Yo Yo Yo, I'm DJ Sounds-Like-Crap As usual I put an insane amount of effort into DJing a party to perfection. I was asked to DJ the youth group (they call themselves CD7) at my church's Christmas Banquet. I did this two years ago and I was wildly successful. I don't just show up and play some music...I prepare for weeks and/or months. I'll get back to my preparation later. For now I'll explain what happened.

We set up equipment on Wednesday of last week, but we didn't test things out. For various reasons it never got tested until 20 minutes before the banquet would be starting. Meanwhile I was frantically trying to learn how to use my newly downloaded DJ software, so I didn't really want to spare any time to figure out sound difficulties. The sound guy(s) had other tasks besides making the DJ equipment sound good, so I couldn't depend on them 100%. Anyway, the initial test sounded awful...the volume was at around 10% of normal loudness. I was ready to run up to radio shack for parts when I got word that we could wire it in a different way using the same wires. People were showing up in ties and dresses by this time so we couldn't do extensive testing. The sound guy got the rewiring done about a half hour after people started showing up. The decision was made to play quiet dinner music via a cd player until after everyone was finished eating. We did a quick (30 second) test of audio to make sure the new wiring would work and we heard some audio coming through...so I thought everything would be set. I was finally at ease and ready to go.

A short while later I was "on" and 4 seconds into it I already knew there were problems. I was supposed to start out with a 10 second audio clip leading into a mix that would get danced to by a breakdance squad. The audio clip would not come out of the speakers. The breakdance mix was missing something. I went directly from that into the dance music and I started out with my heaviest hitting bass-filled techno song. I (and everyone else) was completely underwhelmed. We had no bass coming through. Okay, okay, maybe I can deal with this...I'll avoid songs in which the bass is one of the most important sound elements. I have listened through every song a few times...I can figure this out. I decided to put on a few songs that I knew would be crowd favorites. They both bombed because, guess what?, you couldn't hear any of the lyrics. The sound coming out of the speakers was so bad that you could not hear vocals or bass from any song. I tried to switch the music around and I hoped it wasn't the software's fault. After an intermission I switched to iTunes in hopes that it would sound better. Actually I think I sounded worse. Anyway, I never got people dancing, and very luckily they miscalculated my scheduled hour and a half of DJing -- instead there was only a half hour of time available for dancing. Any longer and I would have had a heart attack and died.

In terms of how I prepare:
First of all I simply listen to tons of music to start getting a feel for what will sound good and be dancy. That's really the easy part. With all of those ideas I start to filter for bad language and I pull out songs that I know without any extra listening will be unplayable based on language or content. After that I get to the very long and tedious part... I don't actually know if any of the songs still on my list are clean or not. I have to actually listen from the beginning to the end of almost every song. Well, I used to do that. Now I search for the lyrics online and I find I can read through it much faster than listening through the entire song. Some songs have no lyrics to be found online, so you still have to listen to the whole song.

As a DJ you are supposed to have at least 10 times as much music as you will need. These teens are unpredictable, so I have about 12 times more music than I needed. They also have a very wide range of tastes, so you can't just play one type of music all night. Weeks before the dance I had requests for rap, screamo, Tom Jones, The Ramones, nu-metal, swing, various techno, punk, line dances, and much more. The night of the dance I had requests for country and for Mariah Carey. Needless to say, even with 9 hours of music on my playlist I still did not have enough music to make everybody happy.

Anyway, back to my preparations. Nine hours of "approved" music probably starts out at about 500 hours of music that gets weeded out. While I am removing songs for language and content (no sex or drugs!), I am also trying to put mixes together. Any audio or video editing is extremely tedious and time consuming. I spent hours and hours making interesting song mixes...and I ended up using none of them at the actual dance. Anyway, luckily for me I have saved my playlist this year...so if I have to do this again it will go from a 50+ hour process down to about 5 or 6.

Ugg. I've been depressed all weekend because all of that work ended up sounding like worthless noise. At the end of the night I switched my sound cable with Jake's cable (he had to play a 3 minute video...so he had his own wiring) and everything sounded great. Not my fault, but it was depressing to me nonetheless.  ¶ 9:44 AM