Saturday, June 28, 2008 by Ingo
Things some don’t know about DJing
DJing might look like an easy job. Sometimes I hear stuff like:
Hey, what’s so difficult about playing some music out?
Here’s why it’s a bit more than hitting a venue and playing music like average Joe could do:
- Finding the right music: I receive around 400 to 600 promos from all kinds of labels and genres each month. I need to listen to them ALL to find MY music. 80% of it is crap, 10% supercrap, 5% good, 5% very good. I only play the 5% that I find very good. But there’s not only the work to listen to ALL the promos, there is also the browsing through the stores and it’s (mostly) crappy samples. BTW, I recommend Resonant Vibes and audiojelly. Beatport just in cases when I can’t find track XYZ elsewhere. Finding the right music is the most time eating thing of the job.
- Sorting the right music: I label my tracks after genre, NOT by tagging but file name adding like Peter Parker - Spiderman Song (Vogelmann Remix) - PROG. Each and every genre has its own folder on my HD’s, both the studio system and the gig notebook, always in sync.
- Touching the music: Each and every track gets slighty sound optimized by myself, like loudness correction or a bit of equalizing, I have my own scripts or batches for that processes. Each and every track gets key detected for harmonic mixing.
The above is the hidden part of my DJ job, not many people have an idea what that means. To be exact: it’s the most important part of the job because THIS IS WHAT MAKES YOU AN ARTIST under millions of DJ’s. Compare it to a painter, his colours, his brushes, his canvas and all that stuff. Then there’s his way of painting and this is the part when I’m going live.
Let’s be honest: Beatmixing is not the hardest part of playing live. You have a bit of a rhythmic feeling? Okay, I’ll teach you in less than 2 weeks. But do you have the right ears, the right feeling for ‘what comes next’? Can you feel the audience? Is your sound right, EQing and all that stuff? When should you change the style a bit or the tempo? And what about your ‘acting role’ whilst DJing, do you have a charismatic aura or do you behave or look like an idiot? Don’t get me wrong, I find it very important to be authentic, but LIVE you’re not bedroom DJing.
A good DJ needs to be reliable with playing times and dates, needs to take care about his technical equipment and all that stuff, needs to find HIS style and satisfy HIS fans everytime he’s playing … I could write an endless list of other aspects of successful DJing. Just wanted to give you a glimpse of the background of things.
