kubin

I’m playing bass for ~6 years now, besides that I can play acoustic guitar a little and am currently trying to improve myself on the keyboard : ) I’m also magically attracted by a drum kit everytime I see one, don’t own one myself though.

I think that the selection of tracks is actually more important than your mixing skills, although you won’t make it without the latter as well.

But having tools like Traktor or Ableton nowadays it’s a lot easier to do beatmatching and transitions rather than with CDs or Vinyls, so making a decent mix using some basic techniques is something you can achieve pretty quick if you dig into it.

Of course it’s getting more fun as soon as you’re getting more familiar with the programs you’re using and your skills developing, and that really helps you in getting attention as well, but making people dance relies much more on the track played than on the super-fancy high-skilled transition that usually only you and maybe a tenth of the people in the crowd are noticing.

Getting gigs with a decent amount of people coming there and listening to what you do isn’t actually that easy (at least it isn’t here), so practicing at home and doing some mixtapes (and Mashups ;P) is really something you should focus on before playing live. Doing a mixtape you’re comfortable with provides you with more confidence when playing live, and it gets you something you can promote yourself at local clubs with and to get some acknowledgement from other DJs who are already big enough to attract a bigger crowd and maybe want to have you as their warm-up because of your mixtape.

Hey Bradley,

That’s one of the things I also had to manage when I first became interested in electronic music and DJing : )

What really worked for me was to listen a lot to online radio stations that covered the genres I was interested in and wrote down every Artist and Track I liked, then looked up other tracks of that Artist and tried to find stuff related to what I just discovered.

Next thing I did was to get a Beatport account and browsed through their toplists and checked out the related stuff there which really got me forward a lot.

Same thing with YouTube, just looked up the stuff I already found and made my way through the related videos and tried to fetch some information from the user comments, there’s always a guy posting a track he thinks is way better than the posted one, sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re not, but most of the time you’ll at least get some new stuff you can continue your search from.

What else worked pretty well for me was to check out gigs done by some local DJs, most of the time with free or very low entry, and the guys (and girls) playing there are usually chilled enough that they’re up for a little chat afterwards to tell you about what they currenty like to play and why. And if not, you can always check out during their set what that killer track is that’s currently on the decks.

Basically that’s the same stuff D-Jam already posted, just thought I’ll add in my suggestions anyways ; )

Some help to get you started:

http://www.youtube.com/user/OMGITMTV – lots of Electro House and everything that goes with it

http://www.youtube.com/user/MoombaBlastaOfficial – mainly Moombahton which isn’t my taste really, but from time to time they post some really great Moombahcore as well

http://www.youtube.com/user/UKFDubstep – As the name already states, mostly Dubstep and some DnB

http://www.di.fm/ – Didn’t listen to their radio stations for some time now, but at the very beginning that was my main source for new music

Hope there’s something useful for you in this post : )

Cheers,
Kubin