Preparing for a DJ event may seem like a piece of cake and as fun as it sounds like at the actual event. I think that’s the beauty of any craft…the output or the payoff always looks easier than the prep work.
Side note, this is one of the struggles I have with taking care of the clapboard siding on my 100+ year old house. I love how it looks like in the end, but maintaining wood siding is 90 percent prep work and 10 percent painting. I like the painting part of the process a lot more than the prep work.
Ok, back to my musings about DJing.
The part you don’t see is the amount of hours spent wondering if I have enough music in my library to please the audience and if my equipment is reliable for my next event.
While my music library is extensive, it’s extensive to my tastes but not necessarily everyone’s. And people’s tastes are changing with new songs that come out every day. So I listen to the radio, break out the old playlists, search online for the latest hits or even the classics for particular genres.
Once I find a tune that I don’t have that I think may be a crowd pleaser, then comes previewing it for content and quality. Not everyone likes explicit lyrics and I do a lot of family events, so I keep it clean, which is a balance between clean and rocking, too. I try to find both.
Then is the mechanics of purchasing each track, bringing it into my playlist app, then transferring to my DJ software playlist crate for analyzing and processing the metadata. Then I review the in and out points and reset those to remove dead space. I do some mixes in my DJ lab just to get a feel for the track, and now my prep work is complete. Sometimes I’m doing these last few mechanical steps right up to the day of an event which is actually nerve racking.
Don’t get me wrong, even the prep work for DJing does not feel like work. It’s how I play. It’s a recreational outlet for me, too. But there is a lot of time spent on the preparation for an event than at the event itself.