What Makes a Great DJ (Continued)
We’ve spoken many times about some aspects of what makes a great DJ, but put aside the technical ability to mix and music selection, one completely overlooked skill is being able to deal with any technical problem thats thrown at you during your set, to me thats one of the biggest assets you can have in your skillset. The amount of times I’ve seen something go wrong and the DJ frantically looks around for help, and in the real world there’s not always someone there when you need them and you should have the ability to fix any problem yourself.
The music stopping is the biggest vibe killer at any party, suddenly you have many people looking at you to blame, the weight of those eyes is horrific and can can send you into a blind panic where you can’t think straight. All that hard work of building a set has gone and it could take forever to try and win everyone back, especially when you’re still spooked/shaken and not in the right frame of mind.
The amount of times I’ve seen or experienced a CDJ crashing/freezing even die, channels on mixers suddenly fail, vibration in the booth causing poor LAN cables to fall out and audio cables work lose, water drip/drinks spilled on equipment, monitors fail and any DJ’s worst scenario the Laptop DJ playing before you playing their last track unplugging all their kit/sound card etc and leave you hanging with 3 minutes left of they last track without any CDJ plugged back in!
Before I play any set I scan over the set up so that I know how to quickly fix things if need be, I check how the decks are connected; digitally or analogue in case I need to switch them out, location of the LAN hub and how equipment is routed, location of the power sockets, how monitors are connected to the mixer, check firmware of players/hardware and update if needed etc. One really very important thing, I ask/locate the nearest fire exits in case of emergency as I could be the one person to help everyone over the microphone if the worst happened.
I tell every new DJ to learn how be able to set up and plug in all the equipment, when they’ve finished practice mixing sessions, pull all the leads out, so next time they want to play they have to plug it all back in so that it becomes muscle memory just like your DJing skills, it should all be part of the same package.