Rock The Dancefloor: The proven five-step formula for total DJing success by Phil Morse

Author:Phil Morse [Morse, Phil]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Rethink Press
Published: 2016-08-15T16:00:00+00:00

How To Record And Critique Your Sets

Introduction

The first real club night I DJed at (where I was actually mixing the music as opposed to the countless mobile DJ gigs I’d done up to that point) was in the basement of a hotel in the city centre of Manchester, back in the 1990s. My DJing partner Terry Pointon and I sold tickets to all of our friends, hired the venue, rented the PA, took our own DJ gear down, and set up on a table to the side of the bar. Tucked under that table was my hi-fi cassette deck, with a pile of blank cassettes, wired in to a spare output on the mixer. We had been practising for months, and wanted a recording of the whole night to keep forever.

As the place filled up we were playing music at about half volume, deliberately holding back from the main event, but when we were ready, we upped the volume, hit record, and I mixed in the first tune of my planned set. Having friends who shared a love for the new house music scene all in one place was itself amazing, and finally getting to play the music – loud – that I’d had flying around in my head for months previously was mind-blowing. But being able to show off all the mixing that I’d been practising since buying my turntables was the best bit of all. As with so many important gigs in DJs’ lives, it changed me forever.

And the best bit? We’d recorded it all.

Afterwards, via DJing at an impromptu after-party in the Bishop of Salford’s back garden (that’s a story for another time), we ended up in Terry’s living room, two cassette tapes in our hands, ready for a triumphant replaying of our glorious DJ sets from earlier. Settling back in comfy chairs, we slipped the first cassette into his tape deck and hit play.

Luckily we laughed, because otherwise we’d have cried. The cassettes were awful – not the quality of the recording or the tunes, but the DJing. The records skipped, the levels were all over the place, the mixing was at best functional, at worst embarrassing…we went from heroes to zeroes in our own minds in the space of one side of a cassette, and it didn’t improve as we played through the rest of the recordings.

How did we not know? How did we miss all the bad stuff when we were actually DJing? Why didn’t people tell us, stop dancing, leave the venue and go somewhere better? How had this happened?

That recording taught me so much. Firstly, it taught me that as long as the music is right, people will forgive pretty much anything. But more importantly – like a college essay that comes back to you from your teacher covered in red ink – it gave me a crystal clear checklist of things to work on in my DJing, a roadmap for improvement. And the most valuable lesson it taught me? You cannot judge your own DJing while you’re actually doing it.

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