It would be interesting to know how you prepare your DJ sets, how you know which track will mix well with the previous one, how you choose tracks on live that were not included in your planned tracklist, etc.
Vlad Zabolotsky
How to organize your music collection so that from tons of material you can quickly find what you need in a specific place and at a specific time?
Dj Nerva
Preparation for a performance includes a lot: negotiations with a promoter, site inspection, coordination of a technical and household rider, studying a lineup and communicating with other artists, thinking through and launching an advertising campaign, recording a video message or promo mix, working on social networks and much more. ... Perhaps someday I'll tell you about this, but today - about the "creative" part, about music.
Musician and DJ are not a creative profession
Vlad, in order to answer the question of how I orientate myself, which track will mix well with the previous one, I must first tell you about the structure of my DJ collection. A similar question was sent by Dj Nerva, so I will combine them into one.
Recordbox and playlists
DJs play from different media, programs and devices: computers, disks, flash drives, records, phones; on the Pioneers, in Ableton, Traktor, Serato and other different variants. Specifically, I use three things: the Recordbox program, flash drives and pioneer players.
About media and formats
It works like this. At home on my computer, I add music to the Recordbox and carefully tag the tracks so that they are automatically distributed among the playlists. Then I sync these playlists to the flash drive. And then, already at the performance, I insert the flash drive into the player, and it displays the entire structure and playlists exactly in the same form as in the Recordbox. This is a key point, because it is thanks to the playlists that I can find the very track that I am going to play next at any time .
Now I'll tell you about the main playlists that make up the structure of my collection.
Energy levels
First of all, after adding tracks to the Recordbox, I assign them an energy level - this is the main criterion. The most important thing here is that the energy level is exclusively my inner feeling of the track, and not some kind of formal sign: not the tempo, and nothing like that.
As DJs usually do.
Here I want to step back a little and tell you how they usually do. Most DJs pre-select the required number of tracks and lay them out in the order in which they plan to play. That is, complete predetermination. Of course, such a pre-prepared set may sound great at home, but be completely out of place on the dance floor.
It may seem that only beginners do this, but no: even those who have been performing for more than ten years do this. Some even record whole mixes in advance and only pretend to be in action at the performance, but this is absolutely the bottom, which I will not even discuss.
More advanced DJs do not prepare sets in advance, but choose tracks right during the set, focusing on the audience in front of them. Most often, as a criterion for choosing the next track, they use tempo as a simple and understandable unit of measurement, some still look at the key.
It turns out something like the following. Let's say the following track is playing on the dance floor:
Dylhen, Paul Thomas — Diablo (Original Mix) 122 BPM, Em
The DJ thinks, “Yeah, 122 BPM. The dance floor is shaking, everything is fine, we must not slow down. " He searches and searches for tracks in his digital library of hundreds of tracks, and he finds this one - in the same key and even two beats per minute faster :
R3cycle, Roy Lebens — Babylon (Rise & Fall Remix) 124 BPM, Em
Obviously, the energy on the dance floor is waning; people disperse. It is normal to lower the energy down during a set if you know why to do it. But if the DJ from the example above wanted to keep a wave of drive, then this is a failure.
Or the opposite example. Let's say the DJ is playing melodic progressive like this:
Tim Penner — Oceans Between (Original Mix) 125 BPM, Gm
He does not want to accelerate much, so he finds a track in the same key and even one BPM lower , and in addition, from the same record label:
Aaron Cullen, Tommy Conway — Glack (Original Mix) 124 BPM, Gm
Already realized the mistake, right?
It is clear that energy partly correlates with the genre, and as a result - with the tempo. But the relationship between energy level and pace is not always there, and it is not always predictably linear.
That is, relying simply on the tempo of the tracks and thus mechanically selecting the next track for mixing is clearly not worth it, and in fact, that's why I classify the tracks by energy.
Favorites
Digg
Del.icio.us
Facebook
Furl
Magnolia
StumbleUpon
Google
Yahoo MyWeb
