On Djing...

I spent the night recording a two hour mix in my new spare room. I'm so excited to share it with you guys

I avoided this thread for years because I was always afraid it would turbocharge all the bad feelings I’ve felt about my dashed amateur dj aspirations, which never went beyond my bedroom. Having come to terms with that, I’ve really enjoyed reading this thread. It’s fun and inspiring to see people embracing meaningful opportunities to dj out and I appreciate everyone sharing these stories. Way to go ilx dj massive!

Same

lol I was the same as you but just stumbled into an opportunity

I do this thing at a local bar where it's me and a couple of turntables, I bring a variety of stuff and encourage others to bring in their own records, then we make a DJ set out of it. it's all over the place but evey time I think I get a little better. it's something I've always kind of dreamed about but didn't think anyone would really be interested in. but I think there are lots of people who are really into an idea like that, you just need to find the place to make it happen.

The manager of the pub I've been playing at monthly has gone on maternity leave and a new guy has come in to replace her.
Suddenly I find my slot has disappeared from their promo calendar, so I emailed in.
"Ah yeah, sorry we forgot to say we're itemising the entertainment at the Bell, so we'll be concentrating strictly on garage and drum machines bass going forward. Big apologies".

Well needless to say, I wasn't too pleased at the unceremoniously ghosting. Naturally, I understand they want to go for a more student-based market and it's not as though I was bringing hordes of people in every Thursday, but still, it would have been nice to have been told.

Last night I decided to commiserate, drink a few beers in my new little home studio room and put together a mix based on the kind of house/disco grooves we often used to play out there

https://on.soundcloud.com/DG3SY

frogbs, that's lovely. Very similar to the thing I was doing. I'd often get a friend or a fellow dj to guest with me, so it was a great way to improve and keep me on my toes

yeah it's fun when my friends show up, especially the music dorks who you know have always wanted to do something like this. you can just bring 'em behind the decks and tell them to pick something out. i love making it interactive like that, it's cool when people show up with obscure records because they always wind up being really cool. like obviously it's a risk telling people to bring their own jams but the people who do put more thought into this than I do

I can relate dog latin. My thursday ghosted me too, in January. (The bar is currently closed lol.) After just taking a break from it all I’m currently knocking on new doors. A few vague possibilities. It was nice going back through old posts recently and remembering I’m a good dj. I don’t know if you need to hear this or not, but you are too.

Local coffee shop hired me to do a Saturday afternoon mellow set — looking forward to having a chance to play tracks that don’t sit well in the more upbeat sets I’ve been doing — like Wings’ “Arrow Through Me,” Air’s “Femme d’Argent,” Sun Araw’s cover of “December” by Teenage Fanclub, etc.

I would go to that

i'm playing at the italian club tomorrow, on the big dancefloor. there's a sit-down dinner that's happening first so the evening will basically be a social hour, followed by dinner, followed by dancing, and the whole evening is a charity fundraiser for an animal rights org. i'm pretty excited about it all, buuuuut...

the host of the party gave me some ideas of things he'd like me to play that i'm feeling a bit stymied by, tbh - like a lot of things he suggested i'm happy to play (madonna, gaga, blondie, etc) but he also mentioned this one current-day italian rock band, i listened to some of their songs and i think they're awful. he also mentioned neil diamond and asked if i could play "murder on the dance floor" as the last song of the night (tbh i'm at a point now where i just never need to hear that song ever again, and i like the damn thing). idk, just feeling vaguely annoyed by his requests - but also maybe i'm just being a brat, and it'll probably all be fine.

had my usual happy hour gig a couple days ago, not as well-attended as the last few i did but still fun. had a few ppl ask for song IDs, and the guy who runs the bar's kitchen (who also occasionally DJs) proposed we play out together sometime, which was cool - don't know him super well but he always says really kind things about my sets. maybe i'll take him up on it! feeling very "seize the day" about things in my life lately.

