On Djing...

LIKE

That's the one, babe.

THUMBS UP, thx

Matt + Anthony, it's a no-brainer but kudos to the person who came up with it.

so my boyfriend is saying that he originally suggested it but i don't remember lol
vah!d suggested it on facebook.
it's perfect

i remember looking it up and seeing that there are a few manthonys out there but i think that matters to me less now

DJ Man Honey

hahaha

now that i've hijacked this thread and made it completely about me, i might as well say that quitting drinking has probably been the best decision i've made in support of my modest little dj goals. there is no way in hell i could have done a tuesday night set from 11-1:30 and then done a 9 am training the next morning for my actual job with alcohol involved. and it was a lot more fun being totally lucid and present when i finally had a few dancers going at the end. mind you this probably doesn't apply to people who are in control of their drinking and i don't mean to evangelize but after years of struggling i finally feel straight-up relief about it instead of regret.

feeling that, the club soda and cranberry combo is a fave of mine when DJing (after I've had a few drinks, granted, but yr point stands)

Disheartened to learn this about piers Anthony after ignoring his existence after age ~15

That was new to me too (never read those books). Anyway, that's great map!

I got a dm from someone who's planning on playing a new track I released at a festival in MN this weekend, and they're actually in WI and offered to help get me some gigs if I'm interested. So maybe I will actually do that even though I had given up all hope of doing that?

awesome

i hope ppl don't mind too much that i post in here about my djing stuff. it helps to lay some things out here and i've gotten really helpful feedback...

anyway so a party has come together for sep 3. i'm doing a fundraiser for the mutual aid org here. one of the djs is doing the sound and giving me a great deal on it. i'm going pretty bare-bones on the production. sound, ttables, cdjs, that's about it, no lights or anything. bar patio out back, hoping weather cooperates, if not we can move it indoors no prob. the sound guy / dj has worked with the venue many other times and knows all the ins and outs of setting up there. he's djing last, i'm warming up. the middle dj is a big name who just got his tonsils out a few days ago and texted me today to let me know he might not be in shape to do it, though he wants to stay on the bill for now and thinks there's a good chance he'll be up for it.

my sweet boyfriend made a handmade flyer that we took pictures of for the social media graphic :). everyone is pretty psyched for it. i think i'm going to meet / talk to some left-y young people from this which is a big plus, if my social anxiety doesn't sabotage it too much lol.

i'm telling djs to aim for like soulful house with a message. i'm debating whether or not to go full jesus with my selection but will just have to feel it out while it's happening.

i'm going to ask the mutual aid org if they can provide a volunteer to collect $ at the door and work a cash drawer.

i'm having some anxiety about not thinking of everything just because i've never done this before. so i thought i'd just post about it here and see if anyone thinks i'm missing or forgetting anything?

don't forget to enjoy yourself :)

Hi map. Really sorry I didn't reply to you upthread.

I started "DJing" way back in the early mid 2000s, although what I was really doing was putting together often very complicated mixtapes using a pirated version of Acid Pro and then playing them out at parties and the odd club night. People in my little town were new to the idea of digital DJing back then and weren't the wiser, plus it meant I could mash together a very wide range of genres in a creative way, a bit like Soulwax used to do with their 2ManyDJs albums.

Around 2006 I realised it was very possible for me to put on a small night above a pub and get my friends to come down. Often I gave slots to people I knew who had never DJ'd before but still had good taste in music. Because it was only a small town, I couldn't be fussy about remit and so we encouraged a cross-genre blend where we could. The first time I heard dubstep played loud was at one of my own nights.

The night got bigger and we moved to a much larger club. I realised I needed to get live acts involved to draw a crowd, and one time we even got Damo Suzuki and DJ Scotch Egg to play (it ruined me financially but I count it as a lifetime achievement). Various people I knew got involved, including photographers and even a VJ who set up an interactive projection thingy.

By the time we'd moved to yet another venue, the smoking ban had come into place and casual punters were more inclined to go to pub gardens. So we introduced a concept or theme for each night: a Victorian ball, a night where everyone wears their clothes back to front and you have to look at the flyer in a mirror to read it etc...

