Rattfink

Let us know how it goes man I’m stoked for you!

Also, if you’re able to get your hands on a DAW like Ableton, you can edit the track to have it’s tempo be a little more quantized. I know that you lose a bit of that “live” feel but it’ll beatmatch better than before.

I totally feel you on this one Mike!
I used to have a residency at the local uni bar near my home for the student nights. It was crazy fun, and I have some truly memorable nights playing there. But there was one thing that I noticed more and more- the majority of people in the bar didn’t care about my mixing so much as they cared about my track selection!

This hit me quite hard. As a dj I’d spent years learning the art of the pitch perfect, beatmatched, seamless liquid mix, and I was quite proud of my ability to do so. I usually focused on straight pure 4/4 house music/nu disco/classics, and that worked just fine in a club setting. But at this new venue I realised that I seriously had to step my game up, and focus not so much on playing great mixes, but playing great (see popular) tracks.

Just to make it plain, it wasn’t like my track selection was rubbish, and I never fully planned out my sets to the point where I couldn’t adapt for crowd taste and atmosphere, but my mixing skills were not received in the way I thought that they would be. I’d hit a crazy loop/build/sweep/drop between two sure things and it just seemed like the crowd didn’t react in the way that your usual club crowd would. But if I let that new track go to the percussion loop at the end and then drop “Little Bad Girl” with its tell tale start, people would go crazy! So after a while I went pop, and sprinkled in new top 40s and female favorites (DJ top tip: when in doubt, focus on getting the girls to dance) to my sets, and focused more on tracks then mixes, and it worked quite well.

The problem with this phenomenon is that when people don’t really care about your DJ’ing skills, you lose your ability to demand wages based on them. I personally lost my night to a guy who I originally taught to mix, and now he plays off of virtual dj without any controllers/mixers/equipment at all. I mean he doesn’t even use headphones; he just drags the track, hits quantize, and moves the crossfader on the screen. He also doesn’t ask for payment. But since this uni night has become so big (in no small part because of my old residency) most people don’t seem to mind his lack of skills; they’re just there to get pissed and hook up.

I realize that this has become a bit of a rant but my dilemma is this: how do I compete with free when all I can offer is my skills, experience, and promoting capabilities?! I learned my lesson but when mixing doesn’t matter what’s stopping venues from just putting on NightLife or some noob with a laptop?!

Now you’re making sense hahahahaha! Christ sorry to keep harping on a silly question but it just wasn’t making sense in my head 😀
My next step after ye ol’ Garageband was Ableton 7 LE. Great stuff man enjoy!

Spandryl, post: 10955 wrote: They are all organized in folders in Ableton… (iTunes is just for general music organization) I have to drag and drop the ‘samples’ file for each one into a track (usually over a previous track when its finished). Does that help?

Oh yah totally I get it. So you’ve done your prep (warping, cue point setting etc) on all the tracks you’ll think will go off but you’re still picking and choosing out of the playlist folder. That leads me to think why don’t you just have all the tracks chilling in session view good to go instead of dragging them over one by one? I mean you’ve already prepp’d them so if they’re all in rows in session view you could pick and choose.
As a side question, are you incorporating any of your own stuff in there? I read before that you’re a musician and I thought you might be chucking in your own loops, samples, and synth lines in tandem with the tracks?