Chapter 21

Facing the Music: Playing Live

In This Chapter

Knowing what to expect from the venue

Being prepared for all eventualities

Reading a crowd, and reacting to their actions

Dealing with requests, with tact

Ending the night just right

You’re ready. You’ve practised for months, your friends know how good you are, you’ve sent your demo to bars and clubs to let them know how good you are, and now’s your chance to show hundreds of people on the dance floor. Stepping out of the bedroom and into a club’s DJ booth is a big leap, so you have a few things to consider.

I’ve always said that this leap is like driving a car. You spend ages with a driving instructor who teaches you how to pass your test, and then only when you’re on your own in the real world, making decisions for yourself, do you really learn how to drive. As a new DJ you spend time in your bedroom perfecting your technique and building knowledge about your music, and only when you get out into the real world, find work and play to people in front of you do you develop the skills to become a true DJ.

The difference between DJing in the bedroom and in a club is crowd control, knowing what people want to hear, and being able to adapt to how they’re reacting to the music you’re playing. Knowing when to move up from one genre to another or when to increase the energy of the mix is something that comes with experience and practice, but the most important skill you develop is the ability to lose yourself in the music and love what you’re doing while simultaneously reading the crowd’s reaction to what you’re playing.

Investigating the Venue

Nothing’s scarier than the unknown. Investigate the club or hall you’re booked to play well in advance. If you’re putting on your own night in a club, you only have to worry about getting people to turn up. If you’ve been asked to play a party or wedding in the local town hall, you need to find out what you’re expected to play and what equipment you need to take, and start memorising the bride and groom’s names!

Scoping out a club

No matter whether this is your first-ever set in a club, or if you’re an established DJ, do your homework. Set up a meeting with the club owner, manager or promoter to discuss a few things. If you can’t set up a meeting, try to go to the club on a similar night to the one you’ve been booked for (the same night a week before is perfect), listen to the music the DJ’s playing and watch the crowd’s reaction (see ‘Reading a crowd’, later in the chapter).

When you’re doing some investigation at the club, try to strike up a conversation with the bar staff and the toilet attendants (if the club has them). Because they hear everything that’s said and everything that’s played through a night, staff can sometimes be a better font of knowledge than the club promoter for the music that works best, the kind of people who go there, and the general mood and patterns of the people who frequent the club.

When you’re the warm-up DJ

If you’ve been asked to do the warm-up set before the main DJ comes on, ask the promoter/manager if the club places any limitations to what kind of music you can play. Whether it’s a house/trance club or a rock/indie club, the promoter may want you to play lighter, well-known, musical tunes to help warm up the crowd so that the main DJ can take the night from soft tunes to harder ones when he takes over the main set of the night.

The warm-up set is extremely important to the club and your career. If you treat this gig as a throwaway hour and a half where what you play doesn’t matter, the customers at the club won’t get warmed up, and the club won’t ask you to return. Although the music may be softer than you normally play at home, suppress your musical snobbery and realise that playing whatever the club asks you to play is really important so that you can keep your foot in the door; hold onto hope that it’ll eventually let you play the main set, where you can show what you’re capable of.

When you’re playing the main set

As the main set DJ you have fewer constraints, but you still need to find out whether the club has a music policy. The club may have a limit as to how fast a tempo you can play and limit you to playing certain genres (perhaps it’d rather you didn’t play hardcore in trance clubs, or death metal in rock clubs).

You may think that you’re there to play the latest, greatest underground tunes, but maybe the guy you’ve been hired to replace just played hard, fast music all the time, and the club’s looking for a change. So if you’ve been brought into a club that used to play hard dance or rock music and it’s now trying to move away from that, you may find that it asks you to throw in some lighter, commercial, popular, or even older tunes in the main part of the set.

Every set may be your big break. So swallow your pride and realise that for every five commercial tunes you play, you may be able to play one or two that people haven’t heard yet but that you know will be massive. But don’t push your luck! Research the music scene, read magazines, listen to other DJ’s and listen to suitable radio shows to help you develop an ear to pick tunes that’ll eventually become popular. This way you won’t have to gamble with what to play; you’ll know that you’re playing the next big thing.