It was a lot of fun, but by 2012 I was done. It was exhausting me mentally and financially as I rarely broke even and I was working a day job and commuting into London. Still, it was really popular and well known in the local community as a fun, creative night where you didn't know what to expect next.

In 2015 I moved to Bristol, the kind of city where there are tons of venues and everyone is a DJ. I was keen to get involved in the music scene and luckily got introduced very quickly to people who DJ'd and put on nights.

I got invited to play a few pub gigs, nothing big. But soon realised that my "Acid Pro mixtape" trick I'd been getting away with for years just wouldn't wash any more. So I bit the bullet, invested in a Pioneer controller and taught myself how to use Serato. Thankfully the theory of beatmatching and cutting is roughly the same, only you do it in real time and perhaps can't chop beats up in quite the same way.

It took a short amount of time to get to grips with things but still I had a hard time convincing anyone to give me a gig. Because I don't specialise of have a signature sound, it's hard to market myself.

I noticed Bristol didn't really have much in the way of a postpunk night, so I convinced a pub to let me put one on. SCIENCE! (as it was called) had an open remit so long as it was alternative music falling between 1978 and 87.

Had a great few nights of that, with everything from punk to disco to hip hop being played, although I can't say it was a roaring success exactly. Despite plenty of acts, Massive Attack included, having been forged in this era, Bristol audiences seemed to be nonplussed by it. I had to explain to a lot of people what "new wave" meant, which was strange but then I think Bristol is a nineties city at heart, and most people are into D'n'B or whatever bassy dub sound is popular in dance music right now.

SCIENCE! lasted until the pandemic, but it felt like it had run its course. I was running out of new music to play and was getting tired of retrospection.

I got this strange idea for a conceptual nightclub. It wasn't meant to be a real thing, just a daft idea I'd had and started applying to various chill out and Balearic mixes I'd been making for my own listening. At the same time, my friend and I were occasionally playing at this "audiophile" bar on Saturday afternoons, just gentle eclectic stuff for people having lunch or daytime cocktails, but mostly just playing to the barstaff.

Club Stoic (named after a "philosophical nightspot" in the Nintendo RPG Earthbound) evolved from this. I'm still not sure what I'm doing with it exactly, but basically it's an outlet for anything from eclectic/chillout to more housey, dancey sounds. The flyers are always high concept: I recently made an online flyer based on old BBC Micro text adventures.

Over lockdown, to keep myself entertained and to help keep on top of new music, I started livestreaming a show on Friday evenings from my bedroom. Basically me and my partner getting drunk while I span tunes and talked on the mic occasionally. Mostly just for my friends and anyone else who wanted to get involved. It was fun.

Just before lockdown, I started a Facebook community to discuss new music from around the world. Terrain is a Facebook group first and foremost where we discuss and share everything from Afrobeats to K-Pop and Latin bangers and stuff from further afield. Most people on there are artists and DJs so naturally after 18 months of lockdown, I decided to turn that into a night too. It's early days yet, and we have our first not-free entry night taking place in October.

So that's my story. I do this all for fun. I sometimes get paid a few quid to play, and I absolutely love playing out: it's literally my favourite thing to do. At 40 years old, I'm not expecting to make a living from it or even get much recognition, but it keeps me in beer tokens and off the mean streets.

hey, thanks for sharing, that's an interesting journey.

Manthony is good, but ultimately make me think of "Romanthony," which isn't a bad thing.

I want to start DJing again.

I've also been doing live improvisations for the audience of my husband and dogs using this software, and it's been making me feel awesome: https://www.olympianoiseco.com/apps/patterning-2/

that sounds very rewarding, glad it's making you feel good.

i've adopted "bring u up" in my last few sets tbh.

my first party was pretty good! the mutual aid org made more money than they thought they might and the sets were all really good. turnout was better than expected.

already making plans for another one in november. i like the fundraiser model. need to find another good organization and two other djs i like (which is hard here haha, though there are lots of new folks i haven't seen yet).

