So I’m all “Yeah, you have to be able to take commentary on your DJing if you want to be the best DJ you can be” and we’re all, like “YEAH!”
But how, exactly, do you actually give feedback to people on their DJing? I mean, what precisely do you say?
#impossiblemission
I’ve had this conversation not so long ago with my friend Meghan who is managing the DJ’s at a regular dance in Montreal. One thing I can notice and say about a good or bad djing is 1) the music you play 2) the order of your playlist, the flow. I take it from Zack Richard, and for my little tiny DJing experience, it worked pretty well : when you play a song, try to keep the same musical feeling for about 2-3 songs before you go somewhere else. If you play a big band, stick with a few more big bands, and then maybe start a more “vocal” song, with Ella Fitzgerald, and Esther Phillips, etc and then Louis Armstrong that might lead me to Dixieland, then a few again, and then shift to something very different, or continue with jive and chunky men vocals, and then again somewhere else with or without in-between songs for a smooth or radical transition… It’s just an example.
As Meghan and I were talking, we were wondering why we didn’t like the current DJ’s set, and my guess was that 1) he was playing way too much 90’s-00’s modern swing bands (I must admit, one is already too much from my point of view – I’m not talking about the current swing bands like Jonathan Stout, Glenn Crytzer etc. They are damn good) and 2) he was going too random with his choices of songs, from Slim and Slam to Glenn Miller to Jesse Stone to Buster Smith. Nononononono !!! The good songs were lost in the middle of other less good ones, and I was getting tired from switching from one mood of dancing to another.
Maybe this is a basic 101 of DJing, before even trying to read the crowd and adapting, or taking risks and go with your intuition.
But I thought that was a good place to start to give a feedback to a novice like me or like the DJ we were talking about.
I don’t think it’s an impossible mission to give feedbacks on DJing, unless you’re talking about skilled experienced Djs. Then it might be a matter of sensitivity, knowing how to adapt to one crowd of dancers, level of awareness…
That’s my thought..