The Top DJ Tips, Tricks and Advice for Club DJing and Making People Dance

Here's my multi steroid booster, magic bullet little blue pill designed to make you perform like the best hot list of 6 key DJ tips:

1. Be the Master of your equipment

Don't think you'll somehow get by without enough practice.

You may not want to hear it but you'll need to know your DJ gear inside out and like a real pro.

Read the manuals, look up the best video tutorials, practices and advice on how to use it and try some little tricks with it yourself in the weeks and days leading up to events.

Develop your own little techniques and wizardry. Take it to the max.

Be the geek who knows all about how to make the most of your gear.

Make sure it's 100% reliable and carry out all the maintenance checks you'll need. Take a back up solution if you can.

Back up gear

For example: if you have no back up for your laptop, burn some tunes onto CDs. At least if your laptop crashes you'll be able to play from them.

Know exactly how everything works. Be relaxed with it. This'll free you to think about other things, such as..

2. Know your music

Knowing exactly what tunes you've got in the bag, case or on your hard drive is a huge bonus.

Knowing when to play the right tunes and who to play it to is just as important.

A deejay who cannot perform should either not be playing or has forgotten to check through his or her music recently.

Check my pro DJ tips on knowing all about your music.

3. Watch the crowd

Now, you can master your DJ equipment perfectly well.

You have the best tunes in town.

But if you're not paying attention to the heart and soul of the party, then none of that matters.

A real pro will be watching the crowd every few seconds.

He or she won't be just looking up every ten minutes, they'll be feeling the dancefloor out, connecting with them.

A top deejay won't be so immersed in their mix that they can't look up. They are comfortable enough with their mixing techniques that they can afford to check out who's dancing, who's going crazy and they'll see if people start to sidle off the dancefloor.

Reading reactions

You'll be able to gauge people's reactions. Maybe they're happy, drunk, drugged up, boys or girls, black, brown, white.

All of this is important when deciding how to react by choosing your next tune.

It's the intuitive part of DJing and it's why some make it and others don't.

Luckily you can find out much more about DJ Tips to read the club dancefloor.

4. Look great when DJing

Like it or not, how you look is part of your image and impact.

Some people even prefer a good looking guy or girl to someone who puts on the best tunes.

No really, it's true.

Ask your image conscious friends some tips on how to dress and adapt to the venue you're playing at.

People will relate better to you if you at least make an effort.

I'm not saying you have to look like Brangelina, but be smart, adapt and make the most of what you have.

When I say adapt, I mean that you'll need to know about the people who hang out there and they'll react better to you if they relate to your image.

You'll go further if you do that.

5. Don't get distracted from your set

It's all to easy for the weak willed boys amongst us to get distracted by a hot gorgeous girl coming up to the booth with a flirtatious smile and asking for Lady Gaga right this minute, because it's her birthday, she says. Be respectful, but remain in charge Be polite, but don't get distracted. Speaking to her is not more important than getting your mix right. Now, maybe it's just me but people always seem to ask me for stuff right when I'm lining up a tune and I need to concentrate. I just ignore them until I'm set and satisfied. Then I'll answer them, quickly. Remember your priorities Don't let them distract you from your set. Listen, be nice, but they can't change the course of a night that's going so well. The priority is your set. You need to remember that before some big breasted dolly puts you off. If you find that you have difficulties with saying no to requests then see exactly how best to handle them with my tips on dealing with booth requests.

6. Play the music they want and not what you want

Now let's get this straight.

While it's hard not to think this is all about you, numero uno, number one son of a gun and the king of the booth, it isn't. I know I just said you shouldn't get distracted by hotties asking you for music, leave that until the end. One of the best DJ tips is for you to pay attention to the whole crowd, not just one person asking for Lady Gaga. You see, people are there to have a good time and very few of them will actually be looking at and wondering about how cool the deejay actually is. It feels grand to lay down tunes that make people dance from a club booth, but you're here to make people dance. You're not playing to jerk yourself off in a booth. The more people that dance, the more successful the night will be and the more chance you have of getting bigger and better paid future gigs. So it's up to you to adapt to the crowd and not the other way around. The above DJ tips should help you play your set better, get invited back for more gigs and rock the dance floor.

This article and many more other DJ tips, advice and a free guide to getting DJ gigs can be found at The Total DJ Blog

Mixing Before Mixing - Good Production Practices When Making Beats Online

Making professional quality beats online is a fast, easy and smartest way to create backing tracks for your music project these days. To get that professional quality, though, you have to produce well mixed material. Here are some things to keep in mind when creating your beat tracks for DJing or adding to your next album.

Mixing tracks is more than just turning up the volume on certain parts, although it obviously includes that a well. Making sure that the sounds in your track are well balanced does not necessarily mean raising volume, nor does it mean exclusively all sounds are the same level or stay that way over time. The way to approach your track is listening to it as a process that changes its strengths over time. It is a miniature composition. It has an opening, an ending, and a series of melodic, harmonic, and/or rhythmic elements in between that carry the listener/dancer through the work. There are cadences and accents at work within the beat and mixing properly can bring those forward, strengthening your music.

Adjusting a support sound level can be very effective. Try bringing a bass drum or bass guitar sound from a zero or low level volume to the most prominent element of a track and see how that works. You can also try the opposite, bringing complimentary sounds in and out with the strongest element as a staple of the beat. The same applies to the ending of a beat or piece. Fading elements out or cutting them out cold can be extremely catchy and can highlight the melodic or rhythmic accents.

Bringing samples up and down over time in the mix can also supply the tension and relief needed to increase the entertainment value of a beat. Paying attention to factors like the stereo pan or the EQ of a sound is important and can give you an entire range of creative outlets for your track. Some DJs utilize the EQ heavily during a set; mixing with this in mind can be a great advantage if you balance sections severely towards or away from certain groups of frequencies. This allows the DJ to drop the bass or the high end and maintain the integrity of the track.

Try some of these ideas when mixing your beats and hear how it assists in producing professional quality tracks! Use an online service to generate your beats, burn a copy, and hit the club!

Now all you need to do is pick an online service, sign up, and get started. There are a few online beat making services out there currently. I personally like using Sonic Producer. They offer professional and concise tutorials and lessons. If you want to find out more about it, check out this review by going here: Sonic Producer Review

Good luck!

William Connor, Percussionist and Ethnomusicology Ph.D. candidate,
London, England and Honolulu, Hawaii, USA