you're not a brat, i'd be more than vaguely annoyed

yeah I am done with Murder On The Dancefloor as well. Can you play all the Neil Diamond/Italian rock stuff at the start of the night so it's out of the way? Or save it til the end, and tell him you're leaving it until everyone is drunk and ready to sing and dance along? That way you don't have to think about this stuff as part of your set in the same way

there's always Neil's synthpop phase:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0b9bWNA1dKs

ok glad it's not just me lol

yeah i'm def gonna start out the night on the more rock end of things, and the dinner may start out as quieter ballad-y stuff that slowly builds into a groove by dessert time or so, leading into the disco bombs portion of the evening

i believe i have found a way to breach the neil diamond impasse at the very least:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msWuL-g_KA4

(i would rather eat glass than ever, ever play "sweet caroline" in any of my sets, for the record)

oh there's an italo disco version of that one too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUA2rVQ-feE

ha! nice find

so my bar closed in march and forfeited their liquor license (weird utah alcohol laws).

i've tried two other gay bars. one basically shooed me away. the other expressed some interest but now they're ghosting me.

i'm tired of dead ends. fuck this city into the ground. can't wait to ghost this place after it's ghosted me so many times. i don't vibe with anyone here at all. such a lame scene, juvenile and not for me anymore, i never fit in with those douchebags anyway. ready to hang up my hat for a while. i've been mostly listening to metal and rock lately anyway. time to drop all the frustration and move on with my life.

xp to NickB - I thought you meant an italo cover of 'Sweet Caroline'. That would have made my day!

Ewww lol no! There is a Fun Fun version of I'm A Believer though. It's... not great

sorry things are so dispiriting map <3

tho tbh your post flashed through my mind at my gig yesterday after a woman not once, but TWICE, requested that i "play music that people know"

and someone did, in fact, request "sweet caroline." i told him i didn't have it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

DJ Ötzi version is the only one you need:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFq2v5MC4YA

SO GOOD
SO GOOD
SO GOOD

haha ty dr. i'm ok with it tbh. sort of just want to be a fan and not feel like i have to 'keep up on electronic music' all the time. i'm thinking seriously about a pretty radical career change too. if i ever want to dance i'll probably try to find an amateur modern dance troupe or something. no pressure no social scene bs just move around emotionally to music some time before 9 pm lol.

and hmm yeah i can see that gig resulting in some dispiriting requester situations. good luck and godspeed.

got another one tomorrow, all I know is I'm gonna start with Cups by Underworld and at the end blam Rydeen

ok this one was kind of sweet, basically my deal is if you bring in vinyl I'll play it almost no matter what it is. I'm the "professional DJ" so I'll figure out how to make it work (or not). anyway this one guy came who was mentally handicapped and maybe looking for an excuse to get out, so he came out for this because he had exactly one thing on vinyl - a boxset of Bitches Brew by Miles Davis. he won it in some raffle. he was pretty excited we were playing "his" record, apparently unaware he'd brought in one of the greatest jazz recordings of all time lol

my pal's hairdresser had a 40th last night, and her DJ cancelled with only three weeks notice, so my pal suggested that I play it. Doing "mobile discos" really isn't what I want to be doing, but the birthday girl offered decent money and I felt bad for her having to scramble to find someone, so I took the gig. We had a chat when we first made contact and I explained that I'm not really someone who is going to play Brown Eyed Girl and Build Me Up Buttercup and Sweet Caroline, so if she was looking for something like that then I wouldn't be suitable. She said she didn't want something as traditional, and she was basically wanting a warm-up party for before her trip to Ibiza this weekend. So I thought, this is something I could manage - some cheesy stuff, some disco and lots of pop-house.

So to make sure I was prepared I asked her if she had any specific requests for songs, and times to play certain songs (eg last song of the night etc). She said she didn't want too much house music, but then sent me a playlist of 30 tracks that her and the people she works with love. It was all hard trance and techy stuff - think Billy Gillies and Hannah Laing, who are huge names in the world of crossover dance music in 2024 despite being pretty terrible.

But, it's not my night, so I decided to go with it. I planned to play an hour of disco, an hour of r&b, and then two hours of clubby pop-house and planned to keep the hard trance stuff to the end, so that when everyone was a bit drunk and lively they would dance to it. I don't think there's anything worse than seeing someone playing fast and hard to an empty room.

