“Do You Want To Be A DJ” A Weekly Series Week 8 “Preparing For My First GIG”

 

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This is a plug: Remember  In “Do you want To Be A DJ” A Weekly Series 2nd week” I talked about “buying equipment on a budget” and didn’t realize, that with a budget didn’t  mean you have to shortchange yourself, you can actually buy from the top shelf and pay in time, “month to month” for the next three, four, six, twelve months.  Here is the top companies do just that!!!

The first place I called Zzound.com, this is a Oasis in the middle of the I can’t afford that world of DJ Equipment. My friend told me about this and after he showed my bought my first and dream connector:  Pioneer DDJ-SX2 DJ Controller for Serato DJ, New for $999.00 or $83.25 for the next 12 months.

This was such a bargain that  also bought a set of speakers Pioneer Bulit8 Powered Studio Monitor, Pair for $498.00 or $62.25 for the next 12 months.    

                   

Now I will have my great DJ equipment this friday for a party and have to pay Only pay $145.50 a month as I enjoy my equipment every month and make money.  It’s just that easy and if you buy it in six months, they don’t check your credit.    

 

This was the hook up of the century and I go this hot tip from one of my friend and fellow DJs in Akron Ohio. You can mention my name and maybe  can got some more readers for my blog lol.

I hope you realized what I said earlier, but I’m going to say it slowly “This Friday I will be playing my first party,” its a card party but I’m actually hired as a DJ. Let me tell you how it happened.

Ok first of all let me explain “a card party.”  A card party is a party for older adults, they pay cards, they come together drink, snack, listen to music, and play cards games like: tunk, pitty pat, poker, and spaides. It’s a fun night for individual older people to play have fun get together and maybe go away with some bragging rights.  

 

This is how I got my first gig, while meeting with some friends who asked me if I’m coming to their card party, I asked them if there was going to be music, as i passed them one of my newly printed professional DJ card. They asked me “how much would I charge?” I said “how many hours will the party be?” they said “about four hours.” I said “I will charge about $10.00 an hour” and they said “fine.” And now I have my first gig.   

How To Prepare For Your First digital DJ GiG:

Your palms are sweating and your heart is racing. You could cut the nervous tension with a knife. The club is full of expectant people who all want to see what you can do. All eyes are on you as you step behind the decks and prepare to pull off what just a short while ago might have seemed impossible to you. It’s your first gig and as far as you’re concerned, everyone in the club is wondering the same thing: “Does this guy know what he’s doing?”

Preparing for your first gig is an activity you should not take lightly. Practice makes perfect, as the saying goes, and without a lot of practice your first gig will be average at best. At worst, it will be fraught with frustrating problem after frustrating problem. While it’s true that few gigs are totally problem-free, with a little preparation and thought, many of the big issues can be minimised or avoided altogether. Here’s how to avoid some of the common mistakes DJs often make at their first gigs:

9 tips for first gig success

1. Take your time

Avoid taking on a last minute gig. Give yourself at least three days to practise and plan before playing a gig. Taking on a last minute gig does nothing but open up the door of frustration. Many inexperienced or novice DJs make the mistake of thinking that they need to take on any gig they’re offered, at any notice. This is not true and in fact, it pays to be selective. Take the gigs you know you can handle and decline the rest. After all, if you botch a gig, how will that help you land another in the future?

2. Use the tools you’re familiar with

Whether your friend has a faster laptop than you, or you just bought a new deck, switching up your tools at the last minute is a recipe for disaster. In order to avoid the confusion of new equipment, or the possibility that it won’t perform the way you’re used to, avoid using equipment you’re unfamiliar with at your first (or any) gig. Stick to the tools you know, even if they’re slower or less fancy.

3. Play to the crowd

If the only place you’re used to playing is your room, then you’re likely playing to an audience of one: Yourself. When playing your first gig for other people you need to keep in mind that their tastes, and your tastes, may not line up. Learning to listen to the criticism and suggestions of others without allowing them to derail you is one of the great skills of DJing. Might as well start learning it right from the off.

