On Djing...

dying at "headbanging music"

I will usually have a couple of drinks but in all honesty I don't really have time to be doing much else. Even though I'm using Rekordbox and a DDJ-400 controller I feel like I'm busy enough with cueing up what's next and chatting to people. I do find it helps steady my nerves, and a drink loosens me up enough that I can dance and relax myself, but I wouldn't want to make a mess of things and embarass myself.

A friend of my brother's has been DJing for a few years and notoriously ruined his first night playing at a well-regarded club in Glasgow by getting really drunk before it. I don't believe a good DJ has to be able to beatmatch etc and it's better to just soft blend than have the "galloping horses" effect of two tracks playing simultaneously at wildly mismatched tempos, which is what this lad was doing when he wasn't accidentally sliding the volume and crossovers about. I don't think he's ever really got the momentum back since it happened.

In my day job I'm still very much a people-pleaser but I don't find complaints bother me much. I'm always following a procedure/policy/rules so it's never truly a decision I've made. I might be interpreting it strictly or leniently depending who I'm dealing with but generally speaking a complaint from a customer or a client isn't something I'm going to feel bad about because I know I've done all I'm able and willing to do. Whereas I think what I find hard about the requests and the moodhoovers with this, is that when they react with disdain and uninterested to what I'm playing it feels very personal, like they're telling me my tastes and perceptions are worthless. I mean, I absolutely do not want to have the same taste as a 77 year old man who grunts his way through anything faster than 110bpm, but I don't like the idea that I'm making someone feel unwelcome and uncomfortable. But I cannot please everyone, I'll drive yourself crazy trying to, and there's no point in doing it anyway because it wouldn't be fun or worthwhile.

It's borderline psychotic than anyone could think that they should actually get to tell you what music you should play. It's like if you turned up at a baseball game and fuckin moaned at the coach to let you play. Just fuck off, you're not a baseball player and you're not in this game!

I get free drinks on Fridays, when I’m playing 2 to 2.5 hours. It’s always 2.5 pints while I’m playing, then I’ll finish the other half while I’m packing up. My rule is never to exceed 3 pints while playing, no matter how long the set is. That seems to work. (Also, any track longer than 3 minutes gives me enough time for a piss.)

xp to boxedjoy, I subscribe to the “pleasing all of the people some of the time model”, so I’ll never stick with a genre longer than 20 mins. Cross-genre transitions are fun! (NB I love immersive hypnotic sets too, but I’m playing a bar.)

same. I'm not trying to keep people on a dancefloor, I'm trying to complement their food & drink experience. different vibes!

love yr story there boxedjoy and I would have been bobbing in my chair if I had been there

finally getting back into the groove tomorrow after a 3-month break. first I took a month off for my birthday, then I threw my back out right before the October gig and canceled. so it's been since early August. it's probably gonna be pouring rain, this is why the Chet Baker and Julie London records stay in my rotation crates.

time to mask back up with the N95s as well, I just got over COVID and have no intention of getting it right away again (which has happened to numerous people I know)

sorry for spam, but here's a video i took that i like. i think boxedjoy turned me on to this one. thanks boxedjoy.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Czw6LPriahw/

In all my time as a DJ I haven't found a way to turn down idiot requests without coming off as a grumpy asshole.

My friend and I had a room full of people bopping around to Amapiano and Afrobeats slammers on Saturday, and these same couple of people kept coming up asking for Taylor Swift because "It's our friend's birthday".

By the third time, I was ready to tell them where to go, but I just kept saying "Sorry, we're not going to play that". They weren't getting the hint, just kept going "Pleeeeeease". It was ridiculous

Vinyl-only helps with that.

I was liked Stirmonster’s suggestion (in this thread?) to say, “I’m sorry, I’ve never heard of them”, not matter how well known the request.

lol I gotta try that sometime

i don't mind coming off as a grumpy asshole but i wouldn't exactly recommend it.

for people who keep pestering me when the answer is clearly 'no,' i tell them that if they have a problem with the music they need to talk to the bar staff, who thankfully back me up. i've had to say 'this conversation is over' a few times and just get into an ignoring contest. it's kind of amazing to me how much this gets on this type of person's nerves - they're clearly used to their relentless bullying tactics working.

You can say “if you really cared about your friend you could have done the homework to find a place that will play Taylor Swift”. Then follow up with my quote I think I already mentioned which is to say you know where you can hear Taylor Swift? Any where else in the world.

oo i like that, ice cold

when i DJed nearly every house and apartment party in college, one classmate of mine would come up to me, without fail, and ask me to play some hip-hop. she would always do this when the room was packed with people dancing and having a great time.

once, she said to me, “no one is having fun” and i looked at the room, motioned to 40 people dancing vigorously, and said, “maybe you need to adjust your idea of what fun is.” she never said anything to me about my deejaying ever again.

