What Does A DJ Do?

Besides Look Cool

Intro

So, in light of a few conversations I’ve had recently, posts I’ve seen in various places on the Internet and my own experience DJing a party this past weekend, I thought I’d write a little personal essay / beginner’s guide to what “being a DJ” actually means. It seems like lots of people don’t really understand what a DJ is doing when they’re performing, lots of people seem to think it’s just pressing play on an iPod, etc. Now, I’m far from a professional DJ, and I know everyone takes a different approach to DJing, just like everyone takes a different approach to playing guitar or writing a book. I can only speak to my own experience, but hopefully this will help shed some light on what “DJing” actually is.

Every Day

For me, DJing is pretty much a 24/7 thing. Even if I don’t have anything coming up, I still spend a large part of every day trawling SoundCloud, Reddit and a myriad of music blogs, looking for exciting new music. There’s nothing more satisfying than being able to play out a track that was just released the same day and have it really hit home on the dance floor. So, pretty much every morning, I spend at least a few minutes scrolling through tracks, downloading the ones I think will work well.

After I download a new track, I like to listen to it at least twice in the same day I downloaded it. When you’re DJing, it’s important to know what a song sounds like, how it’s structured and where it goes over the course of the track. So, after I download a few new tracks each morning, I go and listen to them all a few times over the course of the day, just to get an idea of how they sound, and start thinking about songs they might fit with well. (Sidenote: “Listening” to music is a very active experience for me. I don’t just zone out and let the music happen — at any given moment, I’m analyzing the structure of the song, the sounds that are used and how they change over the course of the song, the vibe that the song creates and how it creates it, the way the song is mixed…etc. This isn’t exclusive to DJs — I imagine that any musician listens to music in a similar way.)

Then there’s the actual practicing. I’m not nearly as regimented with this as I should be, but ideally I would practice mixing at least a little bit every single day. I’ll talk about what this actually entails later. Basically, DJing is just like playing an instrument, or any other skill: You have to practice all the time if you want to get better, or just keep your skills sharp. Like I said, I don’t do this nearly as often as I should, but I’m getting better.

Preparation, Part 1: Songs

Okay, so that’s the every day stuff. Now, let’s say I get asked to DJ a party this weekend (this happened last week, so I’m essentially just explaining what I did last week). First, I enthusiastically say yes, because holy shit I love DJing and want to do it every chance I get. Then, I immediately start mentally going through my music library and thinking of songs I want to prepare. Depending on the setting, I might ask what kind of music they’re expecting, what tends to work well, etc. Last week was just a party at my college, so I already had a pretty good idea of what people like. I knew that people tended to need some well known Top 40 pop stuff to get them excited and into it, but given enough warm-up they would definitely go hard for some popular EDM stuff, and even some weirder, deeper dance music if I sprinkled it in judiciously. However, the dude who was hosting the party also specifically asked for some hip hop, so I had to take that into account as well.

The first step in actually preparing for me is to start going through my whole music library and just wildly making a playlist of things I want to play: songs I know people will want to hear, songs that might be a little more obscure, but I think will do well on the dance floor, and often some weirder stuff that I’m not really sure how people react to, but I want to test out so I know for the future (these are awesome for two reasons: 1. Because if you play something that they’ve never heard before but they like, people will go absolutely apeshit. It’s science. And 2. Because I also produce music, so if I play a weird track that people absolutely love, I can take a look at it afterwards and figure out why it worked well on the dance floor and use that to my advantage when writing more music).

Next, I’ll go see what’s doing well on the Billboard charts or on Hype Machine. Since I’m usually not super up on current pop music, this helps me find any current pop music that I might be missing. I usually try to have a few (maybe three or four?) current-ish pop songs ready to go, and a few more “pop classics” (Hips Don’t Lie, Tik Tok, etc.) that I can pull out if I need to.