My night was a disaster.

First, the venue was a nightmare. She had hired it before it made the news a few months ago for an event that went massively viral for its awfulness. That event was blamed on the organiser, but having now spent a night at the venue I can see they weren't solely to blame. The staff were useless last night. They were more interested in pouring their own drinks than serving anyone. The "low lighting" was still like having the main light on in your living room. The speakers were terrible - really murky, and even with the volume cranked up it felt very quiet.

The birthday girl had hired a saxophonist to come play for an hour. This seemed a bit strange to me but I'm open-minded. The woman turned up and she was lovely, really nice, great chat. She was due to start about an hour into the party and play for an hour, and while she was setting up we were chatting and we were in agreement that it was a tough crowd. The dancefloor space had been reduced for a photobooth which didn't help, but you could tell that people were out for a nice subdued drink rather than a big night out. As we were working out when she would take over, she asked if I could skip a few things I had planned to play because she was going to play them as she played her sax over them.

She then played what I can only describe as "Scottish Floorfillers: The Megamix." In Glasgow we have a local radio show that's really popular called "The GBX" which is basically donk versions of pop hits and club classics. In an hour she played all the biggest anthems, the stuff you would rely on: "You're A Superstar", "Boom Boom Boom Boom", and Scotland's other national anthem "Bits & Pieces." She also played all the big 80s stuff "Sweet Dreams", "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" and "Young Hearts Run Free." Every time she started a new song my heart sank because it was a song I was expecting to play and get a decent reaction. Even then, people were still in their seats, not really feeling it.

She finished at 10pm. That left me two hours to play. But when someone has come in and played all the biggest crowdpleasers before you, where do you go from there? I get that if you're only playing for an hour and you want to be booked again by other guests you have to show you are the most fun and great entertainment. But it really fucked me over.

I started with some chart dance-pop. It was going OK. Then, just to really knock me off, my laptop froze and Rekordbox crashed. I could have just crawled under the table and died at that moment and it would have probably went down better. A minute to reset and it was fine again, but nobody dancing. I was playing stuff from the playlist the birthday girl sent me, which I wasn't even enjoying myself and nobody else was. I did a pivot to 80s pop. Still no dancing. I tried some 90s pop. Still no dancing. I went full cheese - "9-5", "Don't Leave Me This Way", "A Little Respect." Still no dancing. Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, The Weeknd. Still no dancing.

At the end of a Scottish party it's traditional to play Runrig's "Loch Lomond." Everyone gathers in a massive circle, holds hands, and sings along to the slow bit, then do a weird running/mosh dance to the fast bit, while the person whose birthday/wedding/etc it is stands in the middle. It's standard procedure and it would be odd to go to this type of event and have that not happen. When the time came to play that? Still no dancing.

It is fair to say that I completely bombed last night. I know logically that a lot of it isn't my fault - a lacklustre crowd, someone else stealing my energy, a venue that didn't offer anything conducive, and a tech glitch - but I genuinely felt embarassed going home with cash given how underwhelming the whole thing felt. At the same time: this isn't the type of thing I want to be doing, and I don't feel sad that I didn't flourish when attempting to do something that I don't really want to try again.

My phone fell out my pocket on the taxi home and I won't get it back until this afternoon, and that somehow feels like a metaphor for my evening.

Wow! I can't imagine anyone is ever going to have a worse DJ gig than this to beat such an incredible story. I'm so sorry you went through that, but what a tale! The saxophonist part absolutely blew my mind.

I do think this will be an outlier in just how awful a gig can be and I hope one day you can appreciate it for what a great story it gave you. But yes, i think I'd be fairly traumatised after that experience!

It did teach me what a crap Scottish person I am though as I never knew that about Runrig's "Loch Lomond." I asked my wife if she knew that and she just burst out laughing saying how can you not know that!!?. Oops!

Anyway, super sorry but thanks for sharing!

