Ableton Forum

Hi,
I have a DJ gig coming up on Friday and I have no idea how many songs I need. I've never played a 3hr set before so I'm not sure how many I need to be safe. I was thinking around 35 or 40? Please, If you have any experience, please help me out! Thanks in advance.

Each song is around 5 min and there is 60 min in an hour.

I'm shitty at math sooooooooooo :/

I've played 8 hour sets and I improv after the first hour. What kind of gig is it? Is it a club, bar or house party?

It's a bar

Is your entire cd collection too much to bring?

depends a lot on your mixing style too.. eventually you will learn your music well, you need to in order to be successful. Bring everything just in case, hope that you do not have to go digging into what you do not know. Playlists, or too much of a plan is probably not the best way to approach.. learn your music. House music is a pretty broad genre. For what I would call house, about 3 minutes per track unless you get tricky with some. For breaks, disco or classics, I change tracks about every 2.5 minutes, sometimes chorus-verse-chorus-out ( under 2 min.)

Yeah, it depends on your playing style, the type of house you are playing, and what you are aiming to achieve.

Personally, I only play what I regard as the best tracks. Also, you're playing in a bar, which means that people are not necessarily engaging with the music quite as much as at a club. Thus, I would probably present the tracks pretty much as intended by the author, they'll all be strong tracks anyway, the tracks can 'breathe', and not be as 'in your face' as 'compressed mixing' can be. So I'd be looking at about 12 tracks per hour, but I'd ideally like several times the amount of tracks I actually need, because you never know exactly where a set will end up...

you need only one song, but some deep remix-skills

When faced with a similar situation (my first time playing out, never played for that many hours at a time before), I decided the best way to find out would be to practice playing at home for that many hours. So I did. It worked great.

I don't know your mixing style, but for me when playing house music I would average about 3min/track or just a little more. Therefore you'd need 20 for an hour set and 60 for a two hour set. To have some buffer room and so you can play what the audience is responding to and adjust your style as needed I'd recommend having 50% more. So you should have 90 really solid tracks to do a 3 hour set well.

That's for DJing. If you're playing your own music, obviously you don't need so many tracks.

You need 50 tracks at least. Because although 35-40 will fill out the time how do you know how the crowd is going to react to your music?

If you start off with some downtempo and it starts to kick off and go mental and you need to start playing some gabba and storm-tropper techno then you're gonna need some more tracks.

Can you not rip them all and use a laptop?

Also best to have a few classics in the bag in case it turns out cheesy such as Black Lace's "agadoo", "eye of the tiger" by Surivivor and the majestic "final countdown" by Europe.

how lang lasted the thirty years war?

I mean.. I would guess probably about 30 years

one 3 hour track should be enough.

make sure not to check your email before the show... or you'll have nothing to do during the show.

but doesn't anything times 1 = 1 so 1 3 hour set is just 1 minute or is it just over an hour?