Organizing Your Music
So you’ve begun your DJ journey, found 1000 songs, and saved them to a playlist called “West Coast Swing.” How do you find the right song you need for your next set? Below we’ll look at some techniques for organizing your music library.
Goals of an Organized Library
Organizing your library can be a pretty daunting task, and you can easily take it too far and tag your songs with a million things that aren’t actually helpful. So let’s first spend some time thinking about what we actually want to be able to do with our library, and that will inform us how to best organize it.
As you get more and more songs, you’ll begin to find that a lot of songs are very similar in components, and mostly serve the same function. For example, compare the two songs below: Lizzy McAlpine — Over-the-Ocean Call and Sabrina Claudio — Orion’s Belt.
Both of these songs have slow tempos, low energy, female singers, laid back drums, atmospheric rhythm sections, and low rhythmic variety. For all intents and purposes, they are interchangeable with each other. This doesn’t make them bad songs, in fact, both of them are personal favorites. But it does mean they serve the same function within a DJ set: they lower the energy, encourage shaping and experimentation within the dance, and give an overall late night, gooey feeling. As such, we would want to bucket these songs (and others like them) so we can easy find a list of these kind of songs whenever we need a gooey, late night song.
West Coast Swing Music Categories
As discussed above, we can categorize different songs based into what “function” they provide in a DJ set. This is mostly to easily allow us to do one of two things: a) choose a song that’s similar to the previous song or b) choose a song that’s different from the previous song (why you would want to do either of these will be covered in a future article). Below we’ll explore two of the different verticals I use to categorize songs into different functions.
Tempo
Tempo is an obvious and really important vertical for categorizing music. It can be very helpful to divide songs into slow, medium, and fast buckets, with the exact cutoff likely determined by regional preferences (for example, in the San Francisco bay area we like really slow music, so many songs that would be medium tempo in other regions would be considered fast tempo here).
The reason for categorizing based on tempo is that dancers have different reactions to slow and fast songs. Fast songs obviously require a lot more energy to dance to, and so too many fast songs in a row will quickly tire out the audience and make them go sit down. Conversely, many people find slower music harder to dance to, as you have to be a lot more precise with your weight transfers, and for very slow songs it can be easier to lose track of the beat. Knowing when you’re playing more difficult songs is equally important so you don’t scare away dancers who find themselves challenged by the music.
Energy
The energy of a song can be somewhat difficult to define, but it loosely translates to how “busy” a song is, how many instruments (including vocals) are playing simultaneously, and how complex the parts of each instrument are. Let’s look at a few songs and compare each of their energy levels.
Rihanna — Don’t Stop The Music is easily a high energy song. The beat is continuously driving you forward (it’s actually slightly “in front of the beat”). There are also a large number of instruments playing. For example, in the chorus, you have the drums (a kick drum, snare drum, and a clap), a bass, a synth, the main vocals, and chorus vocals all going on simultaneously. The song is extremely busy, with beats of nearly every subdivision having something going on you can interact with. This is the main thing which gives the song its high energy feeling.
Comparatively, Alfie Templeton — Things I Thought Were Mine, has fewer simultaneous instruments. There’s more space between notes, which gives the track more space to breathe. However, the rhythms themselves are still fairly complex, with lots of syncopated notes. To me this makes it a solid medium energy song.
Mickey Valen, MOTHICA — Overthinking has even fewer instruments and simpler rhythms than Alfie Templeton — Things I Thought Were Mine. However, we see the return of the “driving beat” from Rihanna — Don’t Stop The Music. There’s also a lot less empty space in this song. There is additionally a large increase in dynamics between the verse and the chorus, which give the feeling of an increase in energy. Because of this, I still consider this a medium energy song, since along with the increased dynamics, the lack of complexity in the song is replaced by more held notes taking up the space.
Conversely ARO — Heart is more of a low energy song. The feeling of the song is very laid back, it only has three instruments: drums, a guitar, and a vocalist. It has very simple rhythms, and a lot of open space throughout the track, giving dancers a lot of space to breathe (both literally and figuratively).
Intersection of Tempo and Energy
Intuitively one might think that tempo and energy are related: with faster songs being higher energy and slower songs being lower energy. And while many songs will definitely trend that way, that’s far from always the case. Let’s look at a few examples below:
Fast Tempo, High Energy
David Guetta, Nicki Minaj — Turn Me On is a very clear example of a fast tempo (128bpm), high energy song. The sounds in the song are very loud and take up a lot of the sonic space of the song. There are many syncopated rhythms throughout the song. And even though the verse itself is already fairly busy, it finds a way to get even busier during the chorus. The song is exhausting to even listen to, let along dance to.
Fast Tempo, Low Energy
Conversely, Sam Cooke — Don’t Cry On My Shoulder, while still fast at 112bpm, has a much lower energy feel to it. There’s a similar number of instruments involved (vocals, drums, bass, and synth/piano), but their relationship to the song is very different. In particular, while the synth in Turn Me On was a blasting wall of sound, the piano in Don’t Cry On My Shoulder is tucked into the background of the track, just adding texture to the rest of the song. The drums are also much lower energy, doing a simple jazz beat instead of the pounding four-on-the-floor of Turn Me On. This leads Don’t Cry On My Shoulder to feeling like it has a lot more space throughout the track giving both your feet and your ears a break.
Slow Tempo, Low Energy
On the other end of the spectrum is Jorja Smith — February 3rd. This song, at 85bpm, is pretty slow, and has a very low energy. The track has very few instruments, with just a vocalist, simple drums, and a single synth making up the song. There’s little rhythmic complexity in the song as well. The long held notes encourage lots of shaping in your dancing, and give you a wide open space to construct your dancing in.
Slow Tempo, High Energy
Peg Parnevik — Goodbye Boy, on the other hand, is a much higher energy song, despite having the same tempo (85bpm). The drums take a much more central role in the track, giving a much more clearly defined beat. The vocals have a lot of syncopation in them. Finally, there’s a large difference in dynamics between the verse and the chorus, which also give the song an overall much higher energy feel, since we tend to think of the energy of a song by its peaks rather than its valleys.
Library Organization Based On Tempo And Energy
Now that we’ve explored the concepts of tempo and energy, we can use them to create a basic organized library. When constructing a DJ set, we’ll want to be able to easy access the various combinations of tempo and energy. To do this, create 9 playlists, as follows:
- Slow Tempo, Low Energy
- Slow Tempo, Medium Energy
- Slow Tempo, High Energy
- Medium Tempo, Low Energy
- Medium Tempo, Medium Energy
- Medium Tempo, High Energy
- Fast Tempo, Low Energy
- Fast Tempo, Medium Energy
- Fast Tempo, High Energy
You’ll then want to go through your West Coast Swing music library and put each song into its respective playlist. Then, as you’re constructing a set, you can tell yourself, “I’m going to want a medium tempo, low energy song here” (in a future article we’ll look at why you might choose such a song for your set) and be able to easily find the list of songs that fit that profile. Obviously this can get a lot more complex, with by adding other categories such as genre, but if you’re using Spotify to manage your library, anything beyond two categories will quickly grow unwiedly. In a future article, we’ll look at how using proper DJ software such as VirtualDJ can enable you to have a lot more specificity in organizing your tracks.
