DJ Vintage

Depending on how long you are going for and what your gigs will net you, wouldn’t it be easier to just rent for the period you are there? I am pretty sure that as excess luggage it will be rather pricey to take with you and although if you have good quality flight cases you should be ok (the things aren’t called FLIGHT cases for nothing :-)), there is always the risk of the stuff ending up on another flight, getting lost or internally damaged after a severe drop.

Especially if you use “de facto standard” equipment, it shouldn’t be too hard to get identical or very similar rental gear in NZ and the rental price might just be compensated for by not having to ship it back and forth and not having the hassle.

Greetinx,
C.

Hey Mitch,

I am feeling like we are going around in circles here and that it is not helping you.

So let me try to take you through the entire thing.

First of all I want to say that the next bit is somewhat easier if you have a controller with channel level meters, if only because the channel level meters in Traktor don’t use any kind of color or such. Still, it can be done.

There are effectively 5 faders/knobs that determine the level of your signal as it finally comes out of your speakers:
1) channel gain
2) channel fader
3) crossfader (optional)
4) master volume (also called main)
5) amplifier volume control

Other factors that influence volume are EQ settings (try running up the lows +6 dB and see what happens to your overall levels) and sometimes FX.

I’ll go over the steps of setting them correctly in what I think is a logical order to get to a good end result. And I’ll skip the crossfader as that one is pretty obvious. So I am starting at the end of the “food chain” with the amplifier.

5) amplifier volume control. Since you will want to control the level coming out of your speakers from your mixer and not having to run to your amp when you want to raise the volume some, you want to set your amplifier volume control at maximum. It’s a set and forget thing.

1) channel gain. What is important to realize here is that this is a PRE fader setting, meaning that even with the channel fader down at zero, your channel meters will still indicate the amount of signal that goes into the channel (try it). You want to keep this at 0dB average on a controller (usually where green turns into yellow) with peaks somewhere between +3 and +6. You do however NOT want to go into the red on your channel faders, so if the peaks are (a lot) higher than +6, it is often wise to turn the gain down a little, even if that means that your average level will be below 0dB). In Traktor, the blue meters behind the channel fader don’t have colors or numbers to go by, but it would be good practice to have them peak just below the top of the meter.

You said you keep your channel gains at about -5dB. The thing is that channel gain is the one thing you will be changing all night long with every song. The levels between songs can differ as much as +/-6dB, so it is absolutely normal that you are changing this setting all the time. There is three ways to deal with this:

• BEST: check and set your channel gain level for EVERY song. This is best practice because if you start playing out, you may not have the luxury of things like AutoGain or you might have to use music that isn’t gain normalized. If you are used to setting channel gain everytime, you won’t be confronted with any surprises. Drop a track in your player, listen in your headphones for a louder passage, correct the gain.
• OK: you can set autogain in Traktor. Traktor makes sure that the channel gain level is kept at the right (maximum) level. Good for lazy people. But you don’t learn a good practice and you loose a bit of control.
• NOT SO OK: you can normalize all your tracks in advance. Many tools that can do that don’t do it in a good way, sometimes hurting the dynamics of a track or causing other nasty side effects. Best to stay away from these.

4) master/main volume. Set this one to about the 10 o’clock position (in Traktor about -14dB). Since your channel fader is still down from the previous step, your main level meters should not be moving, even though the channel level meters are bopping up and down with the beat. I’ll get back to this one after the next step.

2) channel fader. Now bring the channel fader up to max level and watch the main output levels. If you set everything in the previous steps correctly, those meters should be moving to about the first third of the scale.

4) master/main volume. You can now mix with your channel faders at max (obviously bringing both of them down a bit if you are in the middle of a mix) and your amplifier at max. The main volume now determines how loud the sound out of your speakers will be. Try turning up the main knob to about 2 o’clock (0dB in Traktor) and what will your main level meters show? Right, average on max blues with peaks into a few orange bars (or 0dB average with peaks in the +3 – +6 range). This is a perfect maximum volume setup. If you need it louder, tell the venue to get a bigger PA. You can of course press it a bit harder by running your main level up some more (at about +3dB in Traktor you’ll see the peaks triggering the red), but you get really close to clipping/distortion and you don’t want to do that to your audience.

Best practice in my opinion (if you have to play an entire night) is to start with the main volume a little below the maximum you want to reach that evening and step up the main volume bit by bit as the night, mood and dance energy progresses.

For the rest you check your channel gains with EVERY track (make it a good habit) or if you are lazy use the AutoGain feature and you work with your channel faders and crossfaders.

Hopefully these steps will help you a) understand how levels affect your final volume output and b) getting your system (or any other you run into out there in the real world!) set up to correct levels. There is nothing as annoying for the audience (or promotor, venue owner or party thrower for that matter) as a DJ that knows nothing about this and/or doesn’t care and just runs everything into the red because he likes the color :).

Greetinx,
C.

Oh yeah!

Obviously Phil’s reviews should give you plenty of info on all these.

There is so much out there that you can consider, it’s creepy :-).

