My (Very Debatable) Opinions on DJing as You Go

(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.