bob6397

Which country are you in?

If you’re in the UK, all you need is PLI to be legal – equipment insurance is also recommended. You definitely shouldn’t need PPL (Unless it is your charity’s event – this is needed by the event organiser not by the DJ.

I can’t think of anything else..

bob6397

Can I ask you whereabouts in the world you are? (This affects the licensing as it various between countries)..

In the UK, the license you need (assuming you are the organiser – that is who is responsible, not the DJ) will depend on your broadcast method and how people access the stream. For example, if you have a stream which is completely private (IE encrypted and only some of your friends can get on it and you have to give them a password) then the license amount will be reduced as it is not a public event..

It is the station owner not the DJ who is responsible for the license though (Unless of course that is one and the same person).

I suspect that many of the stations will be paid for with some form of advertising – not many other options out there – but many will be run as a hobby and therefore probably don’t need to make any profit…

bob6397

I wouldn’t necessarily agree with what A.D has put on most fronts…

AMD processors are not by default inferior to Intel – Indeed the desktop AMD processors offer the same performance for often half/a quarter of the price of Intel equivalents. I use one such processor in my gaming PC – £120 of AMD processor is equivalent to around £400 of Intel. No contest for me.

However – In laptops, AMD are behind Intel in terms of power usage and in terms of processor performance. AMD processors are also not officially supported by Serato – so in this instance I would looking at getting an Intel i5 (3rd Gen or higher) processor. (Btw, you can tell the generation of an Intel Processor from it’s model number – each one has 4 numbers, the first number is the generation. EG. i5 2430 <- This is a 2nd Gen intel i5 processor.)

Second is your Windows management. On my laptop (I only have 1 laptop and use it for everything, I just know how to set it up right – Mine is 5 years old now and quicker than a lot of new laptops – and it only cost me £400..) I manage everything very carefully. I run a program called CCleaner every month or so – this cleans up everything and removes temporary files etc. – and I keep my laptop hard drive clean at all times, by which I mean that I uninstall anything I don’t need any more, I run antivirus and I keep everything updated (apart from iTunes..).

I would run the latest version of windows (although give Windows 10 a few months to get the bugs fixed before you upgrade to it after it comes out soon) – I use 8.1 – and update it regularly. I would turn off auto-updating though.

In short – use your PC for whatever you like, but manage it. If you can afford to have another laptop just for DJing then go for it, but I know that I can’t and that I don’t need to.

Other hardware considerations are:

1) How much RAM? Many people DJ using 4GB of RAM (I would not recommend anything less) and they can perform fine. I upgraded my laptop myself to 8GB of RAM and wouldn’t change it back though. It is surprising how much faster your PC can go with such a cheap upgrade.

2) Hard drive. Do you want an SSD? if you do, can you afford one with enough storage to store everything on? HDD’s (or SSD’s) are much harder to upgrade than other components like RAM, especially in a laptop, so make sure you get this right at the start. Personally, I use a 500GB hard drive in my laptop and it just under half way full. This is plenty of space for me, but it may not be for you. An SSD is not necessary however – more speed can be gained from disabling programs running unnecessarily on startup than from getting a new SSD over a HDD.

I would also recommend getting a backlit keyboard on your new PC – you do not know how useful they are until you have tried one in a dark DJ booth!!

Other than that, I would google “How to optimize PC for Serato” – there will be instructions on there on how to make Serato run better. Do you common sense though – if you start going into “Regedit”, stay well away unless you know what you are doing and if they get you to disable something you might want to use, don’t disable it!! (EG wifi).

A lot of people will tell you to only use your Laptop for DJing – and there are arguments for it, and if I could afford to then I would. But it is not necessary. Manage your PC, learn how it works and then everything should work fine..

Hint: If you want us to recommend anything in particular, a budget may be useful.. 🙂

bob6397

Congrats – glad it went well… keep on spinning 🙂

I would play whatever gets them on the floor 😉

Seriously though, when I follow another DJ I make sure that my set starts where they have left off – if they have done a deep house set then I would follow with some deep house/fusion/tropical house and then flow where I wanted to go – I would also not go too far down very specific genres if my set was anything less than 2 hrs – too difficult a handover then to the next DJ – and whilst you could say “none of my business”, giving them something to work with (Especially if they are a bigger name than you) will gain you respect and will get you noticed.

If the other DJs are playing similar genres as to what you want to play, then great, go for it – take them on a journey – but if they aren’t then be careful of 1) changing genre too fast (as this can kill the mood unless done really well) and 2) Only playing what you want to play – play what they want to hear. The real art of DJing is “Knowing what comes next”. Sounds simple but it really isn’t 🙂

To your second point – if you have been warned by someone reliable (and more than one person – so not just someone who doesn’t want you to play DnB as it isn’t their thing) then I would stay away – but if your set goes that way and they stay on the floor then keep at it.. And, of course, experiment – If you don’t clear the floor at least once in your set then you aren’t being adventurous enough 🙂 (Note: this is only advice.. I do not recommend deliberately clearing the floor and saying you’re being “Adventurous”..) Everyone makes mistakes though – learn from them when they do happen – when you play something you thought would fill the floor and it kills it – learn, carry on, get over it… 🙂

Good luck 🙂

bob6397

Arnaldi – depends on their age.. Anything above 16 I wouldn’t bother deliberately playing clean versions – most of them will be singing the explicit lyrics well before that age anyway…

When I’ve done Disco’s at schools (I’ve done some 11 Yr olds and some 8 Yr olds) I have consciously checked the tracks I put into my set list for explicit lyrics.. But it wouldn’t have mattered too much if I had let a couple through by accident..

bob6397

Are you on windows or mac?

If you are on windows, have you installed the drivers for the controller?

bob6397

Hi All,

My choice for the week:

Track: Dangerous
Artist: Big Data
Genre: Funky

Found this last week sometime and love the groove 🙂

Thanks to D-Jam for putting this together 🙂

bob6397