Provided this doesn’t annoy the management, when you pick the right tunes that launch from underground to mainstream, the club owner and promoter will recognise that you know your stuff, and will hopefully start to respect your musical knowledge and give you a little more musical wriggle room.

When you’re replacing a DJ

If you’re replacing a DJ, finding out why is important. If the DJ was fired, ask the promoter what led to the DJ’s dismissal, because you don’t want to make the same mistake yourself!

I was lucky enough to be invited to watch a DJ who I was replacing play the week before he finished, so I could hear for myself what was going wrong. I had to tell the promoter what I thought he was doing wrong, though, and how I’d do it better, as a test of my DJ skills, but fortunately I passed his test!

You may find that the DJ has been doing everything perfectly, but that a personality clash has led to his dismissal or resignation, in which case put on a smile and remember what the DJ was doing that worked.

A little reconnaissance

If you’ve managed to secure a meeting with the manager when the club is closed, make sure to look inside the DJ booth and take a note of its equipment and where everything is located.

Which mixer, turntables and CD decks the club uses

Not all clubs provide a combination of CD and vinyl equipment to use. Bigger clubs tend to have at least two Technics 1210 turntables, two Pioneer CDJs (CDJ1000s or better) and usually a Pioneer or Allen & Heath mixer. But smaller clubs may only have two CD decks and a mixer, or worse, an all-in-one unit that combines the CD decks and the mixer.

Some niche clubs may only provide turntables, with no CD option, but that’s rare – and you could bring your own if need be. If you’re a vinyl DJ and there are no turntables, or worse, no space for any in the DJ booth, you need to discuss a solution quickly!

If you’re unsure how to use any of the controls in the club’s DJ booth, do some research before you turn up on the night for your set. If the mixer or turntables have functions that you’d like to use, but don’t know how, finding out how is very important. The first time I used a Pioneer mixer I had no idea how to work the effects on it, and was banging the yellow button with no result. I didn’t find out how to use it properly until I got home and read about it.

If you use bottom-of-the-range twin CD decks at home, and you’re faced with advance single CD decks like the Pioneer range at the club, check online or speak to someone who has them, so that you’re happy using them on the night.

As much as all DJs love to use their own turntables, mixers and CD decks, not many clubs let you take your own kit. If you’re lucky, in the right club, with a friendly manager, you may be able to take along your own mixer if you’re working the entire night, but CD decks and turntables are normally off-limits to change.

Where to put your records/CDs

It sounds basic, but keeping an eye on how much room you have to manoeuvre in the DJ booth can affect how many records or CDs you take. Remember that if you’re a digital DJ, you need check that there’s room for your computer and controller/keyboard.

Whether it has digital DJ integration

Digital DJs enter a new realm of caution in the DJ booth. Not only do you need to make sure you can fit in your computer (which is a lot easier if you use a laptop-style PC or Mac), but you also need to wrestle with how to connect to the club’s sound system.

Chapter 9 has more information about different ways to connect a digital DJ setup to a DJ booth. The methods are split into two different camps:

• All mixing is performed in software on the laptop (sometimes with an external controller), with the output plugged into an input on the mixer in the DJ booth, to be played through the club’s amplifiers and speakers.
• Outputs of the turntables and/or CD decks in the DJ booth are re-directed to an audio in/out interface (a specially designed external soundcard) to control music playing in software on a computer. This music is then sent back to individual channels on the DJ mixer to be mixed like a normal CD/record and played through the club’s sound system.

The first option is easier. It usually means connecting an audio output of the computer to a spare input on the mixer using a pair of phono (also known as RCA) cables, and setting the controls on the mixer for that channel so the music plays out loud and clear (normally the channel fader is between 75 per cent and maximum, and the EQs (equalisers) at centre position, but this varies depending on the club’s sound system setup).

The second option can be a lot more difficult. If a club isn’t prepared for a digital DJ, it can mean unplugging CD decks and turntables from the mixer in order to reconnect them to the audio in/out interface. If you’re DJing for the entire night, you can do this when you arrive at the club and then disconnect at the end of the night, but if the club’s brought you in to do just two hours in the middle of an eight-hour night, it’ll be a lot harder to get the connections in and out of the back of the mixer while someone’s still using it!

