Ronnie EmJay

You can leave it fr a week and come back with a fresh outlook on it. Sometimes being too in the middle of it can cloud your own judgment.

On a side note, requests: just say you don’t have the song and you have no plans to buy it later.

In 1 party in Spain I was booked to play soulful deep house and 1 Spanish girl kept coming to me every 15 minutes asking for Pitbull. I kept saying I wouldn’t illegally download it and had no desire to buy it. Eventually the manager came over and talked to her and told her it didn’t fit the musical theme ad she left me alone after that. The place was full and everyone else was enjoying themselves til it closed!

In a club using digital DJ gear (controller and laptop etc) you can take backup CDs/USB sticks with songs or pre-made mixes if they have CDJs while you sort out your gear.

Remember if something goes wrong, say to yourself, “Perkele!”, “Saatana!” or even “Vafan!” 🙂 (I have lots of friends all over Finland).

Just remember, don’t panic, be calm and it will all be fine.

As it’s your first time, perhaps you can prepare mini-playlists of 3 or 4 songs that go well together .. If you have a few of those you can look at the crowd and can branch off as you please into any mini-playlist you like already knowing what the next song is that you want to mix in. As you get more experienced you may even end up like me just doing everything on the fly … it’s a lot of fun!

And the key thing is IF you make a mistake, don’t panic just carry on. Drunk people will forget in a few minutes when they are enjoying your next song 🙂

And I know it’s Finland but try not to get drunk (or maybe even drink!) while you’re playing, you can save that for after you finish or for another day.

Lycka till ! Onnea!

What DJ Vintage said… Also once you get to university you should get more opportunities there. Many (at least in the UK) have student radio stations as well as a Student’s Union with a dancefloor/club setup… and it’s really easy to meet people there.

EDM – at least in Western & Northern Europe – usually means the big room sound of Steve Aoki, David Guetta, Dimitri Vegas (the latter 2 have ghost producers as far as I know .. Guetta has never hid it though, credit to him) etc… The current EDM sound seems to have taken the template from Swedish House Mafia (as an example) and combined with harder Dutch hardstyle influences to make the current big room sound we have these days. It seems to be popular with many – who can explain it? For me the older more melodic EDM ended with the disbanding of Swedish House Mafia and the current harder sound came along.

I’m not sure where Avicii and the former Swedish House Mafia are pigeonholed as they, at least, are sometimes experimenting much more with different sounds, and in some cases staying away from their old formula of intro, build up drop, vocals, build up etc. On a personal note I preferred Calvin Harris’ music before his current foray into EDM. Eric Prydz seems to be someone who does whatever he wants… look at his song Opus.. I’ve played that at big events and it’s gone down really well.

I played Rhiythm is Rhiythm’s “Strings of Life” to a friend who likes only techno and he said it was shit and not techno at all! It’s funny isn’t it ? He’d never heard it before when it originally came out and grew up with sounds from (what most in the UK called) Eurodance and Berlin’s Love Parade.

Definitely for top 40 you’re best off buying the Now compilations every year… and used on eBay too, quite good value..especially if you wait for the price to drop.

I think the only time any serious person tries to justify this to themselves is to get something that is not available to purchase eg. Metallica’s And Justice For Jason which will probably never get an official release (it’ll just open a huge can of worms for other albums too)… then again just listen to it on YouTube and avoid a law suit from the drummer Lars Ulrich 🙂
I wonder if owning the Rock Band game gets around this though.
(I’m not a metal DJ, curious if any play these versions or the originals… I prefer listening at home to metal or at concerts rather than a club setting though.)

I’ve only ever DJ’d once with an external hard drive – a 32gb SanDisk USB stick plugged into a friends MacBook. We were using Traktor Scratch with CDJs and had no problems.

For my own laptop I have 2.5TB internal memory, which is MORE than enough for DJing. I’ve never used an external drive. There are now 2TB solid state drives out (1TBs have no dropped in price) as well as regular 9.5mm hard drives of 2TB for around $100 in the UK/US on Amazon.

Even the most basic laptops come with HDMI or other video ports, so it’s easy to connect a big screen if you like . Sometimes I connect up a Dell 24″ IPS screen for photo/video editing.

Ah I have a friend who designs the electronics high end speaker systems and hi-fi gear who always drummed it in to me to avoid Bose … so apologies that I have contributed nothing with this post 🙂

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by Ronnie EmJay.