DJ Tucker
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I love my 2012 MBP. I upgraded ram and added an ssd from owc. Their upgrade packages are stupid easy. I don’t much care about either retina or large screens which helped keep the price low. I went with the MBP over the air because you can’t upgrade the ram in an air. Sometimes I wish I would have just grabbed an air with 4 gigs of ram but at the time I thought both the hd and the ram were non-upgradable.
All of the advice these guys have given you is probably all you need but I’ll add a few thoughts.
If you’ve been asked to come back then you did a good job. There are a lot of things that can lead to thin crowds (time slot, weather, time of the month, news stories, seasons, etc.) don’t get too worried about it.
Secondly, I wouldn’t worry about mixing in key unless it’s an unwritten law of your genre that I’m unaware of (like trance for instance?). Key seems especially unimportant in front of live crowds and room dynamics and harmonics and mono systems, who knows what key the stuff is actually heard by the crowd in anyway? I completely ignore key during gigs.
Read the crowd but don’t over do that either because there are morons in every crowd that think they’re DJs and their requests/demands are usually wack. Probably the most important thing I can add is to take all the opportunities you can to play out because that’s where you really gain the experience you need to rock a crowd.
Wait until you start having tech issues. I’ll post a link to a recent gig where my mixer (Xone:23C) abruptly cut out no less than 3 times during the night. I rolled with it, the crowd still danced and I had a backup plan in the form of my iPhone hooked up to the house mixer with a crowd-pleaser ready to go. https://hearthis.at/alt./altrock-akron-square-2-19-2016/
I would say to look right at the Denon MC4000. I really love mine. But this is a funny post time-wise because I just decided to sell mine so I can focus on my DVS setup. Because I use a Xone:23C, I can still mix with just that combined with my laptop in external mode using the keyboard for hotcues and play/stop for mobile gigs. It’s a compromise but because that one mixer can handle analog and software mixing and can be used at home and at a gig, I can’t justify keeping the Denon controller because I’m looking at a cross country move and need to downsize, even though it’s awesome.
Here’s how I do it. It only works if you haven’t changed the pitch/tempo on the tracks. If you blow a transition, back up and start again. Do it as many times as necessary and then just cut to the last transition you try in audacity. The key is zooming deep into the wav file in audacity so when you make your cut, it won’t leave an audible click. It takes some practice to get right but once you develop some muscle memory, it’s really easy. I only fix egregious mistakes when I make a mixtape so maybe 2 edits per hour. I record my mixtapes within the software (VDJ8) to a wav file to avoid any extra transcoding. If you changed the tempo of one or more of the tracks in the mix, you better make note of when and what speed. It’s easier to rerecord than trying to recreate your exact movements on the pitch fader.