As more DJs go digital, clubs buy audio in/out interfaces to permanently install into their DJ booths, taking care of all the connections themselves so all the DJ has to do is plug the computer into this hardware box with a USB cable. Check, however, that the software that a club’s audio interface works with is the one you use. If a club has a Serato Scratch audio interface installed and you use Traktor, then you still have some rewiring to do, because Traktor software and control records/CDs don’t work with Serato Scratch hardware.

Whether a booth monitor is provided

If the club doesn’t supply a monitor, you can ask about getting one, but unless you’re a famous DJ who’ll make the club loads of money, it probably won’t agree to your request. If you don’t have a monitor, you need to work out the best way to get around the audio delay. (See Chapter 14 for different headphone monitoring options that’ll help you.)

Where the amplifiers are

You shouldn’t need to do anything with the amplifiers – but it’s still good to know where they are in case anything goes wrong.

Money matters

The last thing to discuss with management before you come to play your set is money. Different clubs, nights and locations change how much you can charge. When you get your first gigs, you’re DJing for the love of music and the opportunity, not the financial gain, but it doesn’t hurt to get something in writing that states how much you’ll get and when you’ll get it!

Gearing up to party

Houses and town halls aren’t designed to be makeshift clubs, so you need to do a little more investigation to make sure that you’re well prepared for playing at these venues.

If you decide to have a party in your house so that you can impress your friends with your skills, the only things you have to worry about are making sure your stereo is turned up loud enough, soothing the neighbours, keeping enough ice in the fridge, and where to set up your house DJ booth. But if you hire a hall to play at, you need to think about serious amplification (refer to Chapter 12), lights and something to set up on that’s more substantial than the ironing board! If you’ve invited 200 people along, think about security; you may need some muscle there, just in case things get out of hand.

Whether the party you’re running is at your house or in a hired hall, music policy isn’t an issue, because you decide what to play. You do need to react to how people at the party respond to what you’re playing, though. Don’t be bullheaded: don’t persevere with music people aren’t enjoying, just because you want to play it.

If you’re booked to play at someone else’s party – be it a birthday party, leaving night or wedding – the client can give you an indication of what he expects you to play beforehand. If it’s someone who knows that you’re a DJ, but doesn’t know that you specialise in drum and bass, you may want to let him know, so he doesn’t expect Katy Perry and Beyoncé but actually gets old Roni Size and Goldie tracks instead.

Unless you’re told otherwise, don’t expect the client to provide any equipment; you’ll need to use your own setup – or you can hire in something better when arranging suitable amplification and lighting too. Visit the venue you’ve been booked to play at well in advance. Someone who works there should be able to tell you the most popular place to set up your makeshift DJ booth. When you see the hall, you can work out how much amplification you need.

Preparing to Perform

Baden Powell wasn’t wrong about the value of preparation. He probably wasn’t about to play two hours of music that would rock the local Scout hall – but you may be! Giving thought to the music you’ll be playing before you go can take a lot of pressure off your already jangly nerves.

Selecting the set

From your music policy discussions with the club owner or organiser of the party, you should know what genre of music you’re able to play during your set. With this in mind, you can flick through your collection or library and pick out the tunes you’re most likely to play that night.

I tend to over-estimate the number of tunes I’ll need. In one hour of DJing, I aim high and assume I’ll play at least 20 tracks. But I make sure I’ve got at least 40–50 tracks with me for every hour I’m playing.

You may not have the confidence yet to walk into a club with a bag of only 80 records or CDs – which is understandable. Longing for a tune that you haven’t put in your selection is a bad thing, but reaching for that tune – the one that you’d otherwise have left at home – and using it to win over a tough crowd can only be a good thing.

As long as there’s room in the booth, take as much music as you like. It’s still a good idea to think generally about the set and put all those tunes into one CD wallet or record box, then all your safety-net tunes into another box. As you become more experienced with designing your DJ set, you’ll find you won’t be opening your safety-net box any longer.

Digital DJs need to go through this process too. Although you won’t have the same limitations on space to deal with as CD and vinyl DJs have when they take too many boxes or CDs with them, as a digital DJ the bigger problem with taking too many tunes is more about overwhelming yourself with too much choice.