I am now trying to picture you playing "Loch Lomond" in Queens Park tomorrow and it is cracking me up

Yeah, that sucks. A Little Respect is a bit of a litmus test for me: if they won't dance to that, they won't dance to anything, and there's nothing that I can do to fix it. I had a saxophonist with me for a party earlier this year; she sent me a playlist of half a dozen tunes, and I put them into a mix at the start of my set. It was... fine. And then everybody disappeared upstairs, and almost nobody danced for the rest of the night (I did the A Little Respect litmus test, after which I just relaxed into the situation.) The person whose party it was felt bad about it, and gave me a bottle of wine the next day to compensate!

I didn't know that Bits & Pieces was a Scottish anthem!

My Friday nights are still going well BTW. I have an optional extra half hour which depends on how busy the bar is, and for the last couple of months I've been playing it in full - we always get a late surge of punters, even if it's been quiet earlier. The renewed interest in country has become very apparent: Wagon Wheel is massive (US readers: feel free to roll your eyes, but it was never a hit over here, and it seems to be having a moment), and I get a good reaction to Tebey's recent cover of Blinding Lights, which TBH I prefer to the original.

My most loyal regular - at least 70 years old, less than 5 feet tall, zero dress sense and an amazing dancer, Nothern Soul spins, the lot - has become something of a mascot; everybody wants to dance with him, nobody takes the piss, and something about his gentle enthusiasm helps to set the mood in the room. He drives about 35 miles to get there, and books a room for the night in a local pub. I'm honoured!

I am now trying to picture you playing "Loch Lomond" in Queens Park tomorrow and it is cracking me up

ha ha! i shoud do it to see what happens.

mike, your most loyal regular sounds amazing. what a hero.

oh, and yes - I didn't know that Bits & Pieces was a Scottish anthem!

i honestly think if this was designated Scotland's official national anthem a good % of the population would be all for it.

Another great thing about my regular is that he loves the deep cuts - Azymuth: Jazz Carnival is one of his favourites, and more recently he's been loving Warriors: Destination (a brilliant Britfunk/jazz-funk track which is all about the lengthy instrumental middle section). As he's always there at the start and is the first one to dance, I programme my first half hour especially for him, before wheeling out the more obvious stuff.

Omg what an absolute nightmare boxedjoy. Hope you can look back on it and laugh someday

I did another members night in the Italian club bocce court last night - I have so much fun playing there, it’s not really conducive to dancing but I did see a few people bopping here and there. Tried my hand at a cosmic-style set (lots of leftfield 80s synth and jazz-funk peppered with some African and Brazilian tunes, never went above 112 bpm), ppl responded well to it and I am ruinously hungover today oof

I know there's a "digital DJing" thread I recently revived, but feel like this is a better all-purpose place. Let me know if I should take this over there...

I've always been predominantly vinyl, not for any snobbish reason, mostly I just have the records, I'm used to them, and I'm very used to the process of flipping through my records and pulling certain ones up front and pulling some out halfway, all in a way that's very physical and immediate and way more fun than making a playlist while DJing.

I've also appreciated the limitation of only bringing so many records, and not knowing I have a huge library to pull from.

Regardless I'm trying to set up my USBs/Rekordbox to do more digital djing...to not have to lug as much vinyl, to access stuff I don't have on vinyl, to do some edits and take advantage of looping.

Wondering what people like to do organization-wise. I have a bunch of playlist broken up by genre, some obvious genres, some just obvious to me, and some of the contents clear, some just make sense to me. I'm just wondering if there's some magic number where a playlist is just too big. If I should be splitting up some of these genres into smaller playlists, maybe by era, or relative bpm, or something else I come up with.

Or do people not bother with this and just throw everything in there and just search for things?

My playlists tend to range from 40 songs to 170 songs, depending on my interest.

