Planning=cheating?

[Jester]

Nicely put

[BentoSan]

Prior Planning & Preparation Prevents a Piss Poor Performance.

God damn Australians, you allways gotta be right dont yas

Nice to see a fellow Aussie on the boards !

[j1n]

Ohh Gosh not another wanker to join the likes of Bento....We dont need anymore of those!

[form4]

Hey hey...back off the Aussies!! My location may say Netherlands but I'm as aussie as the next VB loving bloke

[Rumblejazz]

P^6

[sarasin]

Prior Planning & Preparation Prevents a Piss Poor Performance.

Thats a whole lotta P's.....

[plusplus]

Hey guys, very interesting conversation is going on here!

Just one thing upfront:
In the end, the most important thing is what comes out of the speakers.

Thats my very dumb philosophy about DJing.
When i started, and had my first smaller gigs, i preplanned my whole set from the first to the last second. I had to do that because i didn't had the knowledge nor skills nor experience to improvise.
Worked out well, most of the times, but not everytime.

Prior Planning & Preparation Prevents a Piss Poor Performance.

So i won't agree on that one, preparation(like i did, predoing a whole set) can also fuck up your performance. For example when your music just doesn't fit into the stuff the previous dj was spinning, or the crowd hates it and the dancefloor empties. Then you're completely fucked, without the skills to change to another route, and make the people dance again.

But still you need to be prepared, your Library needs to be sorted well, the tracks gridded, maybe warped and volume adjusted. You need to know the tracks inside out.

So preparation is very important to not fuck up.
But what i really think what prevents a piss poor performance is FLEXIBILITY.
If the Soundsytem goes down, your computer crashes, you're getting a blowjob under the booth or you need to take a shit so badly that you gotta leave for a couple of minutes.
Basically everything can happen.

Here you need to be able to keep the crowd entertained, change the style of music you're playing, show off some magic trick or being able to switch to CDJs/Technics if your laptop died.

How i am working right now is, coming from completely predoing everything,
actually really simple.

1. Keep my library organized, put your tracks in playlist depending on criterias like MusicStyle or whatever. Grid them properly and adjust the Volume. So you exactly know which track is ready to go without adjustments.

2. Mix in Keys
That helps so much in live sets, when you're improvising, you already know which tracks are harmonic (its not always the case, but mostly) and you can bring in.

3. Preparing some transitions
I still prepare Sets where i do the whole transition and adjustements beforehand, and save me cue points. But i just make really small set with about 4-6 tracks. Thats like a 10 Min mix, you can do that in such a small amount of time, and its super simple to find 6 tracks that work together then 75 for an 2 hour set.

For these mini-sets i mostly make transtitions that have something special or are hard to do for me and just sound super crazy
Like looping, cue-juggling, throwning samples on top, you know..

Just save them as a playlist, and its done.

So i went from a whole predone set to a lot of small ones where i just build bridges between and go from on to the other, so you can react better to the crowd, but are still sure that you got some kick ass transitions going on.

That helped me a lot at my earlier gigs, when my knees were shaking and i was super nervous and scared to fuck something up.

From there you can just start improvising more and more, super easy!

Maybe this way too huge text helped someone ... jesus ...never wrote that much i think

[miyuru]

Heh I WISH I planned my sets a little more. You never know who's in the crowd, trust me you always want to sound your best! You should still be able to change things up on the fly and trust me that ability will come with time, it's just a matter of experience and learning more and more songs.

[j1n]

Would you go take a test or exam without prior planning/studying? Enough said...tell that guy to fak off and let you do your thing...thats why your djing and that ass is just criticizing cause he cant do it worth shit

[f0tif0]

i plan things as well, as more i plan as better i know the tracks...
every single song i my library that i have selected to play particular night has all 3 cues set up, comments written down, and color marks are usually the meaning of how powerfull is the track(in serato itch)