My DJ Experience

Last Saturday we had a party in the office. As it goes with most of our in-house parties, we needed music that would pump people up and get them to dance. The experience has been that if we keep a playlist, people come with their song requests, stop songs in between and the focus shifts on selecting songs rather than on the dance itself. We like doing things on our own, so wouldn’t even hire a DJ. Neither did we have the budget to afford somebody professional.

So we decided to remix the songs ourselves. This would allow us to switch over to another song when it was no more exciting for dancing and eliminate the scope of run time requests. Of course we could do remixing at run time, but then we wouldn’t get to dance!

The search began. Googled for DJ software. Found an excellent source which listed many professional and amateur, costly and free, complex and less complex – software. Let me put it this way – the amount of software listed was baffling. So I just went through the first two pages of listing and picked one – KraMixer. I tried Mixere too, but found KraMixer better.

What was the experience mixing mp3’s then? I thoroughly enjoyed the whole exercise. It was fun to load up two songs in two channels and cross fade. Then to quickly record loop and play it over and then letting it automatically move on. The effects were not too cool, but pitch (speed), pan (left / right balance) and volume adjustments sufficed. I was lucky that Vaishali had already shortlisted some songs. I loaded them up and began remixing. Quickly switched to record mode so whatever I remixed, was recorded in a new file.

I started with some English dance numbers then added some latest Hindi movie numbers, a few Pop tracks and then some popular slow numbers in between so people could catch on their breaths. I realized that fading was the most important tool. Loop was a little difficult to master; pitch increase also required proper control and none of the effects were useful. Since the songs themselves were so good, I would load one song, let it play, then load another, and then cross fade them. At times I switched between songs – moving from A to B and then back to A. Sometimes a song had a slow start and I would let it play in the background on low volume till it caught speed and then turn it in.

I took care not to let a song play for too long – most songs were played to about two and half minutes each, some even less. This ensured that before people loose their interest in the song, there was a new tune available. This was very important; while the dance party was going on, I could see the benefits of this. People were on the floor almost all the time, pausing only on the slow tunes or on the lounge track I had inserted which nobody had heard before! On every song change there would be a roar of welcome and the tempo would just rise.

The final 50 minute track was a mix of about 25 songs. I did make goof ups in experimenting with the mixing tools, but people did not mind it. I did not go into the DJ techniques of matching the beats per minute of the songs etc, but was extremely happy with the job I did looking at the way people enjoyed the evening. I can now imagine how hard it is for a professional DJ to keep the audience on the floor!

More about this special full day party in the next few days. It was certainly an extremely engaging and entertaining day. Definitely a memorable day of life for everybody who participated!