Preparation, Part 2: Refinement

So now I’ve got a big list of music: Mostly electronic, spanning trap, dubstep, electro house, moombahton, maybe a little deep house and probably some drum & bass (aaand probably a bunch of other stuff. These are the biggies though), with some Top 40 pop thrown in to get people excited at the beginning of the night. Now I remember I had some hip-hop requested. I’ve never been a huge hip hop fan personally, so I’m definitely still building my collection. I think I have enough for this party at least though. I grab Jump Around by House of Pain because it’s a classic, and because I remember hearing that people loved it when DJ Snake played it at Ultra Music Festival. I grab some Kendrick Lamar, because I heard Bro Safari play one of his tracks and it went over well, and I grab DMX’s X Gon’ Give It to Ya, because I heard it in an episode of Rick & Morty and it kicked ass. Among a few other hip hop tracks I find that I think will go off well, I have about 10 hours worth of music now.

Over the next day or two, I’ll scan through the playlist several times a day and take out stuff that I’ve changed my mind about (We Can’t Stop maybe isn’t the right pop song for this party after all…) and add songs I forgot about (Animals by Martin Garrix is super overplayed…but it’ll probably make people go crazy anyway…). In addition, I’m constantly practicing mixing between different songs on the list, figuring out good transitions and listening to the songs so that I know them all inside out. I also start separating them out into sections based on tempo, vibe, popularity, etc. My sections for the party last week were: 110bpm, 128bpm, Dubstep, Trap, Pop, Hiphop and Other. (Other is mainly all the freaky weird stuff that I wanna try out).

That process goes on for a few days in between classes and work. Pretty much any free time I have is spent doing that. Then the day of the party, I have to go through the entire list of songs and make sure they’re all analyzed and beatgridded correctly. (This is sort of my own fault — I should probably do this with new songs as soon as I download them so I never have to worry, but I haven’t started doing that yet). I DJ using Traktor on my laptop, controlled by a Native Instruments S2 controller. To make sure that everything goes smoothly, Traktor analyzes tracks to figure out what musical key they’re in, what the relative volume of the track is, what the tempo of the track is, and where the beats occur. Unfortunately, it’s a computer, so it’s far from perfect, so I usually will load each track on my list and play it to make sure that the tempo and beatgrid are correct, since I’ll be relying on those for mixing.

The Day Of

Alright, so I’ve got my list of songs (mind you, the list is about five times longer than I have room for — this way I have lots and lots of choices), everything has been analyzed and beatgridded correctly…it’s time to go to the party and start DJing! After getting the speakers, the controller and my laptop all set up and the lights turned off, everything is ready to go. Only one problem: the room is empty. No one’s here yet. Honestly, this is one of the most stressful parts of the night. I need to play something that will get people excited and interested to come inside, but I don’t want to play anything too awesome or exciting because I wanna save those for when the dance floor is packed. Talk Dirty to Me by Jason Derulo is hugely popular right now, and works pretty damn well on a dance floor, but I don’t want to play it to an empty room. This past week, I settled on some Santigold. Her songs have some good beats, they’re definitely danceable and catchy, and some people definitely have heard them before. It’s not gonna be a huge dance floor destroyer though, so I felt pretty okay throwing it to the empty room.

I got lucky at this party, because people were literally lined up outside the door before we even got started (although I didn’t know this until they flooded in — turns out, offering free beer is a great way to get people to come to your party). So seeing the dance floor already packed, I figured I’d transition to something a bit more upbeat. Now here’s where the actual act of “DJing” comes in. One song is playing, and I want to switch to a different song without disrupting the flow of the dance floor, hopefully without people even noticing until a few seconds into the new song. So, I put my headphones on one ear, bend over to look at my laptop and twiddle some knobs on the S2 and then all of a sudden TWRK’s remix of Flashing Lights by Kanye is playing.

The Art of Mixing

What did I just do?

