DJ Vintage

HID is a feature, not something to be found. CDJs can be used as HID (Human Interface Device) with Serato when you buy the Club Kit as TJSJ said. I would not suggest Traktor. Get free RekordBox, load your tracks, set your cue points and export to usb sticks (take three!). There is no real advantage to going HID at this point. It will give you better collection management/search functionality, but it involves bringing a laptop and a stand.

If you are not bringing your controller and you don’t currently already own the Club Kit, I’d just go for RekordBox USB-sticks and be done with it. Spend time figuring out how the FX work on the DJM mixer they have. After that, it is all pretty straightforward and no reason to worry.

I understand you not wanting to bring your SB into a pack of “pro” colleagues at this point in your career. Somewhere in the future you will be so comfortable and confident that you can rock the place with whatever gear you have that you won’t worry about the “haters”, but just focus on giving the audience the best performance you can. Rocking the house is the best way to shut everyone up.

First of all: HAVE FUN!

There is only one first gig and no matter how it turns out, be sure you enjoy it and make it a happy memory.

As for how it turns out, expect things to go wrong. They most likely will, just like any rookie college football player will botch a play in his first ever game. It’s part of the learning curve, the growing process.

Promoting yourself is not something I would worry too much about. Post your gig on the appropriate channels you already use (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, stuff like that), don’t “force” people to come. Just tell them that you are there and that any support is appreciated. Perhaps have some business cards drawn up if you already have logo and DJ name and such and make sure your website is in order. If you have mixtapes, you could burn a few to CD to hand out. But only if you have it, if you don’t – don’t worry and leave it on the to-do list for future gigs.

Prepare! Go through your collection well in advance and pick tracks that you think go well together, make them into mini-playlists of 3-4 tracks. Pick tracks that you think will work in the time slot you have been assigned. Talk to the organizer/owner to find out what they expect a closing DJ to do and adjust your music selection accordingly.
Have enough music with you when you go to the gig, but not everything you own! About twice the music you can play in the time you have (say 20 tracks an hour times 2 is 40 tracks per hour).

Mixing-wise do what you have been practicing and don’t worry about it.

Some things to realize: While this may feel like the most important moment of your life thus far, the audience couldn’t care less. Not about messing up transitions, not about fancy FX use and not about mistakes. What they do care about is music selection and I don’t mean the actual tracks, but the flow you create, the mood you set, the musical journey you take them on, etx. They are there to have a good time with friends, chase those of the opposite sex (or same sex if so inclined), have a few drinks and don’t worry about every day life. If you can support that with your music, you have succeeded.

Up til now you have, hopefully, spent many hours practicing transitions and other technical skills. This gig will be the first real opportunity to learn the most important DJ skill “knowing what must come next”. Don’t fall in the trap of staring at the mixer/controller trying to be everything you technically be. Use good, common sense, transitions and spend LOTS of time interacting with and reading the crowd. That is where your education is. See what effect your music has on people. And (re)act accordingly. Keep doing what works (without becoming to boring) for a few tracks then mix it up some. If that works keep doing it, if it don’t mix it up faster. It’s loads of trial and error, there are no courses for it and you can’t teach yourself in your practice room. Only place is out there for a live audience and an unknown audience (club/gig) is better than one you know (like friends parties and such), but any audience is better than none.

To summarize:
1) Have fun, it’s your only first time … EVER!
2) Prepare
3) Don’t sweat the small stuff and it’s all small stuff (thanks to however wrote that book)
4) Enjoy entering the next step in your DJ apprenticeship, Padawan!

Hope that helps some. At any cost just the three cents worth by an old hand (40 years on the decks next year).

Hi Samy, I have moved your question to a post of it’s own. You replied to a thread of April this year, which had nothing to do with your question other than that it also mentions a Numark NV.

Please be so kind as not to do this in the future.

The options you put forward are so far apart (mainly analogue modular gear vs all-in-one laptop based controller) that it is impossible for anyone to tell you what you should buy. Even with near-identical gear that is an almost impossible task.

The choice of gear is highly personal. What I find great in gear, you might find irrelevant or even bad and vice versa.
If you are choosing between the same kind of gear (say two all-in-one controllers in the same budget range) we can give you some advice based on the (difference) in features for example.

If you have read a few more posts on choosing a new controller here, you will have noticed we have a 5-step “plan” to help you make that choice.

It starts with your desired/intended workflow and works it way through software choice and setting a budget to shortlisting 2 or 3 controllers to getting some hands-on time with them. If you follow that “plan”, it is just not logical to end up with the choice are presenting us. Why? Because some of the features of the two platforms are just mutually exclusive with regards to workflow and such.

Personally, as is clear and no secret, I think club gear is highly overrated. Buying personal gear to be “ready” for the clubs is by deduction then an expensive and unnecessary thing to do.
If you are set on bringing memory-sticks to clubs, the only real “must” is using RekordBox software (not DJ), for which you really only need a laptop/PC with a USB connection. All it does is make it easy to find tracks on your CDJ and allows you to make waveforms and cue points and create playlists. No gear necessary.

From long (almost 40 years) experience I can tell you that using a “club setup” is no different from using your controller (bar the lesser feature set). While it pays to be comfortable with gear, there is really no magic in a CDJ/DJM setup. If you have two decks and something to mix with, you can! It takes all of 15-30 minutes if you have never seen CDJs before to get used to where the buttons, knobs and faders are. Some of the more “advanced” features in the menus might take a bit longer to find, but the ones you use most will soon become standard use for you.

