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Topic: DJ Mistakes : Amatuer v Professional - Page: 1

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VDJ RonPRO InfinityMember since 2010
I've been thinking about an experience I had a couple of years ago that might help people.
I suppose I'm not a proper professional, and generally do not work with UK music icons.
The booking was for the CEO of a major UK company. I was an after thought, he had already booked a well known star, a very competent duo, a beautiful female string quartet, plus a dicky bowed compare who annoyed me by referring to me as a "goochie boy". The venue was a magnificent large hall which contained a large number of very expensive illuminated paintings. The stars entourage included 3 female backing singers, lighting engineers, sound engineers, and various musicians. All of the entertainment people where put in a comfortable room together, including me. The idea was that the star, and his crew where hidden behind a huge curtain which would be pulled back when he went on stage at 10pm.

Ok now for the mistakes I made:
1) I insisted on erecting my disco lights. Remember this venue is subtly lit, and contains fabulous artwork.
2) Showing my lack of class by enquiring about what frequency to set my radio microphone. These guy's, and gal's use the best, and their radio microphones automatically jump onto any available frequency.
3) Flapping when disaster strikes. The star got stuck on the M62 behind a jack knifed lorry in the middle of winter. What I should have done is sit quietly in the corner minding my own business until needed. Anyway I spoke out of turn, given that we had lots of musicians, and singers I thought we could do something, the show must go on! I succeeded in annoying the stars manager who basically told me to shut up. The CEO kept coming in, and asking if the star was here yet, and I should have been in the corner, but instead was busy assuring him all would be well. NOT MY BUSINESS!
4) Ogling at the computer controlled lighting desk, and asking "stupid" questions of the lighting engineers, again revealing a lack of experiance.

Anyway I covered for the star until he finally turned up at 11pm.
The compere stop calling me a "goochie boy", and said I did well.
I got thanked by the CEO at the end of the evening, it was his wifes 50th.

I seem to be good at upsetting people by being outspoken, and don't quite seem to be a proper professional.


 

Posted Thu 30 Apr 15 @ 12:32 pm
Hey
Nice topic ,
You were trying to help , but really should have stayed out until consulted .
We have probably all done this at some point .
Lesson to be learned I guess.

AM
 

Posted Thu 30 Apr 15 @ 2:10 pm
The one thing I stress to my students is to SPEND THE MOST AMOUNT OF MONEY THEY POSSIBLY CAN ON THIER LAPTOP!! I don't care if it's a Mac or PC it just needs to exced what the software ask for.

I can't tell you how many times I've seen these young kats drop 3/4 on equipment and only 4/5 hundred bucks on a laptop that's way under specs and wonder why they get drop out or can't run video properly. Your laptop is the brains and balls when it comes to digital deejaying.

 

Posted Thu 30 Apr 15 @ 2:20 pm
VDJ RonPRO InfinityMember since 2010
beatbreaker1, I think I'm going to upset you a little. When I wanted to enter into modern computing ( I was an engineer brought up on Fortran IV : extreme hate ! ) the choice was between buying a desktop from the likes of PC World, or getting the parts, and making my own. I took the latter route. I'm a struggling scouser, if you know what that means. Hence I bought an Asus X58L laptop, with a Celeron 2.0ghz, a 120gb hdd, and 1 gb of memory many years ago. Obsolete you may say.
No!
I replaced the Celeron cpu with a 2.4ghz dual core, changed the 120gb hdd to 1000gb, changed the operating system from Vista 32 bit to Win 7 64 bit, and upgraded the memory to 5gb ( there is a reason for that funny number). I have 3 of these which came quite cheaply, and all run very well. They are optimized for a DJ, and have all the not needed services, and hardware disabled.
You might be a video DJ, I only do karaoke, which does little to tax my cpu?

More hope for those who have little money!
 

Posted Thu 30 Apr 15 @ 3:10 pm
You've kind of proven my point........ These kids are "DJ's" not computer techs. You have the knowledge to do that, they don't. We wanna mix music not sit around trying to make our machines work.....