4. Never leave home without a plan B

As a budding DJ you probably haven’t had a whole lot of experience with hardware failures. Despite what some DJs will say, hardware failure can and will happen. Whether it’s a frayed cable or a crashed laptop it doesn’t matter: they both stop the music. You should always have a plan B in place in case your plan A stops working…

5. Show up early

The last thing you want to be doing before you step behind the decks is rushing around tying up last minute loose ends. It’s better to show up too early than too late. Give yourself time to set up, and run a thorough sound check. This will alert you to any problems and give you time to fix them before they affect the sound of your set.

6. Plan out your set

As a DJ you know it’s best to start strong and end strong, but many well-intentioned DJs will forget this in the heat of the moment. It’s best to plan out multiple solid playlists that you can switch to depending on your crowd. This will keep people dancing, and help lessen the nervousness of a first gig. Having pre-planned “mini-sets” like this is not cheating; slotting together pre-planned segments according to what the crowd reacts to is a time-honoured why of mixing planning with spontaneity.

7. Promote the gig

It’s not enough to assume that your family and friends will simply pack out a club. They may or may not, but truth be told you’ll probably want some strangers there too, and bringing a crowd is certainly one of the best ways to get booked again, like it or not. Friends and family may be flakier than you think, plus they’ll always give biased feedback. Plus, winning over a room of strangers is always more fulfilling than playing to the converted.

8. Make sure everything makes it to the gig

You probably have a lot of equipment, cables, accessories and the like. Create a log so you can make sure everything you need makes it to the gig and back home. It’s a good idea to pin a checklist to the back of door in your DJ room, or keep one on your phone, or tucked in your kit bag.

9. Bring a trusted sidekick

Having a person available to help you isn’t necessary, but it will make a world of a difference. During the course of a two-hour set it’s very likely that you’ll need to step out for a break or to use the restroom, and it’s good to have someone there who can watch your stuff and make sure everything keeps running smoothly. This person can also act as a liaison between you and the audience so that you can receive requests and suggestions without having to shift your focus from the decks to the audience.

Finally…

Whether you’ve already had a few shows under your belt or you’re preparing to play your first, these tips can be applied to help make the whole process more smooth and less nerve racking. Remember, practice makes perfect, and the only place to really practise DJing is in public, so don’t let any excuse get in the way of getting out there and getting some notches on your belt. Good luck!(https://www.digitaldjtips.com)

How To Play Your First DJ Set

 

1. Know your tunes

This is the most important tip of all. So you’re playing a two-hour set – that’s probably 25-30 tunes. Whether you’re DJing the warm-up set or playing peak time, same difference. I’d say have 50-60 tunes prepared that you know inside out. You should be happy mixing all of these, and ought to have thought hard about why they’re in your virtual crate.

What tunes are “big” in the venue? What tunes are big right now? What other tunes complement them? What tunes are important to you, are part of your style? What mixes have you discovered that you love? You need a blend of new, old, known, unknown, predictable and surprising. Choosing double the tunes you’ll need means you can go underground or chart, upfront or classic, safe or risky, as the crowd takes you. But make sure you know them well – that’s the most important thing.

And DO take the time to prepare them – don’t just turn up with 60GB of tunes unsorted on a hard drive and think you’ll be OK. You won’t!

2. Know your kit

It’s important that you’re happy with your DJ equipment, especially because as a digital DJ it’s more than likely ou’ll be taking your own kit with you to play on. You need to know how to set it all up, pack it away again, get everything working quickly.

You need to know what to do if you have a crash (hint: take an iPod and be ready to plug it in with a mix prepared), and how to boot up quickly and cleanly (eg knock out wireless / Bluetooth, don’t let memory or processor-hungry apps load in your PC, disable screensavers…).

Prepare well for your first DJ set to make sure you enjoy it.

It will help if you’ve played with your gear in parties. If not, just take it to someone else’s house and set it all up there, while catching up with them. This will prepare you for being in a venue where people may be trying to talk to you, you’re unfamiliar with the surrounding, you’re in “public” mode – and even for when someone says “you’re on in 5” and you’ve not even unpacked. (But still, get there early and set up in good time.)

3. Have a plan

I had a set list written out and hidden in my record box the first time I DJed in public, I was that nervous – with every single mix planned! I wouldn’t say go that far, but a bit of planning is a good thing.