Glad to hear it went well!

I might try to spend the winter working on music stuff more seriously.

After a long while of feeling underappreciated and underbooked, I suddenly have heaps of gigs coming up, including a monthly residency at one of the cooler pubs in town, a club night I'm putting on, and another little gig in a cocktail bar. All the promotion is hard work, mind you, but as a bonus I seem to be getting much better at design now I'm making all these posters and social banners.

i'm really itching to DJ in public again soon but i'm so terrible at self-promoting and LA is a particularly daunting place to try and get a foot in the door. someone i kinda know is throwing a weekly gay party at a bar with a rotating DJ situation but it seems very Extremely Cool/Fashionable LA Queers and i feel like i'd maybe be out of my element a little? (this is also probably a personal hangup/me projecting for all i know lol)

and anyway before i do that i'm looking to upgrade my tech - currently using a super-basic numark controller that i feel like i've outgrown. not sure i can justify dropping super-fat stacks on CDJs atm so i'm looking into something like pioneer DDJ FLX6 since it works with serato, which is what i use to mix at home - anyone have experience using this controller?

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...

Related, but how do people deal with not being able to practice on CDJs and then all of a sudden using them on a gig, if you're not playing gigs all the time? I have a lot of anxiety about this.

I've definitely wondered what mixing on quality CDJs are like versus my little Pioneer DDJ-400 controller. Actually have had anxiety dreams recently about DJing at a club and having technical issues with the gear even though that is something that is not at all currently in my future.

Haha same

i feel like having a rekordbox-based controller is half the battle. everything important gets moved over to the cdjs - your grids, hotcues, playlists, etc.

i got the xdj-rx2 because i felt like the touchscreen was really going to be useful for beatmatching, but when i figured out you could sync with cdjs now (not sure how long that's been a feature tbh) it was a total godsend. so not sure that the touchscreen is that useful. dr that controller looks ideal for the price point and confidently working with cdjs.

the main things i need to know with the cdjs are track browsing, the "perform" menu (for hot cues) and the sync buttons. also knowing that when the synced track is playing at a different bpm than the track bpm, you have to move the tempo slider to match the playing bpm before you can change it!

what i'd like to get better at technically at this point is mastering a few other types of transitions, doing that thing where you cut the levels on the outgoing track for a beat to "show" the new track coming in, stuff like that.

all the cool kids here are playing vinyl sets. i've been asking one "friend" who "loves" me to dj at one of the many events he throws for a few months now to silence. i don't know if it's because i'm not playing vinyl? no response at all seems super disrespectful to me, like at least give me a reason or some lip service or whatever? i know he likes a certain vein of what i play.

xp the CDJs really don't make that big of a difference! it's all about the mixer. speaking of which, i played recently on a Xone and jesus christ i love the sound on those things. my long-time dj friend who has been playing on pioneer mixers for years sounds really good on them, so i guess i haven't really learned how to sound good on them yet but i am not a big fan of how they sound at the moment.

on a related note, i also asked another dj to play the fundraiser we did and nothing, nada, silence. this to me is so weird! i feel like people who do that show me they aren't worth working with.

dr: ask your friend! just go for it and pretend like you know everything. you know the most important stuff, which is great music.

music people are flaky af in my experience and i try to just let it roll off and not think about it so as to avoid becoming grumpy and resentful, but it's nice when you find people that are dependable. i always respond to direct communication although sometimes people forward just like a cryptic post about an upcoming event and idk what they're saying to me so i ignore it

i haven't played on a controller i liked very much, CDJs just feel way better to me, but that's how i learned so of course i'd say that. vinyl is cool but the association between vinyl and clout and the obvious gatekeeping vibe around playing vinyl is so corny

I picked the DDJ-400 specifically because I felt like working with Rekordbox would be a better choice if I wanted to eventually do gigs. Do any clubs use non-Pioneer decks these days?

using rekordbox to prepare to play on pioneer decks is def the right choice if you want to play out

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.