I have had a few weeks off DJing. My main residency ended at the start of September when the tourists went home (I play in a resort town), and what with my own holidays and some unlucky bad weather (my gigs tend to be on beach bar terraces), I’ve not actually played since then. So when it came to preparing my tunes for the Halloween gig I had booked, I was looking at lots of old, uninspiring music. The short of it was, I didn’t want to play most of it. I decided to be brutal – I cleared out a real big load of stuff to clear the way for the tunes I’ve been collecting since last DJing. I realised I tend to do this maybe three times a year – definitely some time after New Year, again before summer, and around now.
My question is: How often do you manage your current setlist? Do you even have a current setlist, or do you just lump all your tunes together and look through them by date added or something like that? (I like to tag them by venue/sound/gig because I play different styles.)
Are you brutal once in a while like me, or do you have a weekly “one-in, one-out” policy? How important do you think it is to file away tunes that are past their sell-by date and keep a lean, trim “current” set?
I’d be interested to hear your thinking and how you keep your digital DJ sets fresh.