With all your music stored on the hard drive, as a digital DJ you’ll be taking all your tunes with you anyway, so spend time making playlists of tunes you might play during your set before you go. This means you avoid the pressure of trying to create a set on the fly, faced with the task of choosing from your entire library (which can be thousands of tunes) as you’re playing.

Predetermined set lists

Trying to work out and pack only the tunes for an entire set from start to finish before you get to a club isn’t a good idea. Even if the club owner has given you a music policy to stay within, you still need to tailor the music for the people on the dance floor.

If you decide before your set to warm up with light house music or commercial indie tracks for the first two hours, but the club is packed after an hour, with people demanding main set music, you have the choice of playing the other hour of house or indie music (which may bore the people out of the club, so is a bad idea) or skipping to the music that they want to hear. If you’ve not packed enough tunes to play an extra hour of main set music, you’ll struggle to fill the entire night’s DJ set!

Checkpoint tunes

If you don’t like the idea of a completely off-the-cuff set but don’t want to create a start-to-finish set list, use key tunes for your set, like checkpoints that you pass as you increase the energy and the tempo of the night. If the checkpoints are tunes that people love to hear, you can use them as markers to help you map out your set from start to finish.

Provided you practise enough with your collection, you should be able to choose from a lot of tunes that you can mix in and out of the checkpoint tunes, all of which in turn mix into another large number of good tunes. Keep your eye on the dance floor, and try to estimate when you think you’re going to change the pace or energy again, and work towards putting in the next key tune to move the mix to another level.

But remember, on every journey you sometimes need to take a detour. Even with a skeleton framework of tunes to link your mix, you still need to be flexible and react to the crowd (see the section ‘Reading a crowd’, later in this chapter).

Organising your box

You don’t have to organise your tunes alphabetically or by genre if you don’t want to, but by having an order to the chaos of your record box, CD wallet, or playlist, you make it much easier to find that elusive track when you need it most. You have a couple of organisational options:

• By genre: If you’re doing a set that requires you to play multiple genres or multiple subgenres of music, grouping each genre together makes good sense. Especially because most of these genres relate to a specific point in the night (for instance R&B at the beginning, then vocal house, then commercial dance, then trance and then progressive house), grouping these genres together makes navigating your way through the set more manageable.
• Multiple boxes/bags/playlists: Try one for each genre or power level in the night, splitting the music so that all the beginning-of-the-night tunes are in one box or playlist, and all the main set tunes are in another.

DJ software (or even your iPod, if you use that for DJing) takes a lot of effort out of organising your tunes. Your library can swell to an unmanageable size, but some tools are on hand. Not only do most software titles include a handy search box so you can instantly call up a tune you want to play, but you can quickly and easily sort the library of tunes by artist, genre, beats per minute or any other definition you may have given them. I like giving power ratings to each of the tunes in my digital library. Then, for example, I can find progressive house tunes that I think will hit the dance floor at full power, or try to find a good trance tune that has a calming effect on the dance floor for use as a breather in the set.

One aspect of digital DJing that may seem like a huge benefit, but can actually make things a lot harder, is the ability to buy, download and play new tracks as you are DJing! If the club has a good Wi-Fi connection, you can access nearly every track ever written. This can help you find the perfect tune to make the roof blow off, or can cause problems, especially when it comes to requests from the dance floor. If you’re playing a heavy metal set and you’re asked to play some Bon Jovi, you can’t play the ‘I don’t have any with me’ card if people know you can go online and download some!

Knowing What to Expect at the Club

Getting to a club early lets you plan your evening properly, and gives you time to get used to the equipment, chat to the bar staff and promoter about what kind of night they think it’s going to be, and steady any nerves that may have snuck up on you.

Dealing with nerves

Unless you’re a rock, you’ll feel nervous on the first night you play. If you’re lucky, your nerves will subside with time to be replaced by magical, nervous excitement. I believe that the moment you stop getting that excited feeling in your stomach before you play, you should take stock and ask yourself whether you still love what you’re doing or are just going through the motions.

You may be tempted, but try not to turn to alcohol as a way to get over your nerves, even if it’s free. You want to be as clear-headed as possible when you’re playing. Dutch courage isn’t courage, it’s a mask. Your nervousness reduces after a few good mixes anyway, but you should leave yourself aware of this feeling and use it as a reminder that what you’re doing is important, and your fear of messing up is born of your desire to be a great DJ.

