Preperation vs. Freestyle

[!STiTCH!]

Everytime I am booked for a gig, I will spend countless hours preparing a set list, I use Mixed in Key when/where I can, warp my tracks, set loop points, set up samples, I mean I put some time into it, and EVERYTIME, the set list is usually scrapped within the first hour of playing, and the dance floor seems to move more when I just go with the flow. Anyone else have this happen? Any tips for preparing a set, or even tips for approaching a gig from the "freestyle it" standpoint?

Flame On!

[juanlittledevil]

This is really a balance you must achieve, I'm personally still to find what fits my style best. I really do like having an idea of where my set is going, but don't really want to be stuck to a timeline. I've found that some things can be automated, like envelope changes etc, the use of dummy clips is great for this as you have an arsenal of on the fly envelopes which can be used specially if you apply to macro of your device chains.

Another thing which I find helps is having a good set of scenes which aren't fully arranged into tracks to use as an on the fly remix. Something I do usually is leave complicated breakdowns as something which is more or less hard on paper, but do all my intro's and outro's as a set of long looping scenes which I can turn on/off as I need to. Also I have several groups of clips running in a sort of random fashion to add a more unique experience every time.

Another thing which I'm not sure if you are doing now or not is, that you can save your tracks/clips/scenes into your library to be recalled later on if needed, even in the middle of a performance. (though test this first) This will allow you to save all the hard work you've done preparing for your gig and make it easy to prepare for the next one. I used to save each project individually and found myself re-doing the same work over and over again. Once I discovered that Live gives you options as to HOW you save your data it opened a whole new world of possibilities. I no longer save ideas as projects, but rather save them as scenes, or clips allowing me to re-call them on ANY project I'm working on.

Hope this helps. It'd be nice to see what sort of solution you come up with.


-- Juan

[!STiTCH!]

Thank you Juan. I greatly appreciate the advice. I had thought of saving different mix outs / scenes and just dropping those into the set as needed, gonna have to give that a go now.

[lasersounds]

this is why i think live isnt the best DJing tool, it takes SO MUCH preparation! I DJ as a job, and i play out alot with many different crowds and venues, so i cant possibly prepare 10000 songs for live. i use serato and i can DL a song through it in there and its ready to rock.

i guess, if youre playing YOUR tunes and people are there to see YOU, live works great, but if you need to change the set mid set, its really annoying and hard to do.

honestly, its alot easier to use serato or traktor to DJ

[jhonnydeep]

Nice sharing... thanks...

[sailordrift]

this is why i think live isnt the best DJing tool, it takes SO MUCH preparation! I DJ as a job, and i play out alot with many different crowds and venues, so i cant possibly prepare 10000 songs for live. i use serato and i can DL a song through it in there and its ready to rock.

i guess, if youre playing YOUR tunes and people are there to see YOU, live works great, but if you need to change the set mid set, its really annoying and hard to do.

honestly, its alot easier to use serato or traktor to DJ

if you're doing mobile dj, weddings, high school reunions I can see what you're saying, but if you're doing dance music I think LIVE is great for DJ'ing esp if you don't want focus on beatch matching (LIVE will help you with that). I do *agree* with you that it's a b*tch to have to warp / "prep" 1000's of tunes, but this is beneficial in the long rong. When I spend a night warping tons of songs, I get familiar with them having spent time with them. I'll even place warp markers as a "Marker" to tip me off that a break is comming up or something. I've even thought of writing my own Lessons to put notes in on the right side, I may even place the Circle of 5th's color wheel picture there...

can you do that with serato?