And yeah that 2.4 won't cut it for what I do. VDJ running into Resolume (projection mapping) with multiple clips playing running out into a TripleHead2Go with that running into 3 projectors and not gonna mention all the stuff running into the USB ports, lol!

My last Asus was a 2.4 dual core with a 1 gig Nvidia card and that thing crapped out after an hour or so. Eventually burned up the video card and tossed it in the trash.

I say start with a beast of a machine and you'll never have to worry.

My last 2 machines (an Asus and a MacBook Pro both quad core i7's) and I've never removed anything to be able to run and do what I do. I'm not a computer tech, I'm a DJ. I'll leave all the tweaking to the geek squad 😜
 

Posted Thu 30 Apr 15 @ 4:00 pm
VDJ RonPRO InfinityMember since 2010
Hm.. interesting, wanna play chess, you will lose! LOL
So be it!
 

Posted Thu 30 Apr 15 @ 4:07 pm
blckjckPRO InfinityMember since 2008
Along the topic of being a professional VS and amateur, trying to one up someone is not what I would view as professional.
There are a lot of companies that loose gigs by putting another company down or by one-upmanship. I have more songs, I have more lights, I have better equipment, I can do this or that better. I think the best testament to a professional is someone that continually tries to learn and improve their craft, letting their work show their quality.
Do what you say your going to do when you say it will be done. Do more then what you say. Over deliver instead of under deliver.
 

Posted Thu 30 Apr 15 @ 6:14 pm
VDJ RonPRO InfinityMember since 2010
"Hm.. interesting, wanna play chess, you will lose! LOL"
My above statement is very likely to be a fact.
I'm conceding that I'm a little bit of a geek, and that an international chess master might not get the win he expects.
I'm quite good.
 

Posted Thu 30 Apr 15 @ 6:25 pm
beatbreaker1 wrote :
SPEND THE MOST AMOUNT OF MONEY THEY POSSIBLY CAN ON THIER LAPTOP!!


I recently bought a "new" laptop for only 300 euros. It was a second hand ex lease laptop though, about 2 to 3 years old and it looks and feels like a brand new one. Of course, it was delivered with a clean Windows 7 professional install.

The laptop I bought is a Dell Latitude 6510, one of the top high end laptops back then and the specs are still better than most of todays laptops. It has an Intel i5 2,4 GHZ processor, 4GB of DDR3 memory (upgradeable to 8 GB), and I upgraded the harddisk to 750GB. It also has a back-lit keyboard, also a nice feature in our line of work. I'm quite happy with it!

OT: In such a situation, I would probably say I'm available to play any time they want, and leave it at that.
 

Posted Sat 02 May 15 @ 8:28 am
VDJ RonPRO InfinityMember since 2010
beatbreaker1 you sound like your a dj / teacher whose pupils are quite rich.
That's ok !
I'm more concerned with the working class kids of today, and how they are being restricted even more than those in our post war past.
In my day we had plenty of apprenticeships, and free education if you put in the effort, and were good enough.
Lack of an opportunity has crippled the motivation of so many of our young.
Their aspiration level has fell off a cliff ( another one ! ).
In the place of true hope they seem to have adopted computer games, and drugs.
I do not want to see them being excluded from being a DJ on the grounds of finance.
Hence I promote a frugal approach which is part of my working class background.
 

Posted Sat 02 May 15 @ 11:18 am
Well if you really must know the kids/adult students don't even learn about deejaying with a laptop until they've learned how to mix on turntables/CDJ's by ear. They learn the old school ways first which usually takes 6months to a year, some people longer.

As for the kids being rich well some are some aren't. Those that aren't I will lend out a few of my machines out and the school as some.

For me the digital deejaying is a double edged sword and that's not something I really wanna get into that here.

As for working class that's what I consider myself, hell I work a full time job as an iron worker (60/70 hours a week!!) I Dj and I teach and that's on top of having to raise 5 kids and all of their sports, band and just random running them and there friends around. I grow up dirt up poor and have had my share of troubles with the law so, please get off your holier then thou kick.

Not sure what your trying to get at but that has nothing to do with "Dj mistakes" which is what I thought this thread was about??