You already know what time you’re starting and finishing. How many people will be there? When does the venue tend to get busy? When do people start to dance? You can’t make people dance too early, so have a plan – a warm-up, a transitional stage, a peak-time stage.

If you’re only booked for warm-up, play warm-up; if you’re coming on after a chart DJ but you’re more upfront, have some chart crossover material to lead into your set. If you’re between two DJs who play different styles, how will you bridge them?

The point is, have a plan; think about what you’re going to play. Half an hour of this, then half an hour of that, then half an hour of something else… that’s all you need. Just the process of planning a DJ set makes you a better DJ, especially when afterwards you compare how it went with what you were thinking.

4. Keep it simple

Your first DJ set is no time for tricks and showing off. Just plan to play records simply and competently one after the other. Make your mixes functional; you’ll probably be trembling too much to “large” it on the decks anyway!

Keep your mixing simple and make enough time to enjoy watching the dancefloor.

One of the biggest things you should take from your first few DJ sets is how the crowd behaves, but if you’re too busy trying to plan and pull off DJ tricks, you won’t be watching them enough. So keep it simple, take in the atmosphere and learn by looking around you – the tricks can come when you’ve mastered the basics. You’re far less likely to mess up this way.

On a related note, don’t have more than a drink or two to steady your nerves – caution goes out of the window when you’re half-drunk, and you don’t want to go down that road on your first (or four-hundredth) DJ set.

5. Look like you’re enjoying yourself

This is where many rookie DJs (and a few professionals) let themselves down. Nobody wants to see a DJ with his head in his laptop 90% of the time, agonising over every mix. You have to have time to join in, even if it’s just a little dance and a smile, shaking hands, chatting to those near to you.

Even if you feel rough, you’re so nervous you could be sick, nobody’s dancing, the venue owner has told you to turn it down, you keep getting inappropriate tune requests, it looks like a fight is about to kick of in the corner, and your girlfriend just had a go at you for not giving her enough attention: smile!

It’s your enthusiasm often as not that gets the dancefloor going. It’s your love of the music that encourages other people to hear the good in it. It’s your lead that starts everyone having fun. Looking happy on the outside when all manner of “performance anguish” is going on in your head and heart is difficult, but you must master this one. How can you expect others to have a good time if you’re obviously not?

Remember, people have come for a night out, and your music is only a small part of that. Relax!

6. Relax – most people aren’t even listening!

A wise old DJ friend of mine once said: “Most people aren’t really listening.” I thought he was talking rubbish at the time, but it turns out he was quite right.

Put yourself in the shoes of the average person on a night out. You go out for an evening: You are trying to get laid, get drunk, just happy you’re not at work, catching up with friends, in the venue solely because it’s a trendy place to be seen in, worrying that your bum looks big in this skirt, upset that your best friend hasn’t come, really pleased someone you didn’t think you’d see is here, bitchin’ because someone never buys a drink for you… and all this time there may or may not be a DJ playing!

You see? Most people they simply don’t listen to the music all night long… even when dancing to it, half the time. If someone hears two records they love, they’ll go home happy. If they don’t go home happy, it probably won’t have been your fault anyway (see the list above).

Point is, pick your tunes well, and relax! People really aren’t here for you. Even your friends will be hard-pushed to name many of your tunes after a DJ set. Music might be your life… but most of the crowd have got more important things on their minds.

7. End on a great record

So if most people aren’t listening most of the time, your aim is to make sure everyone in the club hears just two or three records they really love. The trick here is to make those “I love this one” tunes different for everyone, so there’s always someone “bigging up” your music at any given time.

Save your best tune to last and send everyone home happy.

But… here’s a big DJ secret. If you can save just one record that as many people as possible in the crowd adore, and play it right at the very end, you’ll send them all home with that tune ringing around in their ears.

And when they wake up, hungover and with hazy heads, they’ll probably only remember that one tune from the night before… and hopefully your smiling face as you jumped about behind the decks while you were playing it to them. Job done! (https://www.digitaldjtips.com)

Hope this has helped you like it’s helped me to get the nerves calm down, get focused, and remember what I learned over the pasted seven weeks? Very nervous and excited!!!! Stay Tuned For “Do You Want To Be A DJ” A Weekly Series Week Chapter 9 What Actually Happened At My First Gig!!!