It’s a lot more than just hitting “next song.” First, I looked through my list of tracks to find something suitable to mood. That remix was honestly a bit of a stretch — I wasn’t sure if people would react well to somewhat strange remix of a not-super-popular song that early in the night. Also, the TWRK remix is at 100bpm, and the Santigold song that’s playing is just about 197bpm. This song I want to put on is almost half the speed of the one that’s playing…how am I going to make that transition smooth? Luckily, you can tell Traktor to halve or double what it thinks is the bpm for any song — it doesn’t effect the way the song plays back, just the way the software deals with it behind the scenes (Since 100bpm can be thought of as 200bpm at half-time, and vice versa, this makes sense). So, I can have Traktor treat the Santigold track as if it were at 98 bpm, and then slow down the TWRK remix by 2 bpm so there both the same “speed” according to Traktor.

This next part is a huge point of contention in DJ circles. When DJs started out, they were just using turntables. To make sure transitions went smoothly, they would have one deck playing only through the headphones. Then, they would be able to start that deck and adjust the speed at just the right time so that the beats on both records would line up perfectly, so that when you faded from one deck to the other, you would only hear one beat. Lots of DJs still do it this way. Doing this is called beatmatching, and it’s a pretty tough skill to learn. However, you’ll recall earlier that we had Traktor figure out where the beats happen in each song — the beatgrid. So nowadays, we can just have DJ software do the beatmatching for us by lining up the beatgrids on the two tracks automatically. Lots of people argue that this is “cheating,” and it’s easy to see why, especially for people who spent years practicing beatmatching by hand.

Personally, I’m not great at beatmatching by hand. I’m pretty terrible at it actually. I’m practicing, but still definitely not good enough to do it live. So, once I have I both tracks playing at the same speed (or, in the case, one track playing at exactly half the speed of the other), I hit the sync button, and the beats on the two songs are matched up. Now, I need to find a section of each song that will work well to transition between the two songs. Luckily, the TWRK remix is “ DJ-friendly” — it has a few bars at the beginning and the end of the track that are just the drum beat, to make it easier to mix into and out of. I set the first four bars of the track to loop. That’s what I’ll mix into. Unfortunately for me, the Santigold track isn’t very DJ-friendly, and it wasn’t on my original list — I just picked out of my main library, so I don’t remember exactly what it sounds like. I don’t want to mix out over vocals, because that won’t sound good. And, of course, there are vocals throughout most of the song. So, I continue letting the song play, waiting for a section that will loop well, and sound okay to mix out of.

There it is — the last few bars of the song just have a beat and vocals shouting “Hey”. That will loop well. I set a two bar loop there, and slowly start fading that track out, and the TWRK track in. Sometime during this fade, I need to cancel the loop on the TWRK track so that it will play past the first four bars. Then I move the fader almost all the way over, but leave a tiny hint of the Santigold track in, because it will sound weird and empty if goes away completely. I’ll add some reverb to the Santigold loop so that it’s less distinguishable as a song and is more just noise until a moment comes about 38 seconds into the TWRK track where it makes sense to cut the Santigold song completely. Then I stop the Santigold track, move the fader all the way over, turn off the reverb, and start looking for the next song I’m gonna play.

Four More Hours

This process repeats for four more hours. Sometimes I’ll have a run of four or five songs all at the same tempo, which makes life easy — I just need to find a good transition point in each track and then fade between them. Other times I want to go from a trap track at 100 bpm to a drum & bass track at 173 bpm. How do I make that transition smooth? Find a section with no beat in each track and mix during that is one option, but since it’s dance music, moments with no beat are few and far between. If you know your tracks well enough and are quick enough, sometimes you can get away with a quick cut — go from one track’s build to another track’s drop instantaneously, or something similar. If done well, these sound really fucking cool. If you mess up though, it’s painfully obvious and everyone will stop dancing for a good few seconds — a DJ’s worst nightmare. Often the best bet for changing tempo is to find a section of one song you can speed up or slow down easily, and then loop that while changing the tempo to what it needs to be. For this to work, the tempo change has to be extremely smooth, but also not take too long, and it has to be done during a loop that makes sense. Another challenge I commonly run into is mixing in pop songs that are made for the radio, so they don’t have any convenient intros or outros to mix with — you just have to grab loops wherever you can find them, and hope they don’t sound too awkward.