Now in my experience a cheap laptop hasn't lived up to expectations and Im not a compter tech. For certain aspects of digital deejaying these little 3,4, 5 hundred dollar machines won't work. I'd rather mix then tweak. So I stand by my statement, spend the most money you can on the most powerful machine you can afford (key word there is "AFFORD").

Now back on topic another mistake I've seen is DJ's not having a backup, be it extra hard drive, a 2nd laptop, spare needles, records, spare CDs etc etc. Just like anything else in life don't panic when shit does go down. Stay focused and you'll make it through. If your really prepared the crowd may not even know something went wrong 😜

So always, always, always have a backup in case something goes wrong during your set.
 

Posted Sat 02 May 15 @ 12:46 pm
beatbreaker1 wrote :
These kids are "DJ's" not computer techs, We wanna mix music not sit around trying to make our machines work


This really sums me up, I've long since given up on configuring computers every year, but then again I dont really push my computers either, I stopped playing music videos and dont really use fx. This is probably because as yet I havent seen a decent 19" mixer/midi controller I like.

 

Posted Sat 02 May 15 @ 3:57 pm
Great topic,

I noticed years ago that the DJ's that were pro and earned good money were the ones that were honest with themselves, I once had someone work for me that got terrible feedback, the customer had listed all what they thought was unprofessional and I had to agree. Once I presented the list to the DJ he went crazy and stated that he had run his shows like that for 20 years! I lol'd and never booked him again.
 

Posted Sat 02 May 15 @ 4:01 pm
I find your post, beatbreaker, to be very interesting.
Even though I never started to DJ with turntables (I joined when dual CD-players was "da shit") I agree that people should begin learning "old school".
Learn the facts and basics behind today digital DJ'ing, to see what it's all about.
I have the biggest respect to all you guys using turntables, and managed to mix and keep beats, with virtually nothing more than a spinning platter and a pitchcontrol.
No auto bpm counters, sync, or what so ever.
It's not an easy task to get a life rolling with full time jobs and the DJ'ing as "second job" (as in my case) with our loved once needing our attention most of the time.
For me, the DJ'ing is a kind of self treatment, it makes me breath and live more happy and perform better in all other aspects of life :)
 

Posted Sun 03 May 15 @ 5:03 am
938MyDJPRO InfinityMember since 2007
Review the contract before the gig (mobile).
Just this January on a post Xmas party on one of annual regular client, I asked my roadie to turn on the venue-lights and start tearing down/packing up at 1:00 am. The client went to me and said "the contract we signed for says you're suppose to play until 1:30."

Lights back to OFF again and played the last 30 minutes.
 

Posted Sun 03 May 15 @ 8:58 pm
I think my most "pro-feature" is tons of backup

If something fails I should always be able to get something up and running again, and have sound coming out of the speakers again within 10-15 sec, while I figure out how to get my main setup back up. Unless it's a power failure :)

/Klaus
 

Posted Mon 04 May 15 @ 1:03 am
locodogPRO InfinityModeratorMember since 2013
klausmogensen wrote :
Unless it's a power failure :)


No excuses, always have a set of bongos handy.

 

Posted Mon 04 May 15 @ 1:32 am
In my setup, I have the HTPC running VDJ and as backup a Denon DN-D4500 cd-player which has two loaded CD's with MP3 just in case.
If computer fails, I could manage rest of the event only by CD's.
My PA has 4 amps (two for subs and two for highs) so if one fails will not show too much.
I don't wanna think what happens if the mixer fails....
 

Posted Mon 04 May 15 @ 1:50 am
locodogPRO InfinityModeratorMember since 2013
Bongos
 

Posted Mon 04 May 15 @ 4:30 am
As we speak about "acoustic" instruments, I remember one time during a christmas party and heavy wind made the power go out.
I was just participating in the party and did not work that night thank god.
The live band had not begun to play yet, but everything was rigged and ready.
During the dinner power went out and did not come back for the entire party.
The live band did as much as they could with acoustic guitars and other sounding stuff (not said to be instruments though)
They should have had bongos aswell...
 

Posted Mon 04 May 15 @ 4:39 am
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