DJ Pools for a New Melbourne Bounce, Big Room Guy

Hey 8Bit,

Time to use the search function here and over on the blog. Been some recent articles on DJ Pools that should answer a lot of your questions.

I always cringe a little if people state stuff like tracks are expensive. 2 bucks a track max for high quality (WAV or FLAC) tracks? Are you kidding me? Back in the day an album ran 20-30 bucks and had 8-12 tracks on it of which you would use maybe one or two (Michael Jackson’s Thriller being the favorable exception, every song on that album was a hit LOL). 7″ was at least 7-10 bucks and 12″, especially imported remixes (and they were always imported) could cost as much as an album with only one track with one or two versions and the acapella on it.

At the time, you had to pick and choose really wisely and you would only commit your money to the tracks that you absolutely were convinced you needed to have. When in doubt, leave it in the bin. Come back another time and listen to it again, nothing changed, don’t buy it.

Guess what, that really hasn’t changed even with the price going down to 1-2 bucks a track and a zillion tracks at your fingertips without ever leaving your home (and missing out on the tips from the guys that work and visit the record store, but that’s another story). Imho, if you buy about 10 new tracks a month, you are doing nicely. If, once you have your collection to the size that feels comfortable to you (Phil Morse has about 600, I do lots of mobile work but keep my core collection to max 1200), you throw out a track for every new track you put it, you are on the road to building an awesome core collection that just keeps getting better (you always throw out the least played/liked from your favorite tracks in favor of a new one you think will fit better). And you have a collection you know inside out. The last bit helps enormously in navigating a gig. That big track matching system in your brain works really well when it knows all the material it has to work with.

Like many, I fell into the digital DJ trap of collecting MANY tracks (from our old CD collection, a hard disk collection I bought from someone) and putting it ALL in my DJ software. I was so lost. Now that I am back to building my new core collection I feel so much more at ease. And even if something happens to my request collection, I can still run any gig perfectly with just my core collection that also fits on my iPhone, RekordBox USB stick and iPad.

Sorry for the wall of text, by all means use pools if they work for you, just be careful not to end up like me, with so many tracks that you can’t see the forest for the trees.

I would vouch for the DMS, as Im the subscriber myself, the way they arrange their collection is a life saver for me, like I had a gig last time they requested a tunes from the 90’s, all I gotta do is go the DMS sites and pulled the Decades features, it has like the 1990’s, 80’s, 2000’s all the way back to the 50’s, I picked the 90’s one and all the tunes from the 90s right there at my finger tips, (all genres ranges from rnb, Nu Disco, Pop) all DJ’s friendly tunes (with intro and outro),