Jon Baker

ellgieff, post: 19461, member: 129 wrote: Congratulations, man. It’s a good feeling, innit.

Exceptionally so. Still buzzed.

gbadegesin, post: 19384, member: 1507 wrote: Jon,

Nice one
Can you give us a brief on how it went? It will sure help alot of others in here

I had the gig booked for a local bar/club about a month ago thanks to a friend, and was understandably nervous in the weeks building up to the event. After all, it seemed all eyes were on me to pull off a good night, and having never done a set live before, I was a tad frightened of something, somewhere going wrong, somehow. And it did. Three days prior to the event, I was polishing off my playlist when suddenly what should happen but my Play/Pause button on the right hand deck of my Mixtrack Pro becoming completely useless by falling through the casing! After a helluvalot of attempted DIY and an untold quantity of hysterical panic, I gave in and on the night had to use the laptop’s spacebar as a substitute. I needn’t have worried as it turned out, as it actually helped me gain quicker access to my keyboard shortcuts etc throughout the night, and thinking about it, the crowd don’t really care what equipment you’re using or how you use it, its all about the music after all.
The night started out slow with a handful of people trickling through the doors for the first hour and a half or so, so as an attempted energy pickup, I was playing some house mixed in with a few chart acapellas, which seemed to work just fine as it seemed that within about fifteen minutes, the numbers had risen from about 15 to 50. As hoped, several of my friends turned up to support me, and from the look of the crowd by this point they were hungry for something with more energy than 128 bpm, so somehow I managed to bridge the gap between it and 175, and thus began the best two hours of my night. Numbers were up to around 75 people and many of them were dancing maniacally on the dancefloor to the likes of Sub Focus and Dub Phisix. I found I seemed to get the best crowd response with a mixture of DnB mashups and Drumstep, particularly the latter. Using this apparent preference of the crowd to my advantage, I managed to mix in a few dubstep bangers into my playlist to shake things up a little, and it went down an absolute storm. As a consequence I began to fluctuate every once in a while between the two genres, and people were loving it right through til around 3am, when all of a sudden the floor cleared and people began to leave. As it turned out, the bar had (stupidly, if I might say so) decided that they would prefer more people in the front bar than where I was playing (the club/rear bar area), even though the vast majority of people in the venue seemed far more inclined to be dancing to EDM in the back bar than the chart tat they played in the bar area. Nevertheless, I was told it was time for my last few songs at 3.15 and was done by 3.30.
Throughout the night, I was asked to play requests on numerous occasions, regardless of the fact that the booth door clearly said ‘NO REQUESTS’ in large black font. Nevertheless, I did manage to stick a few of them in, although they were usually mixed into some sort of mashup with the music currently playing. Yes, the majority of people approaching the booth in a haze of intoxication were mildly distracting, with some being outright annoying by refusing to leave me alone for an hour or so at a time, but I think that the absolute best parts of the evening were in fact due to these booth-clingers, when every now and again someone would approach me just to tell me that ‘YOU’RE F****** SICK MATE!’ or to inform me that apparently this was a ‘TUUUUUUNNNNNNNNNNNNEEEEEEEEE’. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more happy than when people were giving me credit for what I love, i.e. DJing the music I love, and pleasing a crowd.
The night was an overall success and I was even credited by the manager of the club at the end, who told me that they’d had an ‘unusual amount of business’ in the room I played in, suggesting that I might come back and play again some time in the process. I think the main thing I learned from the experience would have to be how to read a crowd, which is of course going to be a considerable learning curve over the course of my DJing career, but nevertheless was obviously considerably heightened by playing live for the first time to a large group of people. If I could say one thing to anybody whose first event is imminent, it would be that the nerves you are feeling are of course perfectly natural, but so long as you realise that your crowd isn’t going to care what equipment you play on, and a mistake here and there is only human (and easily forgiven by a crowd under the influence), then you’ll realise that its not as scary as it seems, so sit back, relax and enjoy what will undoubtedly be one of the most memorable nights of your life!