(this was in an apartment that perhaps dan selzer can recall, above the old video store)

tbh I don't even remember an old video store!

My Oberlin DJ career can be summed up as...music director of WOBC, so plenty of that. I did an "electro-funk/space disco/proto-techno" night at the 'sco that nobody was at, and I DJ'd a "rave" in the South lounge which I think was still daytime. I played old electro and Paul B. Davis played "new" electro. I also gave a history of techno lecture to a very questionable techno exco that took place in Zeke. And I manned the lights most time Morgan Geist played techno to an empty 'sco.

i guess the kids finally got hip to dancing by the time i got there! i would DJ to a packed Sco on occasion, but mostly at house parties.

I forgot I DJ'd at least once house party. I had two belt driven turntables and a single a/b switch. No cue. No faders. That's called "paying your dues".

I’m slow today but what’s a ‘sco

disco?

student disco, I'd guess, yeah

come over to mine after the 'sco I ordered some 'za

It was a "club"/"bar" in the basement of the student union. My microtonal drone band Sruti Box (featuring Mike Kelly aka Kelly Polar) opened up for Gastr Del Sol there. Mostly known for quarter tuesdays, where cups of beer were a quarter and I think in all my years I never once attended. But there'd be various DJ nights as well, to mixed success.

Tuesdays were quarter beers, wednesdays were splitchers (pitchers of PBR for $4), and Thursdays were pizza and pitchers (whole cheese pizza and pitcher of beer for ten bucks).

Deejaying a quarter beers night was great— as long as you played four to the floor, people would dance.
Kelley Polar played and Morgan Geist did a killer live set during my senior week.

Some fun if blurry years.

my thursday nights have been going better since october. you'd think the cold would discourage people from coming out but the opposite has been the case. they haven't been close to packed by any means but a handful of dancers is something. last night my partner and this really sweet guy we've been seeing came. the energy was amazing. many good moments.

<3

haha so i show up last night and half the lights are off. the bartender tells me they'll probably close around ten because it's been really, really slow, did mr. k send you a message, he told me that he sent you a message. i tell the bartender i have friends coming tonight and can i play for a while, he's like sure. i warm up a bit, 2-3 more people come in. the bar is really dead, like 7 people total. my partner, our third, and his twin sister show up and they start dancing hard. i'm more caffeinated and energetic than usual because third and his twin sister are beautiful, brilliant young people and this is the first time i'm meeting her in person, so i want to impress. i'm also higher than usual, double my normal edible dose. they carry me along past 10 and then 10:30. i'm playing a pop set. i sort of ambiently notice the bar isn't closing. you can't see people come in from the booth or the floor, you have to crane your neck around to peep the bar - i notice a few people there. i get up to a rihanna calvin harris tune and suddenly the floor floods with 20 people! i don't think i've ever seen it take off quite so fast. high as i was the energy transformation was incredible. i got some jitters but i know where to go from the saturday nights i did last year. so we have a righteous jump-up-and-down singalong sesh for 30 minutes until the bar finally decides to do last call at 11:45. my friends and lovers get to experience a good crowd. i get home and notice a message from mr. k through facebook messenger. he has my cell, not sure why he decided to send me a message through facebook, it's not like i'm going to check that 20 minutes before i leave. so it's just kind of wild that everything happened, that we had a party on a dead night that i was supposed to not even play. it was incredible. i'm still pretty amped from it.

i'm also higher than usual, double my normal edible dose.

this seems incredibly brave given how much that could affect your sense of time :)

oh i mean i've done that amount before, which is a small dose for most (10mg), and was still pretty functional, so i wasn't too worried. it was a special occasion and i had work off today, so i felt like letting my hair down. 5mg is usually enough to take the edge off and make me feel kinda floaty during a gig without really impairing me.

My new years resolution was to promote less and create more.

That's a general rule. I want to get back into the creative process of actually making stuff, producing music, writing for pleasure, maybe even find other endeavours to concentrate on.

I've been a promoter and a proselytiser my whole life and DJing and putting on nights has been a huge extension of that.

But I miss that feeling of creating new things. And so I told myself I'd leave it for a bit and channel my energies on learning Ableton and trying to write some fiction this year.

Then two days later a local venue I'd previously chasing for gigs got back to me and offered me a monthly residency.... I'm chuffed ofc but its ironic

so I guess my first DJ set doing prog night went pretty well. they asked if I wanted to come back and play within the next few weeks. only thing is, I will need a mixer of some sort, because right now I'm just borrowing it from the guy who normally does it.