Getting used to your tools

Take the opportunity of turning up at the club early to throw on a couple of tunes to get used to the equipment. You should already have investigated the club’s setup (see the earlier section ‘Scoping out a club’), but if you’ve only read in a manual how to use something in the booth, this time is great for working through anything you’re unsure of.

Setting the levels and EQ

As well as getting used to the equipment, you can figure out how the sound comes across in the club and hopefully change it to your liking. There’s a long night ahead of you. If you don’t like the sound, it’ll be even longer!

Put on a tune you know really well, with all the EQs set to 12 o’clock (this is the flat position on your mixer, where you haven’t added or cut any frequency by any amount). Turn the music up loud and stand at various points on the dance floor. Don’t only stand in front of the massive bass speakers, where you’ll be shaken to pieces by the vibrations; move around, from the outskirts of the dance floor to the centre and in front of the booth.

During your journey around the dance floor, listen to the sound in each position. If the different areas of the club are covered by multiple amplifiers and EQs, ask whether you can change them to suit the sound that you prefer. If only one amplifier and EQ is available for the entire dance floor, stand in the middle and set the best sound for that position.

Unfortunately, it’s likely the club won’t let you adjust the sound system, so you’ll need to use the EQs on the mixer instead. This isn’t the best option, but is still better than the music sounding shrill, with no bass in it. The tune that you use to check the sound should be a benchmark. Use this tune to set the EQs, and then match everything that follows to this benchmark.

Don’t forget that people suck up sound vibrations. Clothes, skin and big gangly bones all absorb sound frequencies as the club gets busier and busier. This fact means you have to set the mixer to play more loudly as the club gets busier, and you’ll also find a lot of the bass frequencies disappear into the crowd’s greedy bellies.

Every once in a while (probably when you need a pee), jump onto the dance floor and have a quick listen to how the music sounds. If you can hear too much conversation rather than music, of if your ears start shimmering with the amount of mid range, cross your legs and adjust the EQs or output level so the music sounds better – then go to the bathroom during the next track.

Setting the monitor

If you have a monitor in the DJ booth, take time to adjust it to create a virtual stereo image between the music in your headphones and the music playing from the monitor. (If you’ve no idea what I’m on about, see Chapter 14.)

Pop in an earplug (honestly, I strongly recommend that you use an earplug in your live ear – refer to Chapter 11) and set the level so that you can hear everything clearly, but the music isn’t so loud that your eardrums are quivering. I’ve heard people talk about tiring the ear – which, to me, means if you play music too loudly, for too long, you find that concentrating on the music blaring out at you is hard, and you run the risk of ending up with permanent hearing damage.

If the club doesn’t have a monitor, I hope you found that out when you went for a visit to the club and have either spent time learning how to mix with a split-cue function (if the club’s mixer has it; see Chapter 14) or you’ve been practising mixing with both tunes playing in both ears of the headphones.

Working in a loud environment

This job may be the first time that you play in a volume level louder than that of your home stereo, so use the opportunity of turning up early to get used to all the differences that a club’s volume may throw at you.

Nothing prepares you for the feeling of the beat thumping through your body when DJing. When you’re in a club as a customer on the dance floor, it’s a cool feeling, but as a DJ if the beat vibrations are slightly delayed to what you’re hearing through the monitor or the headphones, you can find the timing a little disconcerting at first.

The good news is that a club’s sound system can be very forgiving for small beatmatching errors. The heavy sub bass can be so thick sounding that a slight l’Boom or B’loom (see Chapter 14 if you’ve no idea what I mean) is easily hidden. With good headphones, you can hear this small timing error before anyone can hear it on the dance floor.

The music sounds different too. The sound system in a club doesn’t have the full fidelity of your headphones, with the sub-bass sometimes overpowering the bass and mid-range melodies, so you find that some mixes that don’t work quite as well on a demo mix work fine played live with the right EQ controls.

Playing Your Music

You’ve investigated, discovered and prepared until you’re blue in the face. You’ve been a polite DJ and turned up as early as possible (even if it is just to give you the chance to sit in the bathroom). Your night’s about to begin.

