How well do you plan your DJ sets?

I plan. 🙂
Clubgigs:
I think about what music I will use, I organize a playlist roughly twice the length of my set, where I sort music by energy rather then when I will play it (high energy songs first in the list) and then build up the set from there. Amount of energy depends, if I do a prime set for a techno party I put lots of high energy songs, if I play a sunday afternoon set I put lots of low to medium balearic/groovy songs in there with a few pick ups.

For mobile gigs:
Depends how long and what occasions. For weddings I organize closely with the organizers (most of the time the bride is in charge of music here) and have sometimes up to 4 playlists for different moods (when the older people are still there up to a 2 o’clock in the morning mental set) during their day and one special playlist for background when someone does a speech or the traditional “walz” is needed or when they have some sort of wedding game etc. For company events this is totally different…

I’m only new to the whole DJ world, but here’s my take on it.

I used to be a turn up and play guy. I started off doing houseparties like that, and it was actually good, cos it made it easy to sort out requests. However, I started noticing that people at the house parties I played at said the electro-house stuff I was playing was “fucking ace man!” So, as electrohouse is my personal favorite, it became my weapon of choice. I then played 2 gigs in a club that’s known for having alternative music nights, i.e., specialist dubstep/house/electro/reggae nights. That allowed me to do an entirely electro-house set, but i still did a turn-up-and-play. At this stage though. I became more and more familiar with what songs go with what other songs, and just became increasingly familiar with my library.

Recently, now that I’ve some time away from studying (failed my finals btw, so it’s back to uni in january, fml) I’ve started putting much more effort into song/set selection. After that lengthy discussion about “to mix live, or not to mix live,” I’ve got a pre-prepared set for a gig on saturday. I’ve a few requests from people I know that are going, so this actually gives me time to think about it, and see where to slot them in, and even make a few remixes for the night. To be honest, I like this arrangement of pre-preparing sets.

At this point though, let me get to my concluding/most important point. Prepreparing a set works in this situation. Why? Because I’m known for playing electro-house, and i’m being employed/requested as an electrohouse DJ. Now, if I’m playing through my set, and decide to mix it up a bit, I’ve the confidence in my own skills (not 1337 skills, but i can do it) to mix live, if i feel the crowd going in a different direction. HOWEVER, if the crowd are liking my set, it can just play through, and I can have fun with effects, and have 1 more drink than usual. (I STRICTLY limit myself to 2 drinks during a set – enough to relax, nowhere near enough to get me drunk.)

I have a few “must play” tracks (usually some brand new bangers) but thats about the only planning I do. I’ve always got Traktor playlists that I can refer back to.

turn up and play i usually jump genre’s at the beginning to way up if i was right about what the people would like once i see a reaction i plan ahead from there if you plan your sets then may as well mix it at home pop it on a cd and just go play the cd in my opinion. practice is needed but not song for song

I got all my music pretty well sorted so it’s very easy to pick things up on the fly, as well as a star rating to tell me how intense a track is. In addition to this though, I also create a seperate playlist with everything I’d like to play that night plus an extra hour or so of music. That playlist would be my main go to, the genre breakdown lists are more for last minute changes that can be done quickly.

Starting out only recently, I planned everything and tried to keep to my playlists rigidly. I found out quickly that ‘rigidly’ doesn’t work any better in DJ’ing any more than any other walk of life I’ve encountered. If I make myself open to requests I get them and my set changes, sometimes drastically. Now I find it more stressful to have too much of a set built so I use virtual folders in VDJ 7 to give myself a backup in case my mind goes blank (usually a possibility), get some surefire winners lined up and just take it from there…

I never plan any sets (except if I am making a CD that I will make hundreds of copies of or a competition). My library is to big for that. What I have done is I have organized my go to music into playlist. The playlist are sorted into categories of genre (Mainstream, Urban, Dance etc). Each one off those genres is broken down into BPM ranges. This way I can jump around between genres and BPMs and find most stuff pretty easily…

So I show up…pick something that matches the mood and start playing and see what happens.