Hello everybody!!

You are in the absolute best place to be buying music these days. There is plenty of option to listen before you buy. Read some of the articles on the blog and threads here on the forums (the search button is your friend, albeit it a sometimes slightly unfriendly one – at least at the forums) on finding music. There is plenty around, even free.

The reason I say you are in the best place, is because this shortness of cash will make you consider, reconsider and re-reconsider what tracks you will actually buy. It will give you the right frame of mind for building a collection of tracks that you will actually know intimately and will actually use. When your collection reaches a certain level (somewhere between 1000 to 2000 tracks seems to be a good measure), you should go into 1 in = 1 out mode. This way your will have a very comprehensible collection with really good tracks, EACH of which you find worth playing.

One of the major pitfalls of Digital DJ-ing is the sheer abundance of music. Many people fall into the trap of sticking anything they hear into their collection. 20.000+ tracks is nothing special and 40.000+ is no exception either. It’s totally impossible for most people to correctly manage and know all these tracks to the extent necessary to use them properly in a set.

If you are spending hard-“earned” and limited cash on tracks, you WILL become very picky about what you let into your collection. And you can feel proud that you are someone that pays the artists for their work.

A lot of bass might sound fine on a set of monitor speakers and totally overwhelming on a PA with massive subs. Hence Jarrod’s remarks about getting 320MP3 from a reputable source (not everything labelled 320kbps MP3 on the internet actually is and/or it doesn’t come from a good source file).

You have to ask yourself what is important and what is feasible. If you want your mixtape to mainly be the newest stuff, that will mean lots of digging and searching (i.e. putting in time) rather than buying stuff. If you want your mixtapes to be about the musical story you want to tell with your selection, it being the absolutely newest becomes somewhat less important for example.

The reality IS that you are on a budget. Believe it or not, this is how vinyl DJs started. Searching discount bins, begging people for stuff they didn’t play, trying to talk a plugger out of some demo’s. Friend of my family was a album cover designer, occassionally he’d toss a 12″ my way (this was mid-70s !!!). My 10 guilders allowance per week would get me maybe two singles. You borrowed records from friends if you had a party to play. You got creative.

If you don’t have money, but you do have time, invest it wisely in finding those new gems. Become a leader by becoming proficient in searching. There are some good articles on how to find new places to look for (free) tracks over on the blog. The searching for track and finding the up and coming hits will be what your mixtapes will be famous for.

What we are saying here, you have to put in the work. Even with help and tips from people on here, there is plenty of stuff to discover. Buy those 15 pounds worth of new tracks, so what if that takes you 5 years to have 1000 track library, that’s irrelevant. You think club DJs only play the latest tracks ALL NIGHT LONG? Or the crowds expects to hear nothing older than 2 months? Sure there will be places like that, but on average I’d say a DJ who can paint a picture with his entire collection (regardless of the age of the tracks in it) is two steps ahead of the pack.

There is about 20 tracks in an hour. An full night residency will run 4 hours (main part) for example. That means you need 160 tracks (about double of the actual amount that fits in the time slot so you have something to chose from). So you might have to go get a job for two weeks washing dishes, so you can carefully select the first 200 tracks you want. You then have something to begin with. 15 tracks is about 1 mixtape if you manage to find another couple of free tracks. So once you have your 200 track base collection, you can make a new mixtape every month AND play out if you like. Knowing that while you have only 200 tracks plus say 25 new ones a month, that EVERY track in that collection is playable.

I hope the message is clear here. Make do with what you got. You can’t expect others to do the work of sourcing free new hot tracks for you (although it’s a good place to start), you have to put in the work yourself, look for obscure new labels, artists, DJs, listen, listen and listen to a zillion tracks and cherry pick YOUR winners.

As Phil Morse often states, what seperates DJs from ordinary music consumers is that we listen to 20 times as much music if not more.

Hope that helps some.