Prepared sets Vs "on the fly" - DJing & Live performance

[innerstatejt]

Hey guys,

I just finished a post about preparing or not preparing your sets for Gigs. I'd love to hear your thoughts either way from a clubber's point of view & a DJ/Live performer point of view.

http://www.musicsoftwaretraining.com/bl ... lan-or-not

cheers,
Jason

[M-bition]

Do not plan as a DJ. Just having an idea where your set is going to is enough. If you are a DJ you can choose from tons of tracks. You should have the talent to know all tracks/songs you have, so you also know/feel which tracks are suited to be played next. Each next song is your point of view of where the set is going to. This can either be to please the public, please yourself or perhaps both. Depends on what kind of DJ you are. Imo underground DJ's should play there own style. I guess as an underground DJ you want to share that sound you like with the crowd. I think playing your sound is more important then crowd pleasing but do not forget them. Party DJ's better play to please the crowd. In all cases; Feel the moment. Play a story.

In case of Live performance your set will most likely be dependent of a couple of tracks. You probably cannot play all of them in random order, because they will not always match. This is more difficult to play a story. Your set will lack this and can have a greater chance of unwanted moodswings if played random. Thats why sets are often planned in case of Live performance. The nice thing of Live performance often is the fact you can give each track a large personal touch, give it a certain kind of mood. DJ's are more restricted while playing a track (however with all of the technology they bring with them nowadays, this certainly decreases)

My point of view in a nutshell

[oddstep]

no one will know if you fake it - so long as the experience works. some people are hung up on authenticity; many people just want to be entertained. the key risk of highly prepared sets is that everything relies on the plan working in an environment that may not be that tightly controlled, the main risk of highly improvised performances is that its easy to lose people whilst you work out where to go next.

[JuanSOLO]

just make a playlist on your phone and push play, you'll do fine.

[muthafunka]

dj-wise...fully prepared sets rarely have much life, they might sound slick but...there's little excitement for the dj and of course that lack can feed through to the crowd. Also, how often have you pulled off a repeat performance that was more satisfying than the first?
Think like a disc jockey and not a hard-disk jockey, don't sit there with 15,000 tracks and no visual ie jacket cues, tapping away tags in a browser. How big's a record bag? Choose 100 tracks max that all have some kind of overlapping vibe somewhere, even if it's only in YOUR mind, randomly play around with your bagful a few times, discover 4 or 5 set-pieces/killer combos and get to know the tracks really well overall while you add/remove some. Then on the night you're not scrabbling around through 1000s of tracks, half of which you've only heard once, you've got a nice bag of flexible vibe and a handful of killer to drop now and again plus a couple of brand new bombs.

From-the-floor point of view? S/he's got a focussed sound/vibe, is responding to what we're liking and damn, did you just hear how s/he took blahblah into blahblah2? Yeeeeeeeeeeeah!

[oddstep]

The first successfull performance is always going to be the most satisfying for the performer, the idea that this will translate into what the audience feel isn't something I am that sure of. On the other hand, any performance but djing in particular is about reacting to the moment and engaging with a shared experience- so sticking slavishly to a script will alienate people.

[beats me]

dj-wise...fully prepared sets rarely have much life, they might sound slick but...there's little excitement for the dj and of course that lack can feed through to the crowd.

I don’t know if I agree with that entirely. A good set gets people excited on the dance floor and they aren’t performing. So I don’t know why it couldn’t get the DJ who put it together excited. It’s more of a “justify your existence” insecurity situation with the DJ. The DJ sets of the millionaire DJs are almost entirely pre-made. They have to be to sync with the light show.

But I’m also one of the few people who thinks the DJ needs to go and get replaced with the visual artists. And I say that as somebody who DJs here and there.

[TYLRbass]

I only prep my sets for high pressure gigs where I feel like I need to go with mostly original tracks. I don't have a very large catalog of originals and they tend to be in all different keys at a variety of tempos so mixing a cohesive set takes some preparation..

