Worst thing that has happened.

Ahhh… hate that, basically any situation where the music stops is an utter nightmare! One night I was djing with my old laptop and was doing simple mixes, one song to the next – no effects no complicated cue point juggling, nothing! Anyway while playing a song my softwares CPU usage shoots crazy I get massive amounts of distortion and just general nastiness, everyone looks over at the booth and I am not there! I had gone to check the sound at the bar and had to RUN back to the booth – pressed play on my ipod which was plugged into a backup line in on the mixer and lo and behold this was the night it decided to break… It was frozen on the ipod screen!!! I kept pressing play till I realized it wan’t going to work. Shut down my system, ran up to the bar got the remote for the jukebox, programmed three songs up and rebooted my system…. terrible terrible feeling. But everything else went fine… I am now super paranoid about my CPU usage, my eyes are always watching it – but I haven’t had any such issues with my new MBPro and hopefully I wont!

Worst thing would have to be back in the day when I was under-age, and only played under-age gigs. One gig, some drunk/stoned/mindfucked kid jumps in to the booth (which was a table in the corner of the room on a drum raise) and starts trashing our amps at the back of the booth. Myself and my brother (who’s doing lights for me) promptly give this punter a few to the face, and chuck him over the decks back into the crowd!

Now that I play licensed events, it amazes me how well behaved people are compared the the brats I played for back then.

Lessee…..

• On the way to DJ at a bar (for a class reunion, IIRC) the truck ran out of gas. It was a long 3 mile jog to the gas station when the temps were -20F.

• En route to play at a HS Prom, it became apparent that the door to the trailer had flopped open along the way. The light controller was nowhere to be found, obviously bounced out on onto the highway somewhere. I shudder to think about that one. :confused:

• I had a hard drive freeze up in my laptop 1 hour before a gig. Removing it and smacking it on a table got it to spin again, but it never worked after that day.

• My amp crapped out right before a wedding reception. Luckily, I managed to get a local music shop to answer the phone just after closing and agree to meet me and sell me a new amp.

Okay, I’m getting ill thinking about this stuff. 😀

Ivyquake, post: 304 wrote: . They wanted me to give back the $100 deposit back, I politely told them to “eat it”.

Wow, what nerve. You’re probably lucky you didn’t play for that crowd. 😉

Wow!!! I sure am glad nothing quite as bad as some of these posts have ever happened to me! I guess the worst thing that ever occurred was when we had the power to the amps go out while the song “Go DJ” was playing. Of course the crowd began to chant “Go DJ! Go DJ!” until the power came back up and the music resumed. Thankfully it only took about five minutes, but it was a humiliating five minutes!

Benny Mackney, post: 244 wrote: ^^ LOL’D SO HARD

Worst thing for me so far is a terrible mix (beatmix, of course. I ain’t no fading iPod) with a huge tempo change. I was jumping from dubstep at 140 BPM to some heavy drum & bass at 175 BPM. I used sync (traktor sync ties the BPMs together, with one as the “master”) purely because my pitch faders weren’t set up with enough of a range. I pushed the dubstep track slowly up to the max as I faded in the DnB, then had to switch the DnB track to be master so it could pick up the BPM at the bottom of it’s range. Now here’s the stupid bit: I only engaged sync on one deck, so when the DnB started moving up and the dubstep was fading out, the dubstep kept going at it’s comparatively slow pace. FYI, 156ish BPM dubstep does NOT mix with 175 BPM DnB. FELT REALLY BAD, MAN!

Generally when doing a drastic change like that I’ll use effects to make a slow build up then drop the new track, as syncing is generally gonna make one of the tracks sound off – one time I was using ableton live and somehow my keyboard was set to the master tempo and I typed in 775!!! pure noise and took me a while to figure out what I had done!

jorn, post: 369 wrote: That’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you at a gig??? I think you just jinxed yourself by posting this! Hehehehehe 😀

DAMMIT! D= I will never play live again for fear of something worse.

DJ GRE, post: 362 wrote: Generally when doing a drastic change like that I’ll use effects to make a slow build up then drop the new track, as syncing is generally gonna make one of the tracks sound off

The tempo change sounded ok, unless you were really familiar with the song, in which case it just sounded odd. Keylock ftw. So you suggest that I just build things up with effects, then get very quick on the play button and the crossfader?

I remember MANY years ago doing a gig at a school dance. It was about 9:50; the dance was supposed to be over at 10:00. One of the adults in charge came up to me and said “Okay, we need to end this now.” (Rumor has it some sort of “naughtiness” was going on somewhere that motivated the request, but I never heard what or if this was even true.)

“Sure,” I kindly agreed, “I’ll shut down after this song and kindly tell everybody to go home.”

Not 30 seconds later, everything went out. No sound. No lights.

Seems said “adult” figured it would be better to just ask a janitor to go flip off the breakers to the circuits my gear was using. I guess in their mind this would clear out the gymnasium faster than the graceful shutdown I had earlier suggested and thought we had agreed to.

Uhm, noooooo……

As the overhead lights in the gym suddenly flickered to life, the crowd began chanting “Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!” Then a mild riot broke out. Thankfully, none of my gear was hurt… nor was I.

The next day, I went to collect the balance due to me for my work. The principal of the school slid the contract back across his desk at me, saying “Oh, I never signed this, so I don’t have to pay you. You can get the rest of your little BS-chanting buddies to pay you if you like.”

That’s right, the contract we had negotiated, and I had signed in good faith, was something he apparently had intended upon defrauding me on all along. Nice example, eh?

True story.