A nice example of gear-independence is our scratch-tutor Steve Canueto who, in the scratching course, grabs a little Hercules (I think) controller and starts scratching on it. It shows how it doesn’t matter what gear you own or practice on, the skills are transferable to any other gear, big or small, expensive or cheap, high end or low end and big brand or no name.

Also, don’t count on finding Nexus setups in all clubs, only the bigger, well-budgeted clubs will feature such high end gear. Don’t be surprised to find yourself on CDJ-1000s or 850s with a DJM600 mixer with a few knobs missing and not-quite-as-smooth-as-they-used-to-be faders and jogs. Since Pioneer gear costs an arm and a leg, club owners with lesser budgets will make their gear last til there is no paint left on the front place (and I mean that literally 😀 ). Some of the older gear does not even allow the use of USB sticks, so there you show up with your usb-stick, now what?

Back in the day I knew only a very select group of DJs who had the actual same gear as in the clubs (again, price being the main reason). The rest would practice their thing on whatever they had at home and then just transfer their tricks to the club gear.

If you have a 4-channel controller you can hook up a lot of extra stuff as well. Some DJ software is so loaded with FX (packs to be added at your discretion) that I find it hard to believe you’d want an effect so bad that you’d buy outboard to your setup (adding to all the gear you have to carry in). If you are a big drum machine fan and it’s an integral part of who you are/want to be as a DJ, you should be looking at the new Roland 808 controller. Any self-respecting 4 deck will not only let you augment your setup with vinyl, but will even give you DVS capability to give you the best of both worlds. Adding pads through USB is then another option.

I can’t stress enough that nobody can make a choice for you, the best is give you some information to help you make your choice. But at the end of the day it’s all about what works for YOU and what YOU feel comfortable with. Because that, for you, is the RIGHT gear!

Well, quite frankly, this being a DIGITAL DJ site, you will find (lots of) people here that will think you are downgrading rather than upgrading with your proposed move.

All the things you describe you want to do you can do with a software/controller combo and more. You seem to suffer from what I am starting to call Pioneer club blindness, which is blindly accepting that to be a “real” DJ you have to play on “proper” decks.

In essence CDJ players haven’t changed all that much since their invention in (off the top of my head) 1994, a good 22 years ago. They have gained better displays, a few cue buttons (CDJs were always conspicuously low on those), and of course the addition of USB based music. The latter feature leading to the XDJ-series where they took regular CDJs and upgrade the screen and took out the CD-playing option.

After CDJs, DJ software and then controllers appeared. Both having made very significant strides of improvement over the last 10+ years. First a DJ showed up to a club with a CD-case or a couple of USB-sticks, they all had to work with exactly the same tools, relatively limited media players and mixers with some FX built-in. Then they got themselves (way more affordable) controllers and DJ software for practice at home. And they found out that not only was such a setup infinitely cheaper than a pro club setup, it offer WAY more options than such a setup. The creative possibilities with a software/controller where nearly boundless and kept expanding. When going to a club they had to revert back to what was in front of them, until some started bringing their controllers to the clubs. At first it was fight, but slowly a turn was seen. Major clubs, like Ministry of Sound, now expect DJs to bring their own gear and only supply CDJ/DJM setups when the DJ has no gear or doesn’t want to use his own.

DJs now accept that in order to bring their best work, they need the best tool for them, not a pre-packaged factory sausage with little or no flexibility. Hooked up to a PC with DJ software CDJs become sort of controllers, but limited ones as they lack loads of the buttons and knobs that an all-in-one controller offers (think dual FX controls, performance pads that offer up to 4 or more functions, dual deck functionality). The mixer even limits things more as all the controls are analogue, i.e. not linked to your PC.

Personally I would not spend a single dime to mimmick the layout of a club layout only to be able to play on a setup that has less features than my own. Co-moderator Terry_42 even charges extra if they make them play on CDJs rather than allowing him to bring his controller.

Also you have to ask yourself what it is your are lacking in your current Traktor setup and then look at all the options that will give you what you miss. Chances are fair that there are better and cheaper solutions.

My prediction is that many clubs will no longer be willing to spend the huge amounts of money to replace their gear at the end of it’s life time. Increasingly we will see empty booths with one or RCA connections for controllers, perhaps a few fixed laptops stands. Investing now in stuff that I think will slowly be on it’s way out of the booth does not seem like a good option.

As usual my three cents, but I cannot in good conscience say that what you propose is the smartest option. That said, at the end of the day it is what makes YOU feel most comfortable with. And if that is club(like) gear, then by all means go for it.

Most serious places you officially download from will provide you with proof of purchase/invoices. So keeping those in an administrative system is handy.

If you are playing out, they won’t be too concerned about your tracks being bought officially (although they might investigate if they don’t trust things. They will be more concerned with whether or not your right to play tracks in public is legit. Depending on the country you live in the legislation on this will vary. There have been some previous posts on the subject, so I suggest using the search function to find out more.

Generally this means you or the venue needs a license to play music in public. If that is in order, I am gonna guess they will go home satisfied (again if you don’t have 50.000 tracks in your collection, in which case they might take a closer look).

As far as I know, that info should carry over into 8, but don’t take my word for it. We should have plenty of readers that have gone through that exact transition who I am sure can tell you with certainty.

Making backups of stuff BEFORE upgrading is always a wise idea!