Hi Ethan, welcome to the forums.
I wouldn’t worry too much about beat matching, if it’s electronic music you can get away using sync for most of it. All other music you are better off learning a few of the very basic transitions. Much easier to learn and execute.
More important is music selection, something you can only learn playing live. Another reason not to invest too much time during the night looking at and fiddling with pitch-faders and jogwheels. Time better spent watching the crowd and trying to read them.
Also building a playlist in advance for any other reason than having the music you want to play during your gig in one place for easy picking, is a recipe for failure. It’s impossible to make a fixed playlist for most mobile events. You should of course think of the audience and select tracks to take with you based on what you think the crowd will want to hear. Add some extra stuff from other genres to have some backup for plan B. Also count on bringing double the amount of tracks for the time your gig lasts. With an average of 20 tracks an hour and a 7-hour gig, that comes to 20 * 7 * 2 = 280 tracks.
Another thing is to make mini-playlists, for example a few (3-5) tracks in a certain genre that fit well together. Then bring a lot of those playlists to make up the 280 tracks needed. Now you can play a track from one of those playlists, watch the crowd reaction and if they like it you have a few tracks right there in your mini-playlist to play next. This generally reduces a lot of the stress involved in “picking the right next track” when you are starting to DJ. And then you can move to the next genre/mini-playlist and do the same.
Good luck with your gigs and enjoy your time here at the forums.
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