With that said, I usually get half-way through and decide to deviate from my plan, whether that means switching to DJing other peoples music or just grabbing from my past catalog of originals that I hadn't planned on playing.

As for DJ sets, I usually toss 1 or 2 tracks into my empty DJ template and then pull tracks from my iTunes as I go. It's a lot more fun for me and it allows me to play to the crowd. The only downfall of this is that you have no choice but to go back to the computer every couple minutes and then you end up with Serato face while you scroll through your library. So there is definitely advantages to both as far as the whole staying away from the laptop thing goes.

With planned sets I can put the laptop far away and never touch it, but you lose the ability to truly improvise. With improvised sets you can play to the crowd/vibe but you pretty much have to stick your face into the laptop before each mix.

[re:dream]

Hmm

I find I need to do a fair bit of prep

A track can sound great - but in the wrong context it can end up being spoiled. Many's the time when I thought, I will mix over from one fab track to another, to find that the actual effect is that the floor loses its energy...

So I like the notion of 'mini-sets'. I know that halfway through my set I want to hit a particular track, and then I will go from that to another one, and I know it will sound cool because I checked beforehand and I know it will work. This has sometimes enabled me to do shifts and changes I wouldn't have had the bottle to do on the spur of the moment.

Around that I leave space for experimentation.

As for the rest, knowing my circle of fifths, and using clip annotation to note BPM and key helps me avoid the worst of jarring moments.

[Donnie]

I like to prepare with plenty of opportunities to improvise and deviate. Personally it feels lazy to me to just go out there and wing it. It's fun as a tag team set or something like that but playing solo I find it easier to get into the flow if I have some direction. Otherwise there is too much thinking going on, searching for tracks, etc...it feels more natural for me to practice and prepare. Plus I find that most DJs who wing it tend to have at least a few cuts that lose momentum, sure a lot of people wont notice but that's just not satisfying enough for me personally. Finding tracks that go great together well and figuring out energy building transitions before playing out is half the fun imo...I find that when done right you don't have to worry too much about "reading the floor" aside from emergency situations.

[TYLRbass]

If you know the tracks in your collection well enough and have played them enough to be familiar with them you'll naturally remember those 3-4 track strings that sound great.. It's almost like when you listen to a really good album over and over and then you hear a single track from the album on shuffle and you naturally anticipate the song that comes next..

Sometimes it's a game of here's where I am now, here's where I want to go and obviously there isn't a straight forward way of mixing there so how can I leap frog my way from here to there. Which sometimes leads to playing a track (maybe for only a short period of time) that you didn't plan on playing just because it bridges the gap between where you are and where you are trying to go with the set.

I like the idea of miniature set lists, and when you can tie a bunch of those together to create a whole set you're golden. I feel like that's what I'm doing when I improvise a set but it's all in my head rather than saved off as set lists.

[TexasDJ2012]

I believe in preparation. I find being prepared helps in whatever job you have.

[Brock]

Failing to prepare is preparing to fail

[oblique strategies]

dj-wise...fully prepared sets rarely have much life, they might sound slick but...there's little excitement for the dj and of course that lack can feed through to the crowd.

I don’t know if I agree with that entirely. A good set gets people excited on the dance floor and they aren’t performing. So I don’t know why it couldn’t get the DJ who put it together excited.

I don't agree either. I have used meticulously prepared DJ flight paths, & have winged it from scratch. Both have their merits. Sometimes you lead the crowd, & sometimes you follow them.

I really like using both prepared set lists & freeform in the same set. Maybe start from scratch & when it banging, hit them with the tightly arranged flow. Or conversely, start from a set flight path, & then change when you feel like it.

Having prepared 'modules' that you can plug-in at will is also nice.

One thing that you should always prepare for is to be able to play longer than your set is scheduled for. You never know when you'll be called upon to do so.