"Are you the DJ?"

Apr 6

(originally posted April 6, 2013)

The question every live sound engineer hates to hear. There is even a shirt that answers the question for you.

Until only recently I would be just as offended as my engineer friends when I get that question, but I have ventured into (dare I say) DJing. Not that I haven't thought about it before. I did buy a pair of used turntables after the first year I worked at Winter Music Conference in '07. I sold them about a month later on craigslist - I know I'm not the one who did that after going to WMC, it affects you. Anyway, I was thinking the way I process information and can quickly discern technical issues while engineering just translated into DJing - I was wrong. Thinking about bpm, music genres and beatmatching is totally different than engineering. Being quick helps but you have to know what to play; I personally listen to Otis Redding, Led Zeppelin, Alicia Keys and Muse in a single playlist but that wouldn't work work well when trying to entertain a crowd. But when a friend asked me to help with an event I wanted to support. So “Sum Poetry Drama” got an engineer/dj for their event. One day I will remove the / and just refer to myself as DJ, but not yet ; )

I had to tune up my laptop since it wasn't purchased with the intentions of audio, just business purposes and web surfing, (I have to talk to Mr. Moore about an upgrade) I used Mixxx which for a free software works pretty well. I also used ASIO For All to fix latency issues and a Behringer U-Control UCA200 for I/O. To sum it up, I can't wait to do it again!