10:58
Opening a set so the manager notices
On YouTube this video is called Start Your DJ Set with a Bang and Get Noticed BY Club Managers
What this lesson teaches
A demonstration with two separate lessons in it: how to structure a demo, and what a club manager will notice about how you made it.
Why the opening decides everything
The realistic assessment: a manager gets ten or twenty approaches a week and is inundated with mixes, discs and clips. They cannot listen to all of them and still do their job.
So the question is not whether your mix is good. It is whether the first couple of minutes are good enough that they keep listening.
His model is a James Bond film: it does not open mellow, it opens with a bang, pulls you in, and then settles down.
That is the structural advice. Your best idea goes at the front, not three-quarters of the way through where you think the peak should be. A set for a room builds; a demo for a stranger does not get the chance.
What he actually does
Two tracks in from the first beat, both playing together, plus acapellas over the top - and then the roll trick from stage 6: capture the two playing tracks, move the roll to a spare channel, and bring two more tracks in over it. Potentially four things at once.
And the preparation underneath it: the tempos are 122.6, 122.6 and 122.6, with one outlier at 126.8 that he has to ride the jog wheel for.
His own advice on that: if you are a beginner or intermediate doing anything like this, have the tracks at the same BPM, or very close. The trick is not the hard part; keeping four things together is.
The warning about sync
And here he is as direct as anywhere in the catalogue, because it is the thing that loses people the booking.
If you are sending a mix to a club manager, assume they know how this works. They have almost certainly been a DJ, or they know plenty. They are not going to hear three tracks locked together and think you are brilliant - they are going to suss it out.
His reasoning is good: a mix with a slight tempo variation that goes very slightly off is organic, and that reads as a human being doing it. A mix that is perfect throughout reads as a machine.
And you cannot hide it. Most managers know the common software and what it does.
His conditional permission is worth quoting in substance: if you are going to use sync, you had better be excellent at cutting and dropping tracks in, your phrase mixing had better be perfect and your selection had better be perfect - because those things might just carry you past the fact that you used it.
So sync does not disqualify you. It raises the bar on everything else, because the one thing it does for you is the one thing they will discount.
And film it
His other suggestion, which has only got easier: do a live video mix.
Then the manager is not only hearing the result, they are watching you produce it - and a video of hands on equipment answers the sync question before it is asked.
That is probably the strongest demo you can send now, and it costs a phone on a stand.
The honest note
He says himself he has not planned this much and is not wearing headphones, and imagines what it would be like if you did plan it - if you spent two days perfecting one move.
Which is the right conclusion. The opening ninety seconds of your demo is the one part of your DJing worth rehearsing to death, because it is the part that decides whether anybody hears the rest.
Contents of the video
0:00 Hopefully this will work
Right guys, hopefully this will work. It's a demonstration, okay? So if it does go wrong slightly, it is a demonstration. Now, you've been asked to do a mix for someone and you want to impress. You want to impress them that much that they listen to the whole mix, not just the beginning. Now I can't guarantee you because I don't know, but I would find it... Probably had 10, 20 requests to play there each week and is inundated with SoundCloud mixes and CDs and YouTube clips and whatnot. Is going to watch and listen to every single one because if they did, they wouldn't have any time to do their managerial work. But if you can capture their attention in that first couple of minutes, then It's more likely they're going to listen to the entire mix, or at least listen to a lot of it, or some of it, or hopefully all of it. So what do you do? Now again, it's a bit like a movie, a James Bond movie. They don't start off mellow, they start off with a big bang to get you involved and then they settle down a little bit. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to bring in two tracks at the same time.
2:45 Is very more advanced because you've
I have got this acapella, Satisfaction, Bina Benassi and Breaker Dawn, the original mix, which is like this. But also, I have got another couple of acapellas, or one acapella, sorry, a break here, that one. Now again, slightly more advanced, you will notice I was moving the jog wheel, that's because this... Track C file name is called. It's just, yeah, it's a joke there. It's 126.8 BPM. Satisfaction is 122.6 and You Don't Know Me, 122.6 which is exactly the same as Breaker Dawn, 122.6. So first port of call is if you're going to do something like this as a beginner or an intermediate. I highly, highly, highly recommend you have the tracks at the same BPM, if not very, very close. Doing something like I'm going to show you is very more advanced because you've got to be really quick, unless of course you hit that ultimate sync button. Now again, if I was the manager of a nightclub, it's not definite.
But it's very likely that you have been a DJ or you know a lot of DJs, you know about DJing. So don't think for one second that the manager is going to listen to your set and go, freaking out, that was brilliant, what a shit hot DJ. Unbeknown to them, you've hit the sync button all the way through your mix while you're mixing three tracks in at once. They're going to know, they're going to suss it out. A slight variation of the BPM and maybe it goes off beat slightly or a little bit out of time, then it doesn't matter because it shows the mix is organic. And also if you can do a live video mix, then not only is the manager listening to you, they are physically seeing you do the mix as well. And don't think for one second as well. You can slowly hide.
The key function, sorry not the key function, the sync function because most DJs and most managers, sorry, know Serato, Traktor and VirtualDJ. So just be wary, that's all I'm going to say. Be wary. If you're going to use the sync button then make sure you're frigging shit hot at cutting and dropping tunes in and your phrase mixing is perfect. Your track selection is perfect. Because that may just about get you over the fact that you hit sync. OK, so what I'm going to do as well, we're going to go to the roll feature. Good reason for that. I'm going to... We'll go to through actually. I'm going to use the through function or I will explain. No, in fact... Shall I use the through? No. I'm going to go to A. So the reason for that is I'm going to go to CFA.
5:32 I'm going to use the roll feature to record the
I could go to master, which is both up anyway. I'm not going to explain all that now. There's no point. So we're on roll. What I'm going to do is I am going to... I'm also going to put channel four up. What I'm going to do is I'm going to let the two play from the first beat, both of them playing together. So we're straight into that bang, zoom, car crashes and everything to get your attention. Don't worry, no one died during the car crash. A couple of people like bruised elbows and I don't know, I think Aunty Megan had Dolly's head fell off and she had to get it fixed down the local shop. But it was fine, they said no problem, won't cost you that much. She went there, took it there, got it fixed and they didn't realise it was a really old Dolly and it cost an absolute fortune. In fact it was more than the cars were so they had to sell the car to pay for the doll. Sorry. Anyway, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to start the mix, two tracks, I'm going to let it play for a while.
7:14 Able record, channel
I'm going to use the roll feature to record the two tracks that are playing, put that onto another channel that then gives me the option of bringing two more tracks in over. So we might even have four tracks playing. Let's see what happens. I'm not going to use the headphones. We'll get that out of the way because they just annoy me sometimes. So not the actual headphones, just having them on and stuff like that. Sorry, right, okay, bear with me. There was hell of a lot going on there but what happened was I had two tracks playing from pretty much from the word go and using the roll feature on the 900 I was able to record the two tracks that were in the mix. You'll notice I was tapping along to the beat and then this
Button here right left of the beat I hit that so we went to 8 over 1 so I was able then to record two bars what I did though is I made sure that another channel was up channel 4 and then I flicked straight over to channel 4 what that does then it takes that recorded roll and puts it to another channel which means then I can bring these two down and start messing around with another couple of tracks now Again, didn't have any headphones on. I haven't really planned this that much, but imagine if you did plan something like this and you did perfect it and this move, you know, you just spent two days doing this move and people do things like this. The DMC scratch turntablist finalist DJs that are like absolute...
Thank you very much.
This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.
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