your most embarrasing dj story

Groschi, post: 30623, member: 3845 wrote: Love to hear those stories from of the dark ages. In the early eighties i was still pooping my diapers, but i remember stuff i’d seen two or three years later on public fairs in the village i grew up in. It seemed very common for mobile dj businesses to play out on home-built gear back then. I remember big wooden consoles (up to 2 metres wide) with mixers and turntables built in. Don’t ask me how they’d manage to move that (by today’s standards) unnecessarily heavy stuff every weekend.

We couldn’t affort to buy professional equipement, so we home-built it where we can ; the main amplifier (4 x 125 Watts, back than enough music volume), Bass speakers (on the picture the one with the white “K”)
I have designed these Bass speakers cabinets, with a very unconventional design; the speaker was turned inside this cabinet, facing the ground. the speaker “sucked in” his air above, and comes out below. On full bass, (have have tested it out to hold a sigarette lighter in front of airgap below this speakers, and the flame was blown out.

Also our lightshow was home-built ; (see the 2 lichtcases in the photo’s) it was no more than an plywood case filled with 3 100 watt floodlamps each, the bigg red balls (on the photo under) was the effect caused by the acrylic pattern sheets and was driven by an home-built light organ. On the above photo you see 2 narrow white cabinets, with couloured lightbulbs in it was driven by an Home-built LED V.U meter. Home-built Strobe. We had to hire an van to transport all stuff from gig to gig. We had also an regular gigspot every friday, on that spot be could leave our big wooden console with mixers and turntables built in stored there in a special room, we only take the equipement & the vinyls back home. (we needed the equipement also for making our radioshows @ our illegal pirate radiostation broadcasting on the FM wave).

Groschi, post: 30632, member: 3845 wrote: Impressive old school photos. I see you were “taking a walk on the wild side” of club culture back then. 😉

I have also foto’s from the late ’70 ties in taken our weekly regular gig in a youthcentre what was original build as an “open air school” from the year 1900. I was surrounded in a little landscape in the middle of a big city.
It was a perfect location for a youthcentre, and no loud noise for the neigbourhood, so besides Disco’s their where also live bands where playing their once in the 2 weeks. This building was demolished 1985.

(1979)

J-Zed, post: 30641, member: 1486 wrote: Share more! I love reading this

As you can see on this photo from 1979, the way how people where dancing back than.
Dancing in line up opposite to each other, in the clubs the girls are placing their handbags in the middle of their dancing space. Just a few years before that mixing vinyl was special skill in that time. A lot of Disco’s & Club had “talking Dj’s”. Who announce between the tracks (compared to a radio Dj). That kind of Club Dj’s don,t mix just a quick fade in/out between the tracks. Also the 12 inch import vinyl that we mixed & played was music only to be heard in the Clubs, not on the official national radiostations, and also not in the official Top 40. Thats was the reason to start also an illegal pirate radio on the FM radio wave thats gonna broadcast our mixed vinyl sessions with that music. In that era where a lot of pirate radio stations active on the FM radio wave.

With home built FM transmitters we broadcast live our mixed vinyl sessions from different Dj’s along with commercials, to fund our damage when our station was taken off air by the Dutch authorities again. They took also our equipement & crates of vinyl with them. After a few times that had happend & fined, we desided not to go Live again. In several “homestudios we recorded our Dj sets in on C120 cassette tape. These Dj sets would be transferred to a autoreverse big reel tape recorder that was in the room with the FM transmitter.

On this photo you see such of a “home studio” 1977 Also on the last photo you can see the 2 MARANTZ turntables where i first learned to mix vinyl with. I couldn’t affort to buy 2 TECHNICS SL 1200 back than.
The analogue Dj mixer is ALECTO with crossfader and built in 5 band equaliser, above the mixer a more band equaliser, and analogue echo effect unit, and several cassettetape decks for jingles. With this tape decks we also began to create customised pause button mixes on as we realised that certain records, could be made more suitable for the dance floor, if they when given a slight twist of extension.

Most embarassing can be a succes sometimes…

Well… here’s my story,

A little while ago a gorgeous lady (ex girlfriend) asked me to come over for a gig to Miami at a private party.
Since I was single at the time I didn’t want to dissapoint her.. hehe 😉
After some talking back and forth they (my ex and the organisation) promised me that the only gear I had to bring along was the Pioneer RMX-1000 and a usb stick. So I didn’t have to carry my controller and notebook with me.
Great… I like easy travelling, a specially to the U.S.

D-Day….
I arrived @ the party only one hour before my gig. Things left to do…. hook up my RMX-1000 and transfer my tracks to the notebook.
I went to the booth to see the finest controller I’ve ever seen in pristine condition…WOW!!!
A broken pitch fader and 1 working jogwheel… great! 🙁
The other DJ’s did not care… auto sync solves everything.
Well… not for the music that I brought allong… digitised hardhouse, recorded straight from vinyl and most of the tracks didn’t go well with autosync.

I did what was posibble with the crippled gear but beat matching from deck 1 tot 2 was a hard job if not impossible at all.
I had to quickly reinvent how to DJ with this setup.
So I went from 2 tracks with a smooth transition to the 3rd track.. BAMMM!!! here you go (and repeating)
The crowd loved it to my suprise (I guess that was because they had more then enough alcohol and other stuff in their blood )

I still have the recording… and man it’s awfull…but the crowd, they loved it

my nephew coming from old school tech had no idea about cdj, pc’s etc..

i was in a nutshell the light and sound tech/DJ. so we would take turns on the wheels cause we have different styles but more than once he would eject the wrong cd or fade back to no music.

BUT the worse was one time we were running late so i told him where to plug the lights but he wasnt listening too well cause unknown to me he plugged them all to the furman power conditioner we were using.

so the party really gets pumping and then pop! all lights and sound go out!

needless to say the furman popped its fuse and i couldnt figure out why for a good 10 min (felt like an hour)

i was reseting the wrong fuses, normally i plug the lights and sound to seperate circuits so im troubleshooting and sweating bullets cause i cant get it to turn on when he tells me what he did. i wanted to choke him but i should have known not to entrust him with that. i got the sound back on and ran a wire for the lights to a seperate circuit.