I fell into DJing by accident.
My friend Rosie had attended a club night for the over thirties in Lancaster a while back with friends and really enjoyed it. The idea was that the audience requested tracks that they wanted to dance to and the DJ played them (unusual in itself!). When she got back to Newcastle she asked me if I might be interested in organising something similar for friends to get together and have a good old dance. We also wanted to target older people, maybe people who used to go clubbing but didn’t anymore, who could routinely be found dancing round their kitchen to the radio.
We talked about a name (which in case you hadn’t realised is a play on the Club 18-30 holiday company name). We found a venue in Ouseburn and a DJ with a PA system. I wrangled together a logo around our chosen identity and Club 30-80 was born.
Due to unforseen circumstances at the first ever event, we had to get a stand-in DJ at the last minute and unfortunately they weren’t comfortable with the idea of dealing with requests from the audience and changing the playlist on the fly. This was pretty much central to the idea of Club 30-80 so we were a bit stuck. After our first outing Rosie said to me “You could do this“, and I said, “Erm… OK, I’ll give it a go!”
It was then that I first started to look on the Internet for DJ Software. Cost was important, as was ease of use for a complete beginner like me. Something that could take the stress out of playing the tracks i.e. fading between each automatically and leave me to curate the playlist as the requests came in would be amazing.
I tried several other “professional” software demos which were either too expensive, too complicated for me to use, buggy, or didn’t have the necessary basic features I wanted. Then I found Mixxx, DJ software for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It is open source (YAY!), there is a supportive community of developers and designers and DJs around the software (Double YAY (and thank goodness)!), it has the features I need to allow me to do what I need to do (Triple YAY!) AND it’s free (Quadruple YAY!).
I was up and running in a few minutes and found the software pretty intuitive (and fun) to use. I quickly realised that “out of the box” there was lots of widget and functionality that I wasn’t (ever) going to need. Thankfuly, it has a modular interface which I can customise. For me this is important because it means I can turn off elements I didn’t need. At the moment I don’t need Microphone support, Vinyl Control or Preview facilities so I just, turn them off. Maybe one day, when I reach the dizzy heights of *Superstar DJ* I might need to turn on the Samplers, Effects and Mixer panels but at the moment I am happy with a simple interface where the focus is on the Tracks in my Library and Playlists.
I love that I can maximise the Library area. This is really useful for me as I have a widescreen laptop which has a shallower vertical screen resolution than conventionl laptops.
Because of the nature of the nights we host I need a broad range on music to cover the audience’s diverse tastes so my MP3 collection is large. We try to include lots of musical genres and will routinely segue from pop to punk, glam to goth, with disco, Motown, reggae, swing, new wave and easy listening classics thrown in for good measure.
I work under the hashtag of #NonJudgementalDJ which means that i try to play what people ask for regardless of whether I *like* the track or not, I try take my own ego out of the mix as much as I can. And I have found The Crates facility is a great way for me to organise music by genre ahead of an event. It’s particularly useful for those genres I am not that familiar with, like RnB for example (yeah, I know, but I can’t like everything!). So when a punter comes up and says “Have you got any classic RnB?” I can show them the crate contents and they can choose what they want me to play which is rather more useful than just saying “I have no idea what that means!“.
After each event I like to make a Spotify playlist to share with members of the Facebook group too. This is made up of the requests that came in on the night that I managed to play. The History panel allows me to easily access to what I played and the ability to easily export the information I need from its auto-generated playlists.
I have, unexpectedly, really enjoyed DJing this far. Club 30-80 has been around for over three years now and while I still feel like I’m winging it, the Mixxx software gives me the confidence that I can DJ and make a pretty good job of it too!
Club 30-80 