Improv

So, for four hours I’m bending over and twiddling knobs every three minutes or so. What am I doing the rest of the time? Definitely part of the time I’m dancing and having a great time — I’m playing music that I love too after all, and I love seeing people dance to it. But I probably spend the least amount of time doing that of anything. Most of the time that I’m not actively doing something you can hear, I’m searching through my list of songs, or through my entire library for what I want to play next, and paying attention to crowd to try to guess what they want to hear next. About an hour into the party the other night, I had been playing some pretty heavy trap for about twenty or thirty minutes — people were definitely loving it, but I was worried that they were going to get tired of it soon and start leaving. It’s pretty energetic stuff and if people get too tired they’ll leave, or if they get bored with what they’re hearing they’ll leave. On the other hand, you don’t want to switch up the vibe all of a sudden if everyone’s having a great time.

In this case, I compromised by bringing it up another notch with Dirty Vibe by Skrillex — it has a very similar feel to the trap I had been playing, but it’s even faster and more hardcore. After that, I dropped in Getting’ Jiggy With It by Will Smith. People liked it because I brought it up another notch with the Skrillex track until everyone in the house was losing their minds, and then I gave them a chance to relax and be a little goofy with the much more chilled out Will Smith track. However, I kept some of the same vibe going by moving from trap to hip hop — trap is essentially hip hop influenced dance music. Both focus on rhythm above melody, and the Skrillex track even had some rapping on it.

Of course, it doesn’t always go this well. Later on in the night we had moved back to the 100bpm trap territory. The audience was into it for a bit, but by the time the third or fourth track came on, people were clearly done with it. I figured it had been a long night already — people needed to cool down. I queued up some Chromeo to go on next (great disco vibes, still good for dancing but definitely a little more chill). I couldn’t find a good transition point in the track that was playing, so I decided to let it play out to the end before bringing in the Chromeo track. Unfortunately, that was too long for people, and the dance floor started to clear out. By the time I could get the Chromeo on, there were maybe fifteen people left. Luckily, we managed to pull people back with the next few songs, and the party didn’t die, but it was pretty close.

Why didn’t I just cut straight to the Chromeo track, instead of waiting for a good transition point (and losing people)? For one thing, it would have been a jarring and uncomfortable transition. It seems like that would have been worth it if kept people in at the party, though, right? I think in the end it’s because a DJ’s job is really to be invisible. You don’t want people to realize that you’re constantly switching between songs, it should just feel like a completely natural flow. I think this is why lots of people think DJing isn’t a real skill, or that anyone can do it, etc. Because in the end, what you’re actually doing as a DJ is completely invisible if done correctly.

2am

The clock finally hits 2am. Time to shut the party down. Me and my friend who I’m DJing with pick a song to finish up the night — a pretty heavy Bassnectar track. We put it on and sit back and watch the dance floor explode for the last time. The music stops, and everyone asks when it’ll come back. Unfortunately, we have to shut down, or we’re gonna be shut down by campus police, and it’s not my house. Eventually everyone clears out, I get some water for the first time in four hours, grab some food, and start packing up. Over the next few days I go through the play history from night and notice which songs worked well, what places in the night I screwed up, and what I need to do next time to do better. And I start looking for another party to DJ!

Like I said, this is just how I DJ. Everyone does it differently, and lots of people do a lot more than I do during a gig. Of course there are tons of people that still use vinyl for DJing, and incorporate scratching into their sets. Some people do live mashups, or even live original compositions. I know a few people that will plan out an entire set before they play it — they know exactly which songs they’re going to play when, and how they’re going to transition between them.

Wow, this turned out to be, like, way longer than I meant for it to be. Hopefully it makes sense and helps at least a few people understand what DJs are doing when they’re not jumping around or doing the jesus pose!