What
makes groups of girls go wild on the dancefloor to music they haven’t
heard before? Understanding that secret can revolutionize your DJ sets.
In business, smart executives know that they often have their best
ideas when they’re not at their desks, when they’re out in the “real
world”. Not only that, but the truly excellent among them understand
that to deliver what customers want, they need to get as close to those
customers as possible – “if you want to understand me, walk a mile in my
shoes”.
Today I’m going to show you how this kind of thinking can make you a
better DJ. It involves getting out of the DJ booth or your home studio a
bit more often, but it’s more than that: It’s a whole new way of
approaching your music discovery. It can help you avoid having to play
chart music if you don’t want to, while at the same time avoiding
becoming one of those DJs who plays sets nobody likes.
What I’m going to share with you is something the best DJs in small
clubs, bars and lounges the world over already do in order to play
creative, fulfilling DJ sets that they enjoy and that their crowds love.
It’s simple, but it can revolutionise the way you approach your DJing
Before I tell you exactly what I mean, though, let me outline the problem.
The “specialist music discovery” trap
When you’re a “creative” DJ (as opposed to a mobile/wedding type DJ
who has a different set of requirements), you realise you need to have a
“better” music collection than the general public, right? That you
somehow need to be more knowledgeable about new music, that you need to
have “put the hours in” to build a great collection that you can draw on
when you’re playing. It’s part of being an “original” DJ, isn’t it? We
all know that.
‘Normal’ people don’t spend two days flat every week on Beatport, listening to obscure releases from about 50 different labels…
The problem is that often the way we do this moves us too far away
from the people we’re eventually going to end up playing this music to!
Why? Because “normal” people don’t spend two days flat every week on
Beatport, listening to obscure releases from about 50 different labels,
shortlisting and buying stacks of tunes at once, then congratulating
themselves on having a “great” collection. (This is just an example.
Think hours spent on SoundCloud, etc, and all the other types of DJ
behaviour that “normal” folk never engage in.)
No, normal people get on with their lives, and music just kind-of
seeps in. They get to hear some of it in clubs and bars, sometimes
played to them by DJs – people like you. Friends recommend stuff. It can
come from TV, from the car radio, from snippets heard in the street,
from films and so on.
What I’m saying is that what “normal” people like and dislike is not
shaped so much by trends or by conscious effort, just by music being a
part of their environment. And trust me, even on the trendiest
dancefloors, more people are like this than like music-fanatic DJs.
(Nearly all the women, for starters.)
So how can knowing this fact make me a better DJ, you may be asking?
Surely I shouldn’t stop hanging around Beatport or SoundCloud and all
the other things I spend hours doing in order to stay ahead of the curve
with my music collection?
Drink from the same cup as your audience
No, I’m not! I’m proposing instead you do something
in addition to this that
I’ve seen and done and that I truly believe in. What is it? It’s
building a system for getting the best of the music that’s “out there”
in public, right now, into your collection – fast.
I’m talking about the music that’s in the malls, on broadcast channels and on the tips of people’s tongues
this second.
The stuff everyone’s listening to without really realising it and that
they don’t really know they like yet. There’s so, so much of it. You
already like some of it (but just like the public,
you don’t know it yet). But when you work out how to bag some of this stuff and start DJing with it, it’s solid gold for your sets.
I’ve observed time and time again that the DJs who firstly allow
their environment to fill their heads with hooks, lyrics, beats and so
on, and who secondly have a system for
acting on that music, always play better DJ sets. (Don’t worry, we’ll get on to how to do this stuff in a bit.)
You see, in music, “familiarity” can be just as important as “good”.
And one problem with locking yourself away for hours on end to build
your collection is that you’ve often got no idea when, or even if, that
stuff you choose is ever going to get any public momentum behind it.
Worse, by “consciously” trying to decide if music is good or not, you
can make mistakes. Now you’re buying music that’s not very good, and
that nobody else will ever become familiar with or care about.
Floor-emptying stuff. Big mistake.
On the other hand, a lot of time and money goes into selecting unique
music for films, shop soundtracks, TV ads and so on. It isn’t left to
chance.
A lot of time and money goes into selecting unique music
for films, shop soundtracks, TV ads and so on. It isn’t left to chance.
Much of this stuff isn’t chart music (yet). Sure, commercial radio
is, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg here. So by just being open
to the music that surrounds you daily, you can bag “exclusive” tracks
for your DJ sets that do the job on the dancefloor, often without
resorting to filling your sets with chart fodder, or with the same dance
tracks everyone else is playing.
Trust me, one good tune found this way is worth ten ill-considered
specialist store purchases. And the beauty is, you’re already there! I
am sure you watch films, go out to restaurants or cafes, hang out with
friends in venues away from where you work, go to the mall and so on.
You, too, are already acting like “normal” people do – the trick is now
to “listen” to the music seeping into your life when you’re out and
about and to allow this to influence your music collection.
How to do it
It can be as simple as making a quick note on your smartphone when
you hear a tune on the radio you like. It can be Shazam-ing a house
track playing in a clothes shop while you’re out shopping that grabs
your attention, then heading off to find a remix of it that works in
your sets as soon as you have time. It can be digging out the soundtrack
of a film you enjoyed, or finding out what the music is on a TV ad when
you like the voice of the singer.
Scoop up these “finds” weekly into a list, and use that for the basis
of your discovery sessions. (Of course, music discovery and management
is one of the core concepts of digital DJing, which is why we go into it
in greater detail than is possible here in our
How To Digital DJ Fast course.)
A great thing about learning to discover new music like this is that
when you’re busy doing other stuff, only the truly memorable music will
jump out at you – the rest will sink back into the void and won’t waste
your time. Your subconscious mind is doing some valuable filtering for
you. (Suddenly, those two days spent on Beatport each week may not look
like such a good investment after all…) At the very least, a shortlist
found like this can tell you where to start looking in Beatport when
inspiration has dried up.
Do you now understand why the best DJs (those who actually fill
dancefloors in bars, lounges and small clubs in every city in the world
week in, week out) are keenly listening in to what the public is exposed
to?
They know that in all of these situations, someone else has already
done some of the work for them – getting a sound, a style, an individual
track, lyric, melody, voice or beat out there in public, where it
starts to seep in to the collective psyche. Where it starts to become
familiar. They know that this means when they drop it on a dancefloor,
even when people haven’t got a clue what it is, there’s a far better
chance it’ll send the place crazy.
And once they’re rocking the floor with these well-chosen bombs that
they seemingly plucked out of thin air? Well, then they’ve built
themselves some trust with their audience, and therefore some space to
drop some of those other tunes that they love that your audience may not
have heard.
This, to me, is far smarter than mistakenly thinking that because
you’ve put in the hours at a specialist online store or site, what’s
arrived in your collection is therefore automatically excellent – and
that it’s your audience’s fault if they don’t like your stuff. By simply
acknowledging that part of your DJ sets should be constructed from
music that’s infiltrating your city’s psyche right now, you’re going to
play immeasurably better DJ sets, that please your crowds
and give you a lot of satisfaction at the same time.
Credit :
Digital DJ Tips
A couple of weekends back, U.S. big-roomer Wolfgang Gartner
let fly with a flood of Tweets lamenting “high profile DJs” who stack
their sets with the biggest, most obvious tracks of the moment. As he
bluntly put it: “Fucking DIG, lazy ass fucks”. What set him off?
Apparently watching Martin Solveig play a “straight-up Beatport Top 10 hits marathon” at the Neon Desert Music Festival in El Paso, Texas. 