Reading a crowd

If this night is your first time playing to a crowd of people you don’t know, the main difference you notice is how much thought you need to put into your tunes in order to keep people on the dance floor.

In time, you’ll become a body language expert, looking at the reactions of the people on the floor as they throw their hands in the air and dance like there’s no tomorrow … or throw their hands up in the air in disgust.

First, think about how you react when you’re at a club. When you’re enjoying yourself, what do you do? If you’re the type who grins from ear to ear and throws your hands in the air to dance music, or headbangs to rock music, and you’re playing the kind of music that makes you want to do that, look for this kind of response from the people on the dance floor. When you’re bored and listless, how do you react? Look into people’s eyes. If they’re staring into the distance or at the floor, or if they’re dancing with no real thought or energy, they’ve gone to a happy place in their heads, waiting for something to change. It’s up to you to make that change.

Don’t base your readings on just the people directly in front of you. Look through the crowd. If you get a chance to go for a wander, walk around and look at how people are responding to the music. A glum face isn’t a good thing to see. Fifteen glum faces are a kick up the backside that should make you play something better.

Just ask … if you dare

The relationship you’ve developed with the toilet attendant and bar staff can really help you out. They’re a great source of information on how well you’re doing, and how the night is going.

In one club that I worked at, the toilet attendant knew everything that was going on. If the people who came in to use the facilities were having a good night, he’d be quick to feed that info back to me, and if he heard tales that something wasn’t quite right with the music, I’d know before it was too late. Never before or since has a visit to the bathroom been so enlightening.

If you want, you can just ask people how they’re enjoying their night, either personally or collectively, over the microphone. If you get a collective groan, or even worse, silence, change the music quickly. If you get cheers, whoops and hands in the air, keep it going; you’re doing well.

Progress the set

If DJs played the same style of music all night, things would get very dull. Dance DJs may start off with house music and end up playing pacey, chunky trance by the end of the night; rock DJs may start off with a mixture of older tunes and lighter rock to break people into the night and end up playing harder, newer music from heavier sounding groups as the night progresses.

DJing isn’t a race. You won’t win anything for playing all the newest, best and biggest tunes in the first 30 minutes; you’ll lose everyone on the floor. You’ll wear them out, they’ll become bored with the same sound, and because you won’t have any big tunes left the people on the floor will get bored with the rest of the set. If you resort to repeating tunes, they’ve already heard them so they aren’t as excited. Your light shone brightly, but not for long enough. I’m not saying you should play dull tunes as filler, more that you shouldn’t pack all your gold-dust into the beginning of the set!

Use the checkpoint tunes (see the earlier section ‘Checkpoint tunes’) as a way to pepper the set with good tunes and to move the set on in energy and tempo. But don’t just arbitrarily decide to change things. Always keep an eye on how the people on the dance floor are reacting to what you’re playing. If the dance floor isn’t busy enough, or if the alcohol level hasn’t kicked in yet, playing slightly heavier music may empty the dance floor. Or maybe it’s getting busy and you’ve played the same style for a while; if you don’t change the pace soon, your set may start to sound dull and monotonous and people will start to haemorrhage off the dance floor.

Test the waters. If you can’t tell what people want by the reaction on the dance floor, take things a little harder or faster, bit by bit, to see what the response is. Or maybe lessen the pace from time to time or throw in an older track to see what kind of stuff people are responding to, and then stick with that level until your crowd-reading skills reveal that the time has come to move up (or down) a gear.

You’re the captain

As the DJ, you’re in charge of the night – you’re the captain of the ship, and you set the tone. If you’re a DJ because you love the music, you should really be getting your rocks off as you DJ, because you’re playing music you love! Smiling, dancing and having a good time in the DJ booth is not something to suppress in a vain attempt to look cool. If people see you loving what you’re doing, they’ll feed off your energy and will have a great time. If you look like someone’s just ran over your cat, it’s up to them to create their own energy. It’s worth repeating: you set the tone for how to enjoy the night.

