DJ Gig Issues? Make Sure Your Set-Up Has This - Free DJ Tutorial

DJ Gig Issues? Make Sure Your Set-Up Has This – Free DJ Tutorial

This is a FREE sample lesson from our “DJing Made Easy” course – find out more here: http://djtips.co/djing-sample

In this lesson I’ll share with you a little backup secret that I take along with me to all my gigs and I’m sure it’s going to be helpful for you too. See I don’t always play in a big club with a nice spacious DJ booth and everything works perfectly. In fact, a majority of the time I’m playing in either a really cramped DJ booth where I have to struggle to put my controller on the desk and have to mess around with wires just so I can patch into the soundsystem, or I’m not even playing in a DJ booth (eg It could just be a table that was set up for me and my gear).

As you can imagine, tons of things can go wrong, and I’ve pretty much experienced all sorts of technical glitches and mess ups: I’ve lost power to my controller, had a cable yanked and had my laptop freeze as a result, someone even spilled an entire glass of beer on my gear, and recently even the venue’s soundsystem team effed up because they plugged me into the wrong input channels on their mixer.

Whatever the case, during these moments two things happen: either the music completely dies and you’re left with silence and a stunned crowd looking at you, their hands up shaking their heads, or the sound is so bad that you simply can’t continue unless you get it fixed, in which case the sound again has to get cut.

Either way, you’re dealing with an awkward period of silence that can really trigger anxiety.

The “secret weapon” source

The trick here is to have what I call a “secret weapon” deck: this is basically a playback source that is NOT your laptop or whatever it is that you’re using for DJing. This could be your phone playing from a music service or DJing app such as djay Pro, or even someone else’s phone or tablet. Just connect the headphone output to the PA mixer and have a song that’s ready to go just in case. Better yet, have a mixtape on it that you can play in emergency situations like this so you have time to fix any technical difficulties.

This “secret weapon” music source can even be a microphone – when something happens, get on the mic and reassure your crowd that you’re getting it fixed! Or if you have an MC with you, have him do some spiels while you figure out what’s wrong with your kit.

Apart from being your “go-to” when you’ve got tech issues, you can also use it as a way to play requests from a streaming service like Spotify instead of having to do it on your laptop. Also saves someone from having to ask “hey bro can I just plug my phone in if you don’t have my song?” so you at least have some form of control over the request situation.

Connecting up your source

So how do you connect your secret weapon music source? Use an aux cable and connect it to your DJ controller or the venue’s mixer. You can also try taking along a small live mixer such as the Mackie Mix 5 specifically for this purpose – this means you can plug in a microphone and your phone / secret weapon deck even if your DJ controller doesn’t have any of those inputs.

Again, it’s a secret weapon deck – you don’t need to use it ALL the time, it’s entirely up to YOU when you want to use it.

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