I found this one - pretty cheap obviously, but do I really need anything more expensive? all I'm gonna use is two turntables and my phone.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/392363543298

FWIW, the functionality on that mixer looks to be exactly the same as the mixer that I use, so I reckon you should be fine. Also, yay, prog night, would totally teleport!

It’s missing one feature I find really useful is a knob to let you mix the headphones from cue to main, sometimes esp when there are no monitors or they’re busted it’s helpful to hear a mix of cue and main in the headphones.

Oh I would definitely need that. I play in too many places with poor monitoring or none at all, I rely on this

the one I was using was the Gemini PS-540i which does have that functionality. however I never used it because I actually didn't know that feature existed until I stumbled upon it halfway through the set. I think mixing prog music you don't really need to be too precise, you're not really 'beatmatching' at all, you're just kind of fading one section into a similar section

however this time I won't be doing prog. in fact the guy didn't really specify what he wants me to play, he just really liked the idea of someone spinning vinyl, apparently this dude is even more of a freak about record collecting than I am. we talked a bit about doing an analog synth thing, like 70's-80's electronic, though I think that's just a launching point. I will say the vibes there are pretty chill.

if anyone can recommend a mixer I'm all ears, I'm willing to spend more than $50 but by the looks of things it's the free shipping that really matters

well guess I'm doing this tomorrow. kind of nervous because prog night was someone else's thing, I was just filling in. this is gonna be my own thing, I don't really know what I'm playing yet, other than it's gonna be mostly all vinyl. do y'all have a setlist in advance? for the prog thing I sorta did, but this is way more open ended

Never!

Sometimes I have a lose idea of what I want to play, mini-sets of things that might work together, things that work to transition between sounds etc, but once you get going, just follow wherever it takes you. Trying to follow and a predetermined setlist will just frustrate.

I usually sort my records then and there. Like before going I might grab a bunch of records that I think I might start with and move them to the front of the bag. But once I'm there and hear what's already playing, whether it's the dj before me or the bartender's phone and sense how people might be responding to it, my ideas of what I want to play completely change, so any setlist would go right out the window.

That's why I hate when DJs throw a curveball at the end of their sets.

I always tell this kind of funny story though. I was invited to DJ with Peter Hook and a bunch of other DJs when he was getting into being a DJ. I was so excited, obv New Order was a huge game-changer for me. I was pretty sure the entire band would hear my set and be really impressed. Actually the rest of the band didn't come. It was at a trendy NY venue while they were in town for a show.

There were a few DJs on before him including a guy from the band stellastarr who I had to load the CDs for, but I was set to go on after him. Things were slow most of the night until Hook went on and then the whole crowd was dancing. All I could think about was how am I going to mix out of his set and keep this party going? At first I thought I knew what to do, but as the night went on Hook got more and more eclectic. Techno. House. Sex Pistols. Every new record had me recalibrate what I'd need to start with. How am I going to mix out of this?

Then right before he finished he crouched down and called me over and said "listen, can you do me a favor? When I'm done, wait a few minutes for the crowds response before you start" more or less.

Suddenly on one hand I had a great relief that I didn't need to mix out of Anarchy in the UK or whatever it was going to be, but on the other hand I had a feeling I knew where this was going.

He ended. The crowd went nuts. I waited a decent amount of time and opened with Yaz Situation. Two girls in the front thanked me and then every single person went home. I played Quando Quango in the hopes that some Factory Records fan would realize how knowledgable I was, but it was over before it began.

Several years later the Moth came to my companies office to do story-telling workshops. We broke up into sub-groups and I was in a group with our boss, the CMO. I told the Peter Hook story, but my boss had left the group before we shared. I realize the irony now. Then my group invited me to tell that story to the larger group so I did. That was my last ever experience "public speaking". It was presented as a sort of funny/embarrassing story when meeting your idols.

lol great story, though I was hoping it was gonna lead to you being there for the gig where he pretended to mix while playing a mix cd that came with mixmag

I played in a smaller town than where I usually play last weekend and it was such a joy. Such a responsive crowd, dancing from the get go (7pm!) I even got a round of applause during the breakdown of a particular track(?!), like, guys I didn't MAKE this song, looool

dan selzer, that's a great (but upsetting) story, and all too relatable. cheeky blighter asking you to come on once the wind had gone from the sails

“Listen, can you do me a favour? I want everyone to go home on the high I just gave them. That’s a good lad.”

Quite. How is that a favour? What's in it for the guy?

yea one thing I realized is once the music stops for more than a few seconds it kind of changes the whole vibe. seems like a dick move

I'm gonna be doing 3 hours, maybe a little more - I got a bag which fits 50 records, probably will need a little more. better to come overprepared :)

lol great story, though I was hoping it was gonna lead to you being there for the gig where he pretended to mix while playing a mix cd that came with mixmag

xp - absolute dick move. I don't care if he's Peter Hook