Things to contemplate are:

• feature list: does it do all the things YOU want/need it to do, or how close does it come to it
• budget: no surprises there, although you might want to consider waiting a bit to save up for a bigger budget, depending on the other things to contemplate
• software: this is a biggie. If you don’t own the software you want yet, getting it free with a controller might tilt the scales. Be aware that most new low-end controllers come with LE (lite) versions of the software and for any serious work you’ll end up wanting to upgrade to the full version anyway.
• bedroom/live: are you buying a controller for practice and to generally stay at home or are you planning on getting out there and do live gigs. In the latter case you might want to wait a little bit til your budget grows to where you can get a controller that is slightly more semi-pro.
• build quality: another factor that is dependent on the use the controller will get. If it just sits safely on a desk in your bedroom never to be removed, pretty much any build quality would do. If you plan on taking it on the road, it needs to be able to handle that abuse. And you should take into consideration that you’ll need proper protection for your gear while travelling. This can be a (custom) backpack or even a full blown flight case. Both have their price
• new/second hand: the good news is that a lot of new (digital) DJs ARE gear heads (sorry guys, truth be told :-)) who like to trade up or newer, which means there is a relatively big choice of used equipment available out there (both thru Craigs list-like channels as well as stuff traded in by music/DJ stores). You might be able to pick up something way nicer than a starter controller for (close to) the same price. Just make sure you get everything with it (particularly the software license if it came with one).

I realize a lot of selection stress comes with this one. Balancing the bucks versus the buttons. More good news though is that whatever you get it most likely will be better than NOT having a controller and most entry level controllers give you all the important tools to get started with. Reading all the reviews written here I don’t think I have ever seen an advice NOT to buy a controller because it was unsuitable, which in my opinion means there aren’t real bad controllers out there anymore, just varying levels of good and better. In which case you should be able to be content with whatever choice you make.

Greetinx,
C.

Might want to check if there are any agencies around that cater specifically to weddings. It might be worth checking with them to see if they would like to add you to their roster (maybe you can get an interview and do a little audition). You won’t make as much as when you are booked directly, but you don’t have to worry about getting gigs (and often they’ll have stuff like P.A.’s and light gear) and still get the necessary experience.

There was a course a while back through DDJT about making money as a wedding DJ. I bought it (even though I have been doing wedding since forever) and found it good reading and some good tips in there. If you want to get into wedding DJ-ing I’d say it is a good place to start looking for some wedding specific information.

Greetinx,
C.

Hi,

I fell into the “it’s digital so I can easily carry around 40k+ songs easy” trap when I switched to digital a while ago. Now I am in the process of completely redoing my collection and try to end up with between 800-1200 tracks. All my current tracks (well perhaps ALMOST all) are properly tagged and such, so I can find them quickly enough (I use Traktor but that is not very relevant). In order to make maximum use of the features of your software, it is important to prepare your tracks also by checking things like correct beatgrid (especially for non-EDM stuff the software gets it wrong a fair amount of time), including correct (1st) downbeat of drop point (the exact point the song starts when you drop it in the player), cue points and loops you may want to use. This is pretty labor intensive, so I figure anything over about 1500 tracks is gonna be too much work. Another thing is that I want to know the tracks I have inside out.

So I came up with a “procedure” that I hope will work for me:

1. Define a few playlist for the most important categories (don’t feel like having a zillion playlists)
2. Determine the amount of tracks per playlist
3. Fill the playlists with the right amount of tracks
4. Do all the necessary preparation work on the tracks in the collection
5. Keep all extra tracks on a separate hard disk for request purposes, but NOT as a part of the Traktor library
6. If a certain song gets requested several times, import it to Traktor, make sure it is properly prepared.
7. When adding new tracks, try to “let go” of an equal amount of tracks. This will prevent your library from growing too much.
8. On a regular basis decide if any tracks need to go from the collection because you hardly ever play them (the play count in Traktor is helpful there, guessing VDJ has a similar feature).
9. If I hear a song on the radio, in a bar or anywhere else that I think really should go in my collection, I keep it in soundhound/shazam and later add it to the collection (see point 7 too).
10. Keep a double copy of the MP3’s on CD (for 1200 tracks that would be about 15 CD’s, so twice that is 30, which would fit in one single CD-case) for emergency. (I make sure I can keep playing if my laptop crashes or something else prevents me from using digital files).

I am a mobile DJ too and I like to be able to play a request if at all possible. This way I have the best of both worlds. I keep my Traktor database relatively small and efficient, while I can still easily find any track on the external hard disk through the file explorer.
I guess every DJ has his own amount of tracks he feels comfortable with. In the old vinyl days I would typically carry about 600 7″ and 200 album/12″ records with me. And it was feasible to know all of them rather intimately. So I am guessing the same will be true for a digital collection of comparable size, although I have noticed that the lack of the physical bit (crate browsing) is definitely a minus for me.
As far as using streaming audio, I have on occassion downloaded a song from iTunes while on a gig and played it straight from my iPhone. Not my favorite way of doing things, but I got to play the requested tune.
I strongly believe you should keep your DJ laptop disconnected from any online source, with the exception of doing upgrades/updates while in a known environment (home).
Even if a venue has an internet connection for me to use, I never do. So, no streaming music.
Greetinx,
C.

Hi Phil,

I am totally good with the offerings you have and I agree that the scratch course is well priced. Again, no dispute there. And if you are serious about this business (and able to buy controllers and laptops :)) you’d do well to invest in this course. As I said, I am seriously contemplating doing it myself.

Keep up the good work.

Greetinx,
C.

At close to 200 dollars I think a lot of the DDJT readership (especially the younger, starting and bedroom DJs) will have to think twice about it. Not saying the course is expensive, but it is a LOT of money for many, especially these days.

But yeah Kevin, keep an eye on that mailbox and a hand on your credit card :-).

Greetinx,
C.