(Ideas about DJing Part 2)
I have heard a fair number of voices opting for DJing as you go, catering to the people in front of you. I think this is an invaluable skill and one that I have enormous respect for, and one I have not developed terribly much (though I'm trying to). Because I don't have much experience with this practice, I'm going to offer a disclaimer: These are just my opinions, not right or wrong. I may do more on the spot DJing later and discover I disagree with myself. But this is what I have observed so far: The value of DJing on the spot ends up correlating a lot more with song selection than the flow of the night. Why?
When I choose songs, I have a sense for what songs people love to dance to, songs that are excellent to dance to, songs people love period, and songs that I love. These can often be four different things. If you are uncertain about what songs your current selection of dancers love or love to dance to and how this differs from your general tastes, DJing on the spot can be very useful so that you have a chance to see who is in front of you and make judgements about what they like.
Why do I find this less true with regards to the flow of the night? Except for the closing half hour or so, if you can assume that you have a sizable group of dancers in front of you when your set starts, you can choose an energy level to start at, and if they hook on to it, they will follow your decisions for where the energy goes. Dancers don't always know what they want to dance to until they hear it, so if your set says, I know you want to dance to this, the dancers will often agree.
Where I have found success DJing on the spot with regards to flow of the night is the last half hour, which is the time of the night that I am the least experienced with. You never know what people will do at this time of night. Sometimes people just get tired and leave, or get tired and stop dancing. Sometimes they never lose energy and dance and dance and are disappointed when the music is over. Sometimes most people leave but you have three couples having intense amazing dances until the music is done. I have found this is a time of night that is much more difficult to control.
For example: Last night, at the gaslight, I knew that the end of my set was a little shaky but I was hoping it would hold up. Things were going great but then about five songs from the end, people just stopped dancing completely. Granted, some of them had been there for three hours of lab, on top of the hour and a half of dancing, and that's a lot of up time. But I thought, I can't just let the dancing stop when there's 25 minutes left and still a bunch of people here. Here's what I did instead:
I faded out the current song. It wasn't great anyways. The next song was really amazing but people were out of dance mode. So I asked someone to dance. As soon as I did that, two couples followed. The next few songs had enough condensed energy that people stayed up and some additional couples joined us. I looked at my set again and realized that my second to last song had extremely low energy, whereas my last one was much higher (but in a beautiful end of the night sort of way). I realized that if I kept that second to last song, everyone who was tired would just leave.
So I deleted it, moved my last song to second to last, and found a happy low but constant energy song to be my final. I had almost everyone who hadn't left yet on the floor for the last three or four songs, even after 3-5 hours of dancing/lab work. Success.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Where the Music Takes Me
(Ideas about DJing Part 1)
Poets often find that when they get to a certain point in a good poem, the poem will write itself. Not only does this mean it feels a little disconnected from yourself but also that sometimes you don't quite understand the lines you write or the poem will go in a completely different direction than you had intended. It can be frustrating if you had your heart set on writing on kind of poem that decided it wanted to be another, but if you let it be what it wants to be, the poem will be better in the end.
I find this to be the case when I DJ blues as well. The way I was taught to DJ was to pick a bunch of great danceable songs and then order them based on energy level, trying to create arcs and variance within the set while ensuring that the energy level is always steady- steadily increasing, or decreasing, but always steady.
I started out DJing this way. But pretty soon I found that this limited me. I would get bored with just following a standard arc, or frustrated with trying to plan where the energy would go and then trying to make my music fit that. The music didn't always want to.
So I began focusing on the part of DJing that is the most important to me, after song selection. I think good song selection is extremely relative and personal and will and should always reflect the DJ. I have my opinions on the danceability of individual songs but I try not to take an extreme stance on song selection in general. I began focusing on transitions.
Transitions are what I have always excelled at, even before i was DJing for dance parties. I used to make mixed CD's to play at my friends' parties and people would get really engaged with them, singing along, dancing, acting stuff out. I was addicted to the response I'd get from a really good transition, that wave of energy when everyone goes, "Oh this song!" You feel it, regardless of whether people use words to express it, and the better the set up, the better the transition, the bigger that wave gets.
When I work on a set, I largely let the transitions of the music tell me where the set is going to go. I keep in mind things like energy level, appropriateness, and variation through the set, but they come second to a transition that makes the next song pop, or as my first DJ teacher told me, "It should be like each new song is a gift that you're unwrapping."
I almost never know what the energy map of my set is going to look like until I'm most of the way through, and for each song, I listen to dozens of transitions into the next song. It's time consuming. But when I find that next song that makes me go YES! I know that the people dancing are going to do that too.
Poets often find that when they get to a certain point in a good poem, the poem will write itself. Not only does this mean it feels a little disconnected from yourself but also that sometimes you don't quite understand the lines you write or the poem will go in a completely different direction than you had intended. It can be frustrating if you had your heart set on writing on kind of poem that decided it wanted to be another, but if you let it be what it wants to be, the poem will be better in the end.
I find this to be the case when I DJ blues as well. The way I was taught to DJ was to pick a bunch of great danceable songs and then order them based on energy level, trying to create arcs and variance within the set while ensuring that the energy level is always steady- steadily increasing, or decreasing, but always steady.
I started out DJing this way. But pretty soon I found that this limited me. I would get bored with just following a standard arc, or frustrated with trying to plan where the energy would go and then trying to make my music fit that. The music didn't always want to.
So I began focusing on the part of DJing that is the most important to me, after song selection. I think good song selection is extremely relative and personal and will and should always reflect the DJ. I have my opinions on the danceability of individual songs but I try not to take an extreme stance on song selection in general. I began focusing on transitions.
Transitions are what I have always excelled at, even before i was DJing for dance parties. I used to make mixed CD's to play at my friends' parties and people would get really engaged with them, singing along, dancing, acting stuff out. I was addicted to the response I'd get from a really good transition, that wave of energy when everyone goes, "Oh this song!" You feel it, regardless of whether people use words to express it, and the better the set up, the better the transition, the bigger that wave gets.
When I work on a set, I largely let the transitions of the music tell me where the set is going to go. I keep in mind things like energy level, appropriateness, and variation through the set, but they come second to a transition that makes the next song pop, or as my first DJ teacher told me, "It should be like each new song is a gift that you're unwrapping."
I almost never know what the energy map of my set is going to look like until I'm most of the way through, and for each song, I listen to dozens of transitions into the next song. It's time consuming. But when I find that next song that makes me go YES! I know that the people dancing are going to do that too.
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