The Nightmare Gig..

LOL Ajax,

Don’t worry about the wall of text, you’ve got nothing on me and I am on posting 500+ hahahahahaha. They still let me in to this place (though barely).

I actually wrote a post saturday I think before going to play the afterparty for the The Who concert in Amsterdam. It was all about triple redundancy. I was on a setups with 2000Nexus and a 900 mixer, from an agency I trust and respect. Still I had triple redundancy. All went smooth as could be, I stuck in the first of my two usb sticks and was off to the races. But I had everything with me (including a simple Numark iDJ Pro controller in the car) to handle just about every possible contingency on the DJ side (if it’s not my PA I don’t worry about that side of things, gotta set boundaries to your responsibilies).

Thanks for your story, especially since I know a lot of our younger brothers here seem to think that modern technology is fool-proof and will always function as advertised.

Obviously I second having a (or even two) backup plan(s) in place. Nowadays (especially if you are a Traktor DJ) an iPad with Traktor DJ and the new Z1 will fit into any backback and I’d feel totally comfortable doing an all-nighter with that. Same goes for my iDJ Pro, but that is a lot bigger already and doesn’t fit in a backpack.

The other thing I admire is that through all the stress, and trust me I know how that feels!, you managed to come up with a solution and have a happy crowd at the end of the evening. It just goes to show, make your audience happy and they’ll forgive you the biggest trainwreck.

Short anecdote: About a year ago we (drive-in-show I work with) had to do a wedding gig. The owner of the drive-in-show is a long time friend of mine and the people getting married were good acquaintances of his. He had just swapped our old, analogue, no MP3 Denon/Dateq setup for a Pioneer 350 set. Brand new, out of the box. It was tested before and after being installed in the DJ coffin. All was working fine.

The wedding was supposed to start at 8pm. We were setting up at 5:30 (had to do truss and lighting, takes time). At 7pm we had sound and most lights going. Then at 7:10 someone plugged in an extra refrigerator. POOOFFFFF, all power gone. STRESS! (and nothing we could do about it). An electrician showed up to correct the situation. 7:50pm (with the bride and groom on their way and most of the guests already there!) power came back on. CDJs? – Check!, Mixer? – Uhm … nothing guys … Somehow the power outage had fried the DJM350 mixer’s power supply. So, here we are sitting pretty with the whole set up, but no sound.

Luckily I had my laptop with Traktor with me (and I had the foresight to install the CDJ350 drivers) so I just hooked up one of the 350s, ran the output straight into the PA amps and played for about an hour on my laptop while my wife drove out with a new mixer (mine, not the drive-in-shows).

It was a great party and everyone was happy. The bride and groom knew what happened to the power and were chill about it. But you can see how the stress hit the roof on that one too. And without my laptop there would have been nothing.

Thanks again for sharing and I hope my wall of text has helped you not feel guilty about yours :cool:.

Greetinx,
C.

What I have not banned Chuck yet?!?!?! I have it on the list somewhere…

Back to topic: Sounds to me you need a Mac 😉