🍏 The Modern DJ’s Job: Lifting Hands, Not Faders 🙌

[danmark_ori]

This morning I read some messages, I'd like to share with you
Each author quoted I've contacted about having their comments published. They might or might not register themselves here. To me, it's not the messagers, yet the contents of their messages. Two contrasting statements:

The Modern DJ’s Job

ro8in
What a job it is. Choosing a pre-made playlist and holding your controller and iPad in a club with your hands in the air!

Pwigle
That's the stereotype, the reality is different.

Spending hours and days looking for songs that can flow into each other, setting cue points for each song, practicing transitions, knowing your music completely, changing songs if it doesn't suit the audience, mixing from 130bpm dance to 80bpm rock, request songs, understanding your controller or club device where all sorts of things can be wrong.

Then you still have to be asked and therefore have some fame: going completely wild on social media with all the video requirements and actually you have to be able to produce which is a profession in itself. There are entire courses for that. You start with the graveyard shifts from 03:00 to 05:00.

bullseye1977
Indeed! I used to do it for years. Back then, the DJ was still the person in the corner who didn't really stand out. Someone who was busy with the technology, the music and the audience. The trick was to build up a set and then break it down again with a slightly worse song, so that the people on the dance floor would all go get something to drink. Then you got everyone back on the dance floor with a nice song. During an event, you looked carefully at which people were likely to dance first and played along with that.

Nowadays, the number of followers who stand almost silently in front of the turntables with a telephone in the air is the new reality. With all the digital options, everyone can now play like a top DJ from the past who did that with vinyl. You now see people behind the turntables in a bra and thong, just to stand out as a DJ.

Only as a producer with your own songs that also make it into the charts, you will be at the big festivals that every DJ dreams of. Without your own fan base, you are also not interesting to book as a DJ. Carl Cox still lives on as a legend on his legacy, but all new DJs really need to come up with their own songs.

I currently have a lot of respect for James Hype. He is a DJ who uses everything as a musical instrument and less as tools to mix two songs together. He is now working on linking the lighting effects to his music. His complaint was always that at big events everything has to be pre-programmed, so that the best can be made of all the lighting and show effects. That prevented him from being creative in his style of DJing. Now he is partly taking that under his own management.

Ref. : https://tweakers.net/nieuws/233234/...met-zes-dj-platforms-toe-aan-apple-music.html
DJ with Apple Music https://music.apple.com/us/curator/dj-with-apple-music/1798261090
Prefab Mixes & Playlists https://music.apple.com/us/curator/alphatheta/1796060650
​

 

[robejaegs]

playing live, a really good will DJ "read the room" and play some tracks that aren't necessarily part of a predetermined setlist

i've seen Tyas, few other DJs do it and it was pretty f-in cool

the phone thing