(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.
Well, it all pretty much comes down to songs, the relationship of one song to the next, the actual segue, and the overall flow of the set. Always bear in mind that we're there to serve the dancers, though we can each find our own way to do that as best we can.
ReplyDeleteWe're always working on our sense of how a song serves our crowd in general and how it works at a given time. I generally start from the groove, 'cause that's so inherently tied to the body movement it induces. A good blues dance song is sometimes said to have "ass", which tells you what it moves. There are a lot of other considerations, and there also a lot of ways a song might trip up the dancers. If you find one of those problems, you throw that song away, or edit out the problem. There are plenty of other songs.
There are lots of ways for a program might progress. The term, "arc" kind of suggests a progressive rise of, let's say, energy and then a fall, perhaps to some sort of resolution. That's generally a good plan -- with little arcs overlaying maybe a set-long overall arc -- but bear in mind that an "arc", in that sense, doesn't dictate any particular progression of energy levels or whatever. Sometimes an unexpected jump will wake up the dancers, or conversely calm them down in a hurry. You can try out different patterns at different times, just remember it's ultimately all about the dancers, so you'd be looking for patterns that might work pretty well for them. Consistent patterns can feel good, but they might also get a little too predictable for _some_ dancers, so mix it up a little.
For what it's worth, when preparing a set in advance I generally lay out the overall progression of the set, at least a little at a time, then look through a lot of songs that might fit in a particular slot to find the song among those that best follows the previous one. A simpleminded approach, perhaps, but it reduces the number of songs you have to choose among at a given time, as well as making you take a fresh look at everything in your collection over time. Every worthwhile song fits into at least _some_ category, and you'll come around to that category some time or other.
There are shortcuts to finding the kind of song that should follow the previous one, but you can pretty much judge segues only by listening to them. You listen to a lot of them and over time you get to know what to listen for. The dancers will hardly ever notice how a segue works, but you hope they'll feel it, after you've sweated over it.