Music Hoarder !

Well … our hero Phil Morse has a collection of … believe it or not … 600 or so tracks! And he only takes a selection with him to a gig, adhering to his own advise of bringing approximately twice the amount of tracks you need (roughly 20-25 tracks and hour, so for a 3 hour gig you’d need between 120 and 150 tracks).

I have started rebuilding my own core collection, the stuff I want to have with me at all times and I am aiming for 1200 tracks max. I have much much more music (after 38 years as a DJ, mostly mobile). So what I have done is made an external hard disk that contains my “request music”, so I have it with me. They are simply filed in folders by artists first name (big artist have a subfolder under their own name). From my DJ software I can just use the file/folder option to find whatever request I might need.

The thing is, in the days of vinyl and even CD’s, both logistics and financials prohibited you from building immense collections. You were very picky what you let in. Slow grow system. And you WOULD make a selection before you went out to play or you’d break your back carrying everything everywhere.

You’d know every track in your collection intimately and what must comes next was hardly ever a real question, you’d know what direction you wanted to move in and what tracks in your collection would match, where to mix in and out and probably what track would come best after that one.

The sheer availability and price of music these days is truly a pitfall for the modern DJ. It’s so easy to give in to buying anything you like.

I know Phil has a 1-in/1-out rule. It takes several times listening before a track gets ok to enter his collection, but he tosses out another track. This makes you determine with every new track you want to add: “is it better than the worst thing in my current collection”. And if you can’t think of one track that you’d toss to get this new one in, then it is probably not worth adding.

I know many of the DJs I respect/admire and that have iron collection discipline (I am getting there slowly but ways to go) that they will listen to lots of music, keep abreast of trends happening and such, but ultimately will buy a MAXIMUM of 10 tracks a month! Only the(ir) pick of the litter makes it to their shopping list. They do know one thing for certain, it pays to put the time in to prep those tracks properly (beatgrid, cues, etx.) and to get to know them intimately, as they know another thing, which is that they will be playing these new tracks on a regular basis because they are that good.

Just my 2 cents.

I follow Phil’s advice, my playlist is extremely curated – my active setlist is around 500 tracks. As a result of this, though, my tags are pristine, and I know all of my tracks very intimately – well enough that I can do a live remix to restructure the song, such as moving the vocals out of the way if they’re going to clash, bringing them back in later, or even completely changing the song’s shape.

This is a major part of why I wrote my own DJ software is to support this, as I really enjoy having this level of control and understanding of my tracks.

I count 3 minutes per track as I don’t do much fancy work, so I’ll usually play a track for 3 minutes (including mix in/mix out). So 20 an hour = 100 for 5 hours, times 2 is 200 tracks should be enough. Obviously if you have a themed night you could bring a few mini playlists with the theme music on top of things.