Handling requests

I deal with requests with the following considerations:

• Was I going to play the requested tune anyway? If so, I’m happy to say yes when someone asks, and say when it’ll be on.
• How polite was the person about the request? I’m not saying I’d play anything if someone was polite enough, but bad manners make me less likely to play something. Please and thank you don’t take much time or effort to say, and they can get you so far in this world.

No matter what you consider when someone asks for a tune (this includes how good looking the person is), remember that people have paid good money to get into the club and are expecting to be entertained, so at least let them down gently.

If you don’t want to play the tune someone’s asked for, either because you don’t have it or it’s not the right time to play that tune, say the following, depending on how hopeful you want to leave the person:

• ‘I’ve left it at home … sorry.’
• ‘I’ll take a look, but I think I’ve left it at home … sorry.’

And if you’re a digital DJ, come up with a good line about no Wi-Fi!

Requests as a warm-up DJ

The warm-up set can be difficult for requests. The owner/promoter’s told you to play lighter tunes that everyone knows, not too hard and not the latest, biggest tracks. Halfway through the set, a couple of people ask you to play the big tunes of the moment, or as someone once ‘asked’ me: ‘Play some heavy stuff I can dance to – this stuff sucks.’ Lovely …

Herein lie a couple of problems. The place isn’t near full and the promoter has strongly said no to playing those tunes, but this is the customer, who’s paid to be entertained. This situation is why I stress the importance of talking to the owner/promoter when you get offered the job, to iron out these possible problems (see the earlier section ‘When you’re the warm-up DJ’). Maybe this is exactly why the club has a music policy: to weed out the kind of people who just want to dance or mosh at full speed on an empty dance floor.

Requests as the main DJ

When you play the main set, the club removes a lot of the restrictions on what you can play. Requests only become problems when someone asks for a tune that you don’t like or don’t have, or that isn’t appropriate for that point in the night.

You may be asked for a ‘problem’ tune if someone doesn’t realise the kind of club he’s gone to. The number of times I’ve been asked to play an R&B track in a trance club amazes me, but usually this request is prefaced by: ‘I was dragged here by my friends and don’t like this music, so …’

Friendly lighting jocks and bouncers can sometimes step in and take the role of a mediator in passing on requests. This option saves you from entering into a three-minute argument with someone over a tune that you’re not willing to play, and then missing the next mix.

Requests as a party DJ

As a club DJ, you have some licence to say no to people when they ask for tunes – you got the job because you should have a superior knowledge about the music. As a party DJ, you have to appear to be at the mercy of the people you’re playing for, whether you follow through with their requests or not. However, a few occasions can crop up when you’d say no to a request, if you don’t have that particular song or if it wouldn’t go down well.

If you’re working at a wedding, and the dance floor has all the grandparents on it, dropping the latest gangsta rap or nu metal tune may be a bit of a mistake. Or if you’re a rock DJ and everyone’s going nuts for the 1980s Bon Jovi/Van Halen set you’re currently playing, agreeing to play one request for White Zombie may not prove to be the best decision you make all night.

Taking over from someone else

The warm-up DJs have a hard life: they turn up, play for an hour and a half to get the crowd in the mood, and then the next DJ pushes them out of the way to finish the job they started. When you’re the person doing the pushing, pause and pay attention to what was happening before you entered the DJ booth.

Aim to get into the club at least 15 minutes before you start so that you can listen to the end of the warm-up DJ’s set. This time gives you a chance to gauge how the crowd is responding to the music, and also avoids you repeating a tune that’s only just played. Ask the warm-up DJ questions about the crowd’s reaction to the music already played and how he feels the night will continue, based on his experience so far.

Checking the setup

Checking the setup is extremely important. Look at what the DJ’s using. If he’s only using CDs and you’re about to use the turntables, quickly check the turntables and the settings on the mixer to make sure that the previous DJ hasn’t disconnected, broken or switched off something that will end up causing you problems.

Look at how the DJ is mixing too. If he mixed using only the channel faders, look at the cross-fader. If the mixer has assignable switches, the DJ may have switched off the cross-fader so that it has no control over the mix.

Gauging the mood

Use your body language skills to judge what mood the crowd is in before deciding how to start your set. If the club’s busy, with pent-up energy, and the warm-up DJ has been getting loads of requests for more upbeat tunes, use that to your advantage by instantly changing up from light warm-up music to something a lot newer, faster and harder. That change gives an instant boost to the crowd. Bear in mind, though, not to blow your entire set trying to take the crowd even higher, only to run out of tunes to play.

