8 Hour "Marathon" Gig: Help needed with strategy

C2, DJ Vintage, thank you very much for invaluable tips and your time to respond!

I actually don’t mind taking requests subject to tracks availability and the flow coherence but we agreed with my friend that I decide as I see fit.

The idea of mini-playlists sounds great and I will start working on them asap. I think I have fairly decent knowledge of music across different styles and periods, but playing cross-genre is a whole new unexplored field to me and I am really excited to finally delve into this.

Again, thank you both for sharing your views.

Have a great day.

Thank you Craig.
Couldn’t agree with you all more on reading the crowd; I just never had a chance to master that skill yet 🙂 Pretty sad given that I’ve been messing around with my S2 for the last 3 years.. ah, well, better late than never.
It will be busy two weeks practicing for me for sure!

Hello All!

Just wanted to share some thoughts on my first full night set a couple of days ago. It was a terrific experience overall, people absolutely loved it, I received a lot of words of appreciation next day.
The host had initially asked me to include about 25-30 songs – acoustic pop / rock from 80-90’s; the evening started slow and I decided to play mostly those songs in the first hour which must have had some personal meaning to the guy but frankly wouldn’t spark any sort of feedback from the crowd if I played them later in the night, in my opinion.
First two hours I did no mixing whatsoever and I was honest about it. Just fade out / start new and watching the effect on people.
One downside was that people were too hesitant to start dancing. I had a couple of “messenger” friends who told that everyone is really up for going to the floor from the bar and the music was great but I guess it’s when everyone is waiting for someone else to step in first. I blame the booze though, or rather its very slow consumption, which bartenders confirmed to me as well.
Probably the speech by the host’s parents was the gamechanger – I actually picked an oldie song as a background playing very low level at almost zero low frequency, which was good. Then came the cake and that’s when things went off when I put some Will Smith followed up by a combo of disco remixes (God Bless Frankie Knuckles!).
I did the cycles as you guys recommended changing genres and moods – some of them worked, some of them didn’t, but I’m actually happy that some didn’t as it put me against difficult choices. Overall once the crowd was out there, I think they fancied rather high level of energy music, be it reggaeton, balkan or contemporary house with some electro. Unfortunately hip-hop was not taken too well, but ok, next time in a different setting.

Here are the points I think I learned:

1) I felt skepticism and even a bit of antagonism from the bar owner when he realized he has to free up some space for my controller and the laptop stand (he had huge stacks of CDs and some equipment there). On the other hand, even if I had been able to play CDJs, I wouldn’t have tried on those, they did look a bit questionable. I am sure he changed his opinion around midnight though!

2) I tried to build a nice relationship with the security guy and bartender girls and it really paid off: free non-alcohol soda all night + tolerance for sound levels into late hours.

3) Requests (or rather generally, interaction). So I had a couple of people coming up asking either certain tracks or to e.g. high up the pace. I was lucky that the floor was almost full at those moments so I could just say – hey, look behind you, people are actually enjoying it at the moment but I’ll surely switch to more intense sound later on. With the tracks I didn’t have, I was just honest saying I don’t have them. It was kind of compensated by occasions when a girl asks for a song and I was about to play it next anyway, and that’s when you feel you are a king! 🙂

4) Preparation paid off, as I followed DJ Vintage’s recommendation to form short sequences of tracks that go well together. What I found interesting though is that sometimes, if genres are switched between those sequences, no mixing or blending is expected. Maybe my crowd was too simple and rather cared about the music than technical skills. In general, actually I was able to get away with incredible number of things! Some of the extremes were stopping the track midway for two seconds (there is something with Traktor – if the cursor is not in the search field and you start typing, it messes with the playing deck, I need to investigate), playing a loop for 5-6 times while looking for a track, bringing down the tempo by 15 bpm to mix properly, etc. Crowd is forgiving if music is good.

5) I know many of these seem obvious but it’s so reinforcing when I experienced it personally. This one for example: people loved seeing me enjoying myself, I had some specifically praising me for that!

So there it was – my first full party. Many thanks for your personal advise and I hope someone will find the above useful.

Enjoy your Sunday!