Any thoughts? This is important because I dj like twice a year.

despite being an archivist by trade, my digital library is an absolute mess lol. i don’t have anything organized by genre and my tagging is pretty spotty too. for my happy hour sets which are usually only three hours long, i always make a playlist of about 75-100 songs and make it a point to stick to that playlist for the whole evening. (if i have access to my entire drive i will literally be paralyzed with indecision.) i have a rough idea of the songs i’m feeling that week and then i just spend some time diving into my collection pulling things together that i think would complement or build nicely off those songs and try to fashion a semi-coherent set from there. lots of just zipping around my collection and seeing what’s what. organizing it by BPM helps me with set-building too, tho ofc that number isn’t always accurate on rekordbox.

I get the paralyzing. Trying to avoid that. Excited to add stuff to the library but worrying I'm gonna get lost.

I have 1 playlist called "crate" that I basically fill up before a gig with stuff I'd like to play, so I at least have that shortcut to a small playlist of appropriate stuff.

i find myself doing the equivalent of packing a crate of records for most events i play by making a smaller playlist of stuff i'm most excited about playing that night. i also dump everything i put in rekordbox for the year into an yearly "incoming [current year]" playlist and i make two copies of it, one sorted by date added with the newest at the top and then another sorted by BPM, so like: "inc 2024 date" and "inc 2024 BPM." gives me easier access to the music currently on my mind. there might be a way to change the "sort by" of playlists on newer decks but idk i'm used to doing it in rekordbox. i also make playlists using real or made-up genre names and for various djing purposes (segues, tools, acapellas, etc) and i use that double playlist tactic for any playlist that gets into hundreds of tracks. it's common for me to have the same tracks in multiple playlists b/c they're genre-flexible. people do cool stuff with tags which makes it much easier than using playlists to sort and search for tracks b/c you can search for multiple parameters like "disco + peaktime + chugger" but i haven't gotten into that b/c i don't always play on nice cdjs that support that so for now i stick with my shitloads of playlists

i am typically not a very organized person, so it's taken me forever to arrive at this even vaguely sensible system

I’ve made sure everything is tagged with the correct Year and Genre(s).
I don’t really do “Energy” or “Mood” tags.

Then I just make a smart playlist with, say, Genre contains “Italo Disco” and Year is min 1980/max 1987. I’ll go through that subsection, and pick the tracks I like and put them in a playlist, which will go to my USB stick.

I’ve got a Denon Prime now so it’s EngineDJ instead of Rekordbox, but it works pretty much the same.

This works well for single-genre sets, not ideal for anything-goes genre-hopping.

jeez I don't do any of this, but I have an unorthodox setup and don't mix at all, plus it's for a restaurant/bar so I don't have to worry about people dancing

I bring 1-2 crates of undigitized vinyl, plus a box of 45s. then on the other mixer channel I use a laptop with, y'know, 20,000 albums on the external drive, I bounce back and forth as I please

just like my radio shows, I tend to build up mini-playlists on the digital side, 15-20 minutes max

then keep in reserve as needed

a lot of times this involves me just randomly scrolling through the 7500 FLAC albums just to see what catches my eye

i think if i were playing regularly to proper dancefloors i'd be a little more organized in terms of my sets. my happy hours are kind of "anything goes" sort of deals although they do broadly tend towards disco, synth-pop, house, italo, etc.

I've taken the approach of building up my DJ library slowly, trying to limit it to just tracks that I know I'm enthusiastic about. Each of the mixes that I record and post here is also my first time working with that particular set of tracks. I usually start by building up a playlist on spotify of tracks I like that fit a certain theme. Once I have a good list and Bandcamp Friday rolls around, I will buy up those tracks and pop them into a corresponding playlist in Rekordbox. I give each playlist/mix a name I can remember and that reminds me of its overall mood. After the mix is done, I hang onto the Rekordbox playlist and add it to my USBs, that way I have a collection of playlists that are already organized around specific themes and have a catchy name to easily identify them, which makes it very easy to find tracks that fit a set when I need them.

I've got it mostly worked out. Most of my playlists aren't that long. I just have this one playlist called "Recent" which is 278 songs that were recorded like, after 2000. I know, my idea of "recent" is ridiculous. And I play almost none of it. Some of my early 2000s nu-disco friends like Metro Area and Danny Wang yes, but much of the rest of this stuff, not really. I just want to? I have a bunch of mixes I've made over the years with a lot of this stuff, that I'm happy with, just never seems to fit in with my decidedly more retro sets, which is what I've always been most comfortable with. So fun to make those mixes, which I started as a sort of "see, I have new(ish) music too".

