Help with How to Get Your First Mobile DJ Gig and Advise for the New Mixing DJ

0:00 How do you get your first gig?

How do you get your first gig? Now I've done videos like this before, but they're probably lost amongst the thousands of other videos. Dodgy cat running around me ankles. So how do you get your first gig? You're a new DJ, you've got all the kit and you're just waiting for the phone to ring. Well, you might have to wait a very long time unless you don't do something about it. So what do you do? How can you get your first gig? One way is to offer yourself to do a party for family and or friends. Try and find a local venue where you're allowed to have people and stand very close together. And take your kit, make some cards. Vistaprint is really good because it's cheap and cheerful. No, they haven't asked me to promote them, it's just that I use them because they are cheap and cheerful. And you get your cards done and they're with you even before you've finished. They're that quick. Like it.

So you get some cards, you hand them around and then anyone there who books you, you charge them. But of course the first gig you do for free. Also what you could do is go to a local pub, bar, club and say, excuse me mate, could you go on your decks please? Maybe not that easy but what you could do is go to a local bar or venue where they play music from a jukebox or maybe music from, actually that might not be a good idea because if they play music from a jukebox... They might make money from that so they wouldn't want you. But then again, thinking about it out loud, well inside my brain anyway, if they had you instead of the jukebox, they may make more money because they could start charging at the door because you're playing and make more money than they would be if they were using the jukebox. I hope you get me anyway. So go to a local venue and say, Oi mate, I'm a DJ, can I do a little set here?

Make sure the venue, of course, is the sort of place you would want to play in and also the clientele are the sort of people who'd like music. The last thing you want to do is go to a venue where you've got old geezers playing dominoes. Mind you, they might like house and dance music as well. Anyway, so you find a venue, like I said, and you have a word with the management and say excuse me. Is there any chance I could maybe DJ here one evening for free? Tell your friends, tell your family, open a Facebook page for that event and just try and promote the hell out of it. And do one or two nights, see what happens. You could get following, people come along, like your music, start to dance. Oh, do you do other places? Yes, I do. I'm a mobile DJ. Give them a card. Bingo!

2:35 Ah, that's funny, that's another story in itself

Now also, mobile DJing is not just about, I've got the best controller in the world man and I've got 50 million files. No, you need public liability insurance, you need to make sure that all your kit's pat tested or at least got green stickers on. Ah, that's funny, that's another story in itself. A DJ console, some lighting, some decent PA. So for God's sake, don't look like some topsy-turvy DJ with cables hanging everywhere because it just looks very unprofessional. And less is more. Of course, that depends on the sort of event you're doing. But if you are a new DJ, I don't think you're going to be getting £20,000 worth of Turbo Sound System, the best Nexus setup from Pioneer, loads of moving heads and a lorry to cut your kit because if you were doing that, why would you want to be a DJ in the first place? If you can afford all that sort of stuff, you might as well just sit at home and smoke big fat cigars and drink champagne.

So you take a decent amount of kit, a good controller, your laptop, a backup laptop, a console and some lights. Now if you think about it, let me give you an analogy here. I love my analogies. Done this one before but it will make sense. You walk into a restaurant, there's two plates of food in front of you. One looks wonderful, the other one looks like someone's puked up all over the plate. Which one are you going to eat? Don't say the puked up one. Yeah, alright, you're gonna. But you eat with your eyes, don't you? Now imagine that they actually both taste the same and no indeed it has not been puked up by someone but it's just the chef's gone like that whereas the other one he's gone and added little bits of this, that and the other on them to make it look good. You're going to go for that one aren't you? So take that thought in your mind and then imagine you're a guest. You open the door, you walk into the venue and you see the DJ.

4:34 Look, and I can see all the cables danging around everywhere

And you look and think, hold on a minute, that's a trestle table with a cloth. That's a laptop with all the cables and I can see that square thing he or she is pressing with and underneath I can see their legs. Look, and I can see all the cables danging around everywhere. No, you don't want to do that. Just make sure that the system you have All right, on the odd occasion I may have a few cables dangling all over the place but what I try and do though is make sure that the setup I have is pleasing to the eye. So when I do an event most of the time I will take light console, I'll take maybe well actually I can't anymore I've got the RX2 anymore so I'll take the XE which is over there put that on the light console

A couple of totems either side, maybe moving head on there, or maybe a couple of tripods with T-bars and some wash lights or something like that. And that's it really, because less is more. And also, of course, don't forget the PA. Oh, great light show mate, what can you play? Bugger all mate, I haven't got a PA. Alright, so talk a little bit about PA. All right, yeah, so you've spent a vast amount of money in your home on your home hi-fi and believe me, you can spend a lot of money on your home hi-fi. You can buy all separates only to find that you didn't have enough money to buy some speakers. So you end up going down to local B&Q, getting a couple of car speakers, knocking up some MDF and hey, you've got some speakers. No, you haven't. You haven't got any speakers because they probably sound absolutely shit.

