My first gig was bad, but educational. I sent out my first ever mix to all of the clubs in town and was surprised to hear back from the manager of one of the biggest. He decided to throw me in at the deep end by putting me on at midnight on a saturday in the back room. I was absolutely terrified, and as the DJ before me started his lat song I started plugging in my equipment. At the time i was using FinalScratch 2 DVS so i had a lot of cables to plug in, but I’d rehearsed it many times at home. Unfortunately, I hadn’t accounted for their setup being more ‘spread out’ than mine and as a result one of my cables was too short to reach from my soundcard back to the mixer, so i was forced to use one final scratch deck and one deck with normal vinyl (luckily I’d packed some just in case!)
The other problem was down to the really cheap headphones that I was using – fine for practising at home, but almost completely inaudible over a booming club system! So i had to wing it for the whole gig, trying to beatmatch by turning up the volume on the incoming channel just enough so i could hear it and get it in time.
All in all, it didn’t actually go too badly, although the manager didn’t invite me back 🙁 But i learned some valuable lessons that night, and since then I’ve never been as terrified as i was before that gig!