If the people are still tentatively moving onto the dance floor, be a bit more gradual about the change in music. Do start to move on from what the previous DJ played, to add a feeling of impending energy and excitement, but do it gradually to keep the people on the dance floor.

Playing with momentum

If you’re taking over from someone who’s already playing fast, powerful tunes, you have a choice: you can mix out of the DJ’s last tune in a smooth, seamless, unnoticeable mix, you can announce your arrival with a change in tempo/genre/key/volume, or you can try something like a dead stop, spinback or power off if you really want to let people know that you’re taking over. (Check out Chapters 16 and 17 for more on these techniques.)

My preference is to use a basic, simple-sounding tune. Something that’s just drums and a powerful, offbeat bass melody coming out of a quite frantic tune is a good way to change the power without changing the tempo. (In Chapter 18, this is described as the te from the ta-te driving rhythm into a ta-fe-te-te.) I can then build the set back up to a fuller feel in my own time, rather than carrying on with the same sound as the other DJ, which may bore the floor.

You can also be a bit cheeky and gradually, for the last couple of minutes of the warm-up DJ’s last track, lower the volume it’s playing at a little, so the people on the floor don’t notice it. Then when you play your powerful starter tune at the same volume the warm-up used to be playing at, it’ll actually sound like you’ve really cranked up the sound system at the start of your set.

Changing the music

One of the most interesting things I’ve ever had to do was take over from a heavy metal DJ. Changing from Iron Maiden to David Morales isn’t a natural thing to do! I used a simple fade out with an instant start of the next tune, which isn’t a particularly hard mix, but choosing the right tune to start with is important. The tune I used, ‘Needin’ U’ by David Morales, was a simple, recognisable tune with the offbeat simple bass line I mention in the previous section, and it worked very well.

Finishing the night

After a successful night in the DJ booth, putting on the last tune and letting it run out can be hard – you just want to keep playing all night long. Start thinking about how you want to finish your set about an hour before you finish.

How busy the club is determines how you end the set. If the club’s still packed, keep playing great tunes until the end, and then try to finish with the best tune you can think of. I used to love finishing with BT’s ‘Believer’, because it’s an energetic musical track that finishes with a repeating vocal line, ‘I’m a believer … ’, echoing into silence. This is so much better than just fading out drums, or a tune that whimpers off into silence.

Some clubs request that you tone down the energy and pace of the music towards the end of the night or when the dance floor starts to get quieter, so people aren’t hyperactive as they leave the club. I think that sells the club and the customers short a bit – you need to play the most suitable music for the people who are there from start to finish.

Respect the licensing laws for the club you’re playing in; you don’t want the club to lose its licence just because you wanted to squeeze in one more track. Even if people are screaming for another, don’t take the law into your own hands by playing another tune. That’s a sure route to not being asked back to the club next week! The owner/promoter will probably hang over you towards the end of the night to make sure that you stop anyway, so don’t push your luck.

The last things to do as you finish your night are to pack up all your tunes (and any equipment you brought), disconnect anything you’ve used to record your set, put it all in a safe place and then find the person who has your money!

While you’re still at the club, have a last word with the bar staff and the toilet attendant to find out how they felt the night went. Always listen to feedback. If they say something you don’t agree with, that’s fine, but remember it and look out for it next time, in the unlikely event that they know better than you.

If you’re working through an agency, you will be paid through them, so you only need to say your goodbyes and leave with the knowledge that you’ve had another successful night.

If you’re not working through an agency, you have to play what I call ‘hunt the money man’. You may have to look in some strange places, but you’ll eventually find the person who will pay you. Unless you have something better to do, don’t let him leave your sight until you get paid. In full.

Be cautious if the club doesn’t give you the full amount there and then. If the person who pays you gives you half now with a promise of half next week, because the club is cash light – don’t believe him. You’ll never see that other half! The same goes for promises of bank transfers or the old ‘The cheque’s in the mail’ nonsense. Listen to the folks at Gas Monkey Garage and only deal in cash!