To all of my loyal listeners, fans, followers and subscribers, I give you a warm, heartfelt, and sincere thank you. I appreciate each and every one of you for your support, kind words, and spending some of your valuable time with me on my musical and personal journey, and although I can’t see you, I can feel your smiling faces and love coming back to me through the wires. People like Reann, Tanya, Terry, Sarah, Adam, Chad, Danny, Vanessa, Jen, Ira, Jeff, and so many more wonderful boys and girls out there … I wish I could give a shout out to each and every one of you, and give you a big fat hug too.
I hope I’ve given you a sonic escape, a bit of insight, and maybe a few laughs… but most of all, joy and inspiration. Humbly, I’m grateful to be in all of your orbits. Right on!
So, there’s a huge misconception out there that Djing is easy. They might say things like, “you’re just pressing buttons,” or “oh, you get to play music for a living, how fun!” And while these statements are partially true, I’m here to tell you that when done properly, it’s NOT easy. There’s a lot of hard work, time and dedication that goes on in the background, in preparation for what we do as DJs that’s hidden under the surface and behind the scenes.
One of the biggest jobs for a DJ is taking on the role of a librarian - a curator. Obtaining, downloading, buying, sifting, collecting, classifying, organizing, tagging and integrating new music is a massive undertaking! And keeping track of so much music to be able to recall it at a moment’s notice is the ultimate goal.
Now, I definitely take things to another level, A) because of my background music service company, Auratunes, where I provide custom playlists for businesses like restaurants, bars, and retail stores, and B) because I’m just a nerdy freak that loves to get super granular on details. But believe me, all that work and preparation pays off.
Sometimes, I get tracks that may not work in the context and flow of one of my DJ sets right now. But I’ll classify and tag them with descriptive terms that will help me find them in the future, especially because it’s hard to recall each and every track by artist and title alone.
Tagging the comments field with adjectives and adverbs that I can search for in the meta data, like melodic, chunky, funky, moody, thick, light, tight, breaks, lazy, aggressive, sexy, proggy, uplifting, deep… you get the idea, or even including what instruments or sounds that are used in a track, like saxophone, rhodes, arpy, 303, 808, 16th hats, full vocals, etc., lays the groundwork and foundation for future DJ sets when the mood strikes or circumstances arise.
Here’s a tip for all you DJ’s out there. Try to come up with descriptions that are unique, so that those tags are easier to find when doing a search. These can be contractions, acronyms, or even made up words that don’t normally occur.
For example, let’s say I’m searching my library for progressive house. Well, the words progressive and house will probably show up in other fields that you may not be interested in seeing, like the album or title. But, if you shorten it and eliminate the space between the words into proghouse, it will narrow your search to exactly what you’re looking for. We all think differently, so it’s all about organization and coming up with a system that makes sense for you.
Today’s mix is a perfect example of all of this behind the scenes work. While some of these tracks are brand spanking new, half of them are a few if not several years old… I might not have
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