Dj-ing

Ok… I am in need for some advice!

Due to a friend of me bragging about my music when he was drunk, I and another friend now got a DJ gig :) Kinda interesting because I have no experience in that whatsoever. :D It will be a synth club at a student pub (with probably not so many people)…

So after looking around a bit I thought about doing this with a laptop, mp3s and mixmeister pro 6 (probably a total noob, lame, etc etc program, but I only have 3 weeks to become great at this :) )

Music will be mostly EBM/synthpop. Danceable stuff.

So please overwhelm me with lots of great advice and tips! :) I know there’s lots of knowledge on this forum so you probably have some good input.

Thanx!

Personally I’d recommend Atomix VirtualDJ, as I use it myself! It’s really easy to use 'specially if you have some external sound card with surround possibilities, as you can have pre-hearing on headset as well as main output going. Very effective!

…this didn’t help, sorry! :D

Thanks for the tip! I’ll check it out.

For previewing I have 10 outputs on my sound card or, if that doesn’t work, also an internal crap card. So that shouldn’t be a problem.

I have tried that Mixmeister and used it last time I was DJing at Rollercup 2004… and it went all right.
Quite not bad I’d say. It even allows some pretty nasty trick ;)
And it does not requires ages to be understood.

I tried MixVibes, it’s pretty good once you learn the hotkeys etc.

But i think Ableton is even better, because the tempi always match and you can go crazy with fx (in sync) and have a nice midi controllability. The only bad thing is that it cannot read mp3’s and such, so you would need to prepare your songs and have a large HD though.

Loolarge

Ableton or Traktor are the go.

OR, if you really want to impress people and not give them the same old same old do two things:

  1. Get 6 or more cd players into a mixing desk (with nice faders). Mix 6 songs at once, with your main song in the middle and the rest as ambient ‘tension setters’. The thicker and tenser the sound the better. Start small and work your way toward getting huge. Take your audience to Mars.

  2. Do not beat sync. If you beat sync you will sound like every other monkey out there. Make different beat structures convolute and weave, keeping a tight balance on the levels. Obviously, if it sounds a big mess, then pull out: but you can create some bloody exciting sounds with liquid beat layering.

There a probably many more gimmicks, but it depends on how silly you want to look. Then again, there are too many geeks behind laptops posing as a poor excuse as entertainment. Get a VJ at least :)