When It’s Good I Am At the Mercy of My DJ Set
It’s time for another Sunday Weave, and this one is totally impromptu.
At a big event this weekend before one of the University of Texas games, we run a tailgate that’s gotten to be pretty sizable, and I also DJ. And no one was available for setup.
So it was an all-day affair, basically from right after dawn to well into the night. Although the DJ set was only about two and a half hours.
I’m always amazed that planning on twice as much music works as well as it does. Being that if you’re DJing and you have a two-hour set, you need four hours of music ready.
This I learned from Digital DJ Tips. Good old Phil.
And it’s about as true as any rule I’ve learned.
This is always a good deal because it’s full of friends and folks I know, and a lot of folks I don’t know so well, but know okay. And they talk to me the whole time.
So it’s really—you gotta do two or three things at once, and it’s kind of like playing the drums.
Luckily, I’ve known these songs for a long time, and I think I played just under 40 in all, and had 80 songs in the set list, so it worked out perfect.
I was really happy.
It went ’80s.
I don’t know why.
I did realize in the middle of it, and I was telling somebody this, like, a DJ set sometimes just takes over and you really don’t have a choice in the matter.
I mean, you are the selector, and you’re picking things, and you’re putting them on, and you’re playing them, but really, the spirit is guiding you, and you are slotting in these tracks, and you’re totally at its mercy.
And that’s kind of when you know that you’re in the flow, which I was.
It’s a good time.
I have been running with two main speakers and two subwoofers, and I brought my third speaker as kind of a side fill. Everything battery powered, and it just worked great.
I’m really loving the Teenage Engineering Sidekick mixer with the iPad, which I wiped this week and kind of brought back from the dead, and it’s only a DJing iPad now, which I should have done a long time ago.
And then the big LC6000 platter from Denon, which I can’t say enough good things about.
And I kind of like the keeping-you-on-your-toes aspect of just having one platter and switching it from right to left the whole time.
It’s nice and compact, and most importantly, which is a whole other thing from this week, I’m not over-geared.
And I err on the side of austerity when it comes to being over-geared, but I really, really, really try to stay away from that because I think I talked about it earlier this week.
I have been over-geared in my life, and this is such a tight little austere unit.
For the gig this weekend, where I’m a utility guy but I have to DJ, I can very easily add my SP-404 into the aux. It would be nice to have, you know, some kind of monitoring system for the aux, but whatever.
I’ll just map out the buttons well enough, and if I screw up, it’ll be a good part of the show.
So I’ve got an arm and a stand for my iPad, and it all fits into my little case and feels nice and tight.
So, spent the evening tonight preparing for that, and my however-deep knowledge it is of British TV from the ’80s.
We’ll see how quick it wears thin.