But I generally have trouble working a lot of that stuff in. Like the old techno and house I play works well with the old italo and new wave, but the new stuff sounds too different to me. And I LIKE being eclectic.

It's a lot of bandcamp stuff, some pretty small/obscure. But also stuff like Border Community, Norwell, Lawrence Le Doux, Roy of the Ravers, Oyvind Morken, Roman Flugel, Young Marco, D'Marc Cantu. Stuff on Lovefingers ESP

I could probably split some of it out into nu-disco, nu-techno, nu-house. Or go by region.

Though I may just split it up into tiers based basically on how likely I am to actually play it.

Stuff like these mixes:

https://soundcloud.com/lodown95/lodown-presents-new-york-endless-another-mix-pt1?in=newyorkendless/sets/mixes

https://soundcloud.com/throneofblood/tob-podcast-075-dan-selzer-aka-new-york-endless-pt2?in=newyorkendless/sets/mixes

https://soundcloud.com/newyorkendless/a-heavenly-imposition

are completely unlike anything I've ever even tried to play in a club/bar/party/etc. But I'd like to. Maybe I just haven't played those kinds of parties. Maybe I'm still stuck on my old days in my 20s where you really had to lay on enough vocals and hooks to get it going. And I don't mind doing that still! I love that.

this mix is a better mix of newer house/techno and classic house stuff that I like, but still isn't what I actually sound like when DJing.

this is more akin to what I sound like playing out:

https://soundcloud.com/the-magic-message/009-magic-message-radio-dan-selzer-womr-921-wfmr-913?in=newyorkendless/sets/mixes

or the first 35 minutes of this:

https://soundcloud.com/newyorkendless/bumped-my-ass-off-at-james-bday?in=newyorkendless/sets/mixes

I don't know if I want to find the best way to mix it up, or find ways to find myself in contexts where I could play more deeper house and techno. There's been a change in NY where techno really blew up in the past 10 or so years and I'm jealous of people where they're banging out techno an the audience is into it and into the energy and not just waiting for something they recognize. I have PTSD, years of "play some michael jackson or prince" requests in Williamsburg bars. On the flip side, I don't actually like the techno and house 99% of people are playing these days so feel conflicted. And find when I'm djing it's still a more low-key space and early enough that I stay in my comfort zone, even if it's a relatively eclectic one, but it's one with vocals and songs, because that seems to work better for me, and because I think it's fun!

Not that I don't like any proper contemporary DJs but even then I find it more likely that they'll mix it up more. Optimo never sounds like the same thing all night long to me, thankfully. I saw Scott Zacharias DJ a sunday night in a bushwick record store 2 months or so back and it was mindblowing. I didn't know a single song and there were long stretches of just deep banging jacking house stuff that could've been chicgo 1987 or somewhere now and then stretches of weird european classic rock or whatever. I don't know what but it was fantastic and everyone was dancing. And I was there from 9pm to 11pm, then went home and got a good night's sleep! What a dream.

Sorry I'm ranting. Generally things are great in NY. People dancing at 8pm or 10pm. On a sunday night. There were MANY years where nobody would start dancing until like midnight in manhattan or 1:30 in brooklyn. The new kids are so keen to just have a good time, it's really cool.

And I'm not being naive, I know what the good and/or popular parties were like 20+ years ago, I was there. More than I am now. Even those huge gigs didn't kick off till later.

not sure I'm making my point, going to go to bed now so I don't say more conflicting things or anything petty or bitter. Tomorrow hopefully I'm gonna process the dozens of tracks I digitized a few weeks ago.

Which does bring up another question. I'm gonna remove some pops, remove the space before, fade out the end etc. Eventually normalize. But does anybody do any mastering of any kind at this point? Or do you figure the record sounds how it should and I ripped it well and should just let that be? Or do you think oh some subtle mastering compression/eq or whatever can help this compete a bit?