You Must Take a Spare Everything to a Mobile Event Gig!

0:00 Jonathan Ellaskins, DJ Tutor

Alright guys, Jonathan Ellaskins, DJ Tutor. Now this video is really important and I have banged on about this time and time again and I think if you just repeat it over and over again maybe one day it might sink in. So take this analogy on board. It's a beautiful sunny day, you've taken the family for a drive, you're 50 miles away from home, it's in the country, it's sunny, the birds are singing and all of a sudden you have a flat tyre. You stop, you get out only to find that you forgot to bring a spare. And you're like, oh, I forgot. Well, what do you do? All of a sudden the day is ruined. And if you haven't got a phone signal, you've got to walk to the nearest garage that potentially could be 20 miles away. And that's it. The entire day has gone from this fantastic experience to, well, I prefer to be home.

1:54 I nearly said flat tire again

Poking pins in me eyes. Anyway, the same applies with DJing. I've got a relatively decent setup here, laptop controller and a CD player. Now this does not apply if you've got the likes of a controller that just works off a laptop, but there is a way around this. You can still have your spare tyre. Now, a unit like this, I can plug in not only a laptop, I can plug in... USB, vinyl turntables and CD players. So as you can see I mean I've got the laptop on but it's just there really to look pretty. Anyway if all of a sudden the laptop stops working and I do have a controller like this then admittedly I could use some thumb drives. If I haven't got some thumb drives then I could actually use A CD player. Now, again, a lot of DJs seem to think CDs are old school, vinyl is old school and whatnot. But let's be honest. If you're driving a Ferrari that cost an absolute fortune and all of a sudden you have a flat tire and someone or you have got a spare in the back, but it happens to be one of these skinny little flat tires. I nearly said flat tire again.

Well, actually I had to do this video twice because I kept on saying flat tyre even though I didn't mean to say flat tyre. You've already had a flat tyre. You don't want a second one and you definitely don't want your spare to be flat. You better check that as well which could be part of this story. Just thought of that. Anyway, even if you're driving an expensive Ferrari, you're not going to be bothered about putting some flimsy tyre on that isn't flat because at least it will get you Back home, same applies with this. All right, maybe it's a CD player. Maybe CDs are old school and no one uses them anymore, but they do. At least it's going to get you out of the CRAP. It's going to get you out of that, OK? So what I'm trying to say here is when you go to a gig, make sure you have backups. Now, going back to what I mentioned sort of earlier I was going to talk about is...

The controllers where you can't plug in anything else, like the DJJ-400, Mix Track Pro series, etc. Basically got a USB, a plug for your headphones, plug for a microphone if you're lucky, RCA out, that's about it, okay? Nothing else, that is it. Well, you're probably thinking, well, all right, my laptop goes down, you're stuffed. Well, you're not, because guess what you do? You take a spare laptop. Hello? That's all you've got to do. You have to always think in advance. You've got to think, I know we don't like to think of worst case scenario, but when you're a professional DJ and people are paying you to do a professional job, you cannot halfway through the night say, I'm really sorry, but my kit's broken. I can't carry on. They don't care. They're not interested. They're not interested if your dog's just died or your house has burnt down.

4:14 Again, passive and active pros and cons

They want to be entertained, so you need to make sure you can. So all of a sudden, if this stopped working, the USB stopped working and the CD player stopped working, guess what? I'd probably take another one. If my laptop stopped working, I have got a backup. My speakers, if one of my speakers stopped working, it doesn't matter, I've got another one because they're powered. Again, passive and active pros and cons. We can talk about that in the future. All I'm trying to explain in this video, it's paramount to make sure you have backup. So really what you want to do, all right, this is the key. Look at the kit you're taking out and think, if that goes wrong, can I still carry on with the gig? If that goes wrong, can I still carry on? And so on. If the answer is yes, brilliant. If the answer is no, then make sure you can get extra kit so the answer will be...

Yes, really simple. Anyway, I'm uploading this video, I think it's November time, and very soon, hopefully this week, I'm going to be doing a live stream on speaker systems, what to buy, what not to buy, etc. I'll be doing a YouTube short to promote that, but watch out. Again, it's going to be just join in and any comments I will... Thank you for watching. There's a heck of a lot of kit that's damn good. So I hope this video has been helpful. Please don't forget to like and also there's lots of people who haven't subscribed so all you've got to do is hit that button. It doesn't take much, it's basically move your mouse and in fact don't bother. Practice and enjoy. Thank you. Cheers.

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