So what I'm saying here is if you're going to invest money, good money in your controller and your laptop, you have to remember that you're only as good as your weakest link. And there are so many people out there who are selling these fantastic speakers, 100 million gigawatts of power with the flux capacitor. Hope you get that. And they'll just probably sound... Rubbish, okay? So there are three levels. Actually, there's probably four. Four levels of PA that you can buy. You can buy the high-end, exceedingly expensive, money-can't-buy except if you sell your testicles or something like that. And even if you do sell both of your testicles, if you're lucky and you've got two, unlike me. No, I have got two actually. Hold on. One, two, three, four. Right, so...

7:16 I need bass cabs and another one

You can probably just about buy one if you're lucky and then you plug it in, you think, bloody hell that sounds good. Now I need bass cabs and another one. So don't bother unless of course you're very, very rich. In that case, like I said earlier, you probably wouldn't need to do this. You can just sit there and drink champagne and pick caviar out your mouth, teeth, nose, whatever. Okay, so calm down. Scary feet. Bump beds. That's another one you might get. Alright, so the other one is of course the higher end kit which is like your JBLs, your RCF, your Nexo, your EAW, your QSC is very good but the high end and they are really, really expensive. But they're very, very good quality and a lot of DJs will buy those. So if you're a new DJ you may want to then consider the setup below which is good quality sound at an affordable price.

But what is an affordable price? Now, before I talk about that, let's listen to, well actually let's talk about the lower end speakers. Alright, and there's lots of them. If you go on eBay for example, you could see a set of speakers that look like they've come out of a starship. They're just different shapes and they've got loads of circles and they're different colours and they've got LED shining and they say a thousand watts. A thousand watts, maybe a thousand milliwatts but definitely not a thousand true watts because they may look good but you plug those in and you start turning them up and the only thing you're probably going to hear is people screaming when they're running away because they've caught fire.

No, so please don't spend ridiculously low amounts of money on your PA. If anything, even if you're a new DJ and you don't have much money, save up and invest. A minimum amount is going to be about five or six hundred pounds, euros, dollars, shekels. Shekels. We may end up getting there actually if the monetary system dies. You never know. Bitcoin, go for it. All right, so make sure... God, this video's going bananas now. Thumbs up and like it if you like it. And don't forget to subscribe if you're an idiot. You're an idiot, aren't you? Right, so again, let's go back to the new DJ. You want to become a DJ. You want to become a mobile DJ. Now in today's society with lots of live streaming and so on...

10:10 Sync Cloud or Mask Cloud?

Do it! Alright? Now, I can't say definitely or don't or whatever, but just be wary about Facebook and YouTube because they do have a tendency of going, naughty boy, naughty girl, I'm sorry, we're gonna just delete you for a month or so. And all you did was play the beginning of a track by some ridiculously overpaid artist who can't even sing in the first place anyway. Yeah, it is like that. So just be wary about that. But what you can do is do some mixes on Sync Cloud. Sync Cloud or Mask Cloud? Oh God, it's getting worse. Mix Cloud. Right. Put some mixes on there and then just maybe link those to your Facebook page. You see? Now, as far as I know, Twitch is a really good medium for doing live streams. So do a live stream.

It depends really on the sort of mobile events you want to do. If you are across the board, then don't do a live event and start playing techno because you're not going to get mumsies and dadsies phoning you up going, oh hello we're getting married next week, yeah we've got all the aunties and uncles coming, we've got little girls and boys and my gran's coming, she's not very good at hearing and she's a bit old, we'd like techno please. No, people like that probably want a wife. Sorry, it's going to ruin your day this video isn't it? They want a wide variety of music so make sure you have a good quality catalogue of music as well. Because think, you've got your PA, you've got your console, you've got your laptop, you've got your controller, you turn up and you go, right what do you want me to play? I've got seven songs.

No, it's not going to work. You need to make sure you have a diverse eclectic mix of music because you never know all of a sudden there could be some people walking through the door from India and you're like oh dear I haven't got anything for them or you could have people maybe from South Africa turn up like oops or you could have people from America turn up they can play just joking I'm English, I can say what I like. So you have to have a wide variety. You've got to have a wide variety. You have to have a good selection of music. So what I mean there is you want your 50s, 60s, 70s, Tamla Motown, Northern Soul, rock, reggae, rockabilly, hip-hop, R&B, salsa, trap, two-step.

This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.