Ronnie EmJay

I agree with DJ Vintage, unless you’re famous, you won’t be able to walk into clubs and festivals (festivals you’ll probably have to even pay to play or do it for free …!)

Club DJing is all about how many people you can bring to the club. here in Valencia the pay is VERY bad. It’s normal to get anything from 0 to 50 euro as a standard fee. A few places will pay 100-200 euros but it’s very rare. There are too many middlemen promoters taking a cut from DJ fees and far too many who will play for free for “exposure”. I usually get my fee topped up with how many people came on my list which can add a few hundred at the end of the night. Bringing people can be very hard work! You can spend all day/week messaging/talking to people about coming to the party, and it can be just as boring as how you’re feeling. Then you have the bait and switch promoters who book you to play one thing and then want top 40 when you get there,using you really just to bring people to the party. I’ve had cases where I was supposed to play Deep House and took songs on USB sticks for the CDJs and when they said to switch to Spanish/Top 40/EDM I didn’t have any and finished 20 minutes in. Oh and they didn’t pay for that night…. be prepared for promoters who book you and don’t pay you afterwards.. I’m owed around 1000e via various shady promoters that I don’t work with anymore.Many DJs won’t work with these guys but there’s a ready supply of new beginner DJs who will for the non-existent “exposure”.

Anyway follow DJ Vintage’s advice… if you rely on DJing for your living then keep doing the wedding gigs while searching for regular club gigs. Once you have that you will have a nice choice to make and experience of both industries. You never know, you could meet a club/bar manager at one of the wedding gigs…

And mixcloud hasn’t helped me get gigs.. bosses at clubs always ask for soundcloud and I don’t post mixes there. I’ve had over 60k people listen to my mixcloud mixes, regularly charting and never got a gig through it… I think it’s mostly other DJs and friends listening on Mixcloud rather than promoters. Only 1 or 2 promoters were ever impressed by those numbers, what they really want to know is how many people can you bring to the party, another reason they have 1 DJ per hour (I prefer doing 2-4 hours!)

Remember with hip hop DJing it’s different to EDM DJing .. if you aren’t really using sync and doing more manual mixing, it is fine on any software. You can make mashups of instrumentals and acapellas in production software like
Ableton, but if you do it live you may want decent beat gridding, especially if you want to get old soul and funk beats (think Chic’s Good Times) and overlay recent acapellas over them. Live drummers are not drum machines so they may not hit at exact points 🙂

As regards electronic music, I’ve seen Edu Imbernon (tech house DJ who plays festivals and regularly at Space Ibiza) using Traktor with 4 CDJs which are all synced up for 4 deck mixing, otherwise 4 deck mixing is a pain to do!

• This reply was modified 8 years, 9 months ago by Ronnie EmJay. Reason: spelling

You can learn on whatever you want.

There are some places (in Ibiza and London, mainly) that do not allow controllers or laptops, but you can use USB sticks on their Nexus CDJ2000s (which do have sync). I think they have this rule to cut down clutter in the DJ booth and during changeovers as they usually have 1 DJ every hour.

There are also places in London which are vinyl only parties. Sounds great, but I have no wish to add to my 3000+ vinyl collection as I just have no more space and don’t wish to punish my back carrying them around anymore… if you are the same you won’t be playing at these places. In Spain, it seems normal to use controllers. I’ve used controllers when playing at Es Paradis and Eden (both Ibiza super clubs) with no problems, and a friend used his Traktor S2 when playing with me at Eden. I’ve seen many in big clubs use Traktor X1, or Traktor/Serato Scratch.

Basically, if you can beat match by ear, you can transfer your controller skills to using CDJs easily and to vinyl too, though you will need to label your records with BPMs to make things easier.

Also a song like the Cheerleader song will get a betterr reaction than generic sounding EDM that is not a big song.