJs? like i have maybe one or two people i could ask but i'm still relatively new to doing this and i don't have a ton of connections let alone a "crew." but i volunteered for a slot anyway so i have about three weeks to think of something lol. still, i'm excited to branch out beyond the happy hour i've been doing!

if i were you i'd ask some friends if they wanted to hang out while i mix and they can put some records on if they want, who cares if they actually dj

Last week's relaunch of my Friday night bar residency went so, so well (and the bar's pleased, because they had post-lockdown record takings). My new lighting rig, which replaces the much loved £12.99 Lidl desktop mirror ball, illuminated both the main room and the upstairs mezzanine, which was cool. Swapping from vinyl to digital made for a bigger dancefloor, with no needle-jump red zones to police, also aided by the bar removing some of the seating for the night. The bar has also been refurbed, so the whole place felt different, and better.

As it was my first public outing using digital, I played a pre-planned set, mostly consisting of tried and tested favourites from the pre-pandemic era, which I'd fine-tuned and practiced many times over, so there were no fuck-ups on some of the more complicated transitions. Although massively nervous beforehand, I quickly got into a calm state of focus, and so was able to fully appreciate and enjoy what was happening around me.

The track which first got the floor full was, to my surprise, The Doobie Brothers "Long Train Runnin". The night is advertised as "vintage disco, funk and dance from the 1970s onwards", which in practice means very little after 2000, but I took a punt on "Inspector Norse". It was the only track to lose most of the floor, but plenty of bystanders were into it, so what the hell.

As usual, it was a very diverse crowd: mostly early 20s to mid-50s, but two of my best dancers were well into their 70s, which I loved. Loads of friends turned up, plenty of regulars from the old days resurfaced, and there were a lot of new faces. Warm and friendly atmosphere, smiles all round, no bad vibes from anyone. It really couldn't have gone better.

Nice one! I am shocked that Inspector Norse would lose most of the dancers, no matter where you're playing

it is 8 years(!) since I last heard Inspector Norse played to a dancefloor when Mr. Terje played it live. The crowd reaction was one of the wildest I have ever seen as can be witnessed in this video. The sound quality is awful but the energy is a delight. Skip to the last minute for an unalloyed distillation of pure joy -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tgK5tfG9ps

ps - very happy to hear it went so well Mike.

Man, my co-DJ dropped Inspector Norse just the other week while we were going back to back and everyone loved it

i'm going forward with that in-store i mentioned the other week, asked my friend/neighbor if he wanted to share the day with me and he said yes. he's a veteran reggae/dub DJ (who's literally been collecting/DJing since before i was born lol) and i mostly play disco/boogie/italo stuff so it'll be an interesting mix but i think it'll be fun!

for my set i'm leaning towards going all-vinyl which would be my first time ever doing that. my vinyl collection isn't huge but i have enough for an afternoon. the shop has a pioneer XDJ setup with two turntables - i've read that most pioneer mixers don't support FLAC files, which is unfortunately a big chunk of my audio collection. on the other hand, i have also never attempted to mix with vinyl before, so this would be a little bit like throwing myself into the deep end of the pool. but it's also just like...a casual record store thing so i'm trying to not stress over it. i'm hoping i get to meet some other folks who DJ and make connections, there are so many DJs in my city and i'd love to start linking up with some of them.

also the happy hour i'm one of the rotating DJs for is moving to a *much* better location that has cheaper drinks/food, space for people to theoretically dance, better sound (i mean, i'm guessing? the sound was atrocious at the last venue so if it's somehow worse that would be terrible lol) and just a better overall vibe, which i'm very excited about!

that sounds great, I say jump in the deep end

for my set tonight they have finally gotten the speakers properly installed and a friend told me it sounds "kind of amazing" so I am psyched.

on the minus side, I appear to have sold or lost my half speed master of "Fly Like An Eagle" which is bumming me out way more than it should, was really looking forward to hearing "Wild Mountain Honey" on the new setup

it is 8 years(!) since I last heard Inspector Norse played to a dancefloor when Mr. Terje played it live. The crowd reaction was one of the wildest I have ever seen as can be witnessed in this video.

I saw him drop it at Public Works in SF live back in 2013/14 or abouts (same tour I think) - and that remains one of the most insanely euphoric experiences I've ever had on a dance floor.

dr that all sounds like exciting news, wtg

so my sunday thing this evening was kinda weird. there's this funny drama where the new gay bar in town advertised a "tea dance" on their weekly lineup a couple of days ago, and like, no one owns that concept right? but the bar owner where i'm working got into it with them in their instagram comments, accusing them of stealing the idea. it is basically what they did tbr but it's not like i'm going to say anything about it online lol, people notice that shit imo? anyway rain set in an hour before my gig today which is usually on the patio, so we were inside, and like no one came today. AND i took a huge vape pen hit early on in the set and got quite stoned. somehow i played my heart out though.. my bf came a little later and said the bartender told him "he djs for himself and we love it," which the first half is absolutely true lol. people do seem to connect to it in a positive way, so that's good. i want people to feel what i feel, you know?

i know we don't really talk about music itt because everyone has their cache of records or tunes and their sound that makes them special, but i gotta say, gavlian russom's remix of "this bitch is alive" earns every fucking second of its 11 minutes, that track is straight fucking fire.

here's me in an empty room cutting shapes to grant nelson doing "the pleasure principle"

https://www.instagram.com/p/CdCJx7oAMCU/

FWIW (to stay on topic here despite the fact that I can't move on from the Terje talk) I consider Inspector Norse an "emergency" track - if I find the vibe faltering or I made a goof I drop that and the dance floor is right as rain again

there's always gonna be nights like that map, i've played to many nearly empty rooms through no fault of my own. do your thing, i'm proud of you for just keepin' on.

this whole thread makes me very nostalgic but also gives me no desire to dj live again lol

thanks for the kind words

tbh i have a lot of work to do prepping tracks, just going to focus on doing that work and getting better.

five hour set last night, the bar was PACKED for at least 90 minutes of that

table of old folks complained abt the volume, good thing the owner was out of town, he is much ruder to people about that than I am ("did you notice this is a bar?" is his stock response)

lol at bar owners that are ruder than anyone else

On Saturday I put on my big(ish) occasional night of global / outernational bass music. It was so much fun. Only a 100 cap venue but somehow we managed to get 250 payers on the door(!) Naturally I had nerves for the first hour or two - it was pretty quiet until midnight, but I went to the toilet and came out to an absolutely throbbing dancefloor.

I'm really enjoying inviting other DJs to go back-to-back with these days. The best ones are when you're really able to vibe off each other and egos are left at the door.

I've back-to-backed several times with two DJs. With one of them, it didn't work because we were kinda pulling in opposite directions. With the other one, where we've back-to-backed for three hour sets, we've been on the same page throughout and it's worked superbly well.

Yeah, it either clicks or it doesn't. Very frustrating when it feels like wresting like that. I've found that 2-3 songs on/off is the sweet spot. Other times we've done 20 mins on/off and I found that when someone tries to go in a different direction, it sometimes ends up plonking right back where it was