14 Do’s and Don’ts — DJing for Blues and Swing dancers Part 2

I have made the mistakes so you don’t have to. This time we will deal with common mistakes and some Do’s and Don’ts that relate to both new DJs and more experienced ones. They will draw on my experience as a DJ with mistakes I have made as well as things I have observed as a dancer and organizer. Most of these will concern playing local parties but they are also applicable to playing festivals.

One important thing to remember is that these are not laws or rules. They are barely even guidelines. DJing is an art and not a science and everyone needs to find a way that works for them. The following Do’s and Don’ts are from my playbook and are things I have found work well for me or things I see many DJs doing wrong. Or at least I think they are wrong.

If you want to start from the beginning, Part 1 — Motivation can be found here.

Photo: Dan Erez https://www.facebook.com/danerezphoto

1. Don’t try to be smart

I was excited to play my first gig. I was going to be different. I had DJ’d other genres before. I was going to play different music, not the normal set with the same old songs that everyone played. It was a disaster. Unfortunately my first ever swing set is still available online. It is awful. Not only is there no flow, a lot of songs were bad for dancing and perhaps not even swing.

So what do I mean by not being smart? Learn how to play the classics before you try to innovate. Learn the 200 most common songs for Lindy Hop or Blues and play those. Use them to learn how to create flow, read the floor, to learn what works. Learn your basic Basie, Ellington, Chick Webb, Benny Goodman and the like before you start experimenting. Learn your Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Koko Taylor, Champion Jack Dupree, and Alberta Hunter before you… Actually, in blues it’s a bit different. Learn what blues is before you start DJing.

One of the most common mistakes new DJs make is that that they try to go too far too fast. The basic 200 songs is a great starting point to learn the craft.

2. Don’t be boring

One of the most common mistakes DJs make after having gotten into it is that they keep playing the same 1–200 “best of Lindy Hop/Blues” songs. Don’t be that way. Once you have started learning the craft you need to develop a personality. Do your research and find music that you love. Develop your own style and taste. Different DJs have different style and that is as it should be. If you don’t have a personality there is no reason to hire you above someone else.

On top of that, it is really boring to dance to the same songs over and over and over and over and over and over. You need to strike a balance between new and interesting, and safe and familiar. Perhaps start with looking for different versions of commonly played songs, it’s a fairly safe way to start broadening yourself. Don’t play an entire set of material unfamiliar to the dancers but equally well don’t stick to the overplayed standards.

That being said, make sure your style actually suits the scene you play for which conveniently leads us into the next topic.

3. It’s not about you

Great, so you have started developing your own style and taste. Don’t go too far. As a DJ you will most likely end up listening to way more music than the rest of the people in your scene. This can have some pretty odd side effects.

I had periods where I was really in to rural “man and guitar” blues or uptempo funky blues. I started putting it more and more into my sets. It did not go down well because my tastes had drifted too far from the taste of my scene. It is ok to try to educate your scene, actually I think you might have a duty to do so and will probably write something about that later. It is however very important to understand that you are there to make people dance.

People come to the party to dance whether you are playing or not. They are not coming specifically to hear you chose songs. This means that your main job is to keep them dancing. Don’t play music for yourself or a few friends. Play music that you think will make the floor hop.

4. It’s about you

“But wait, you just said it’s not about me and now you are saying it is about me, that doesn’t make sense!” I know, deal with it.

As I said, develop your own style. It is important. Be yourself. You have no duty to play music you don’t like. If your scene likes a particular song but you don’t then don’t play it. I am sure you can find other songs that you both will enjoy. If the music you want to play doesn’t please the dancers at all, then perhaps you should reconsider DJing for dancers.

As I wrote in the first post about motivation, you have to have find what you enjoy in DJing. You are not paid enough not to have fun.

5. Don’t force it

Sometimes I come to a gig super excited to play a new song or four that I have discovered since my last gig. Or perhaps it is a new favourite of mine and I really want to hear it on the big system. If it suits the flow of your set and what the floor seems to be responding to you are in luck and there is no problem.

If it doesn’t you have two options. Either you shoehorn it in and play it anyway or you skip playing it.

I have done both and here is what I can tell you. If you skip playing it you will go home after the gig and go “Damn, I really wanted to play Johnson Rock by Trummy Young tonight! Oh well I guess I can try to do it next time.”

If you do shoehorn it in there are three options.

1. It just works and you had misjudged the situation. It wasn’t shoehorned it was a good fit, congratulations. Now think about why it worked despite you thinking it wouldn’t.
2. It breaks the flow of the set and you are able to recover. You play it, it jars the ears and soul a bit. Fewer people are on the floor than before. However you recover with the next song by playing a crowd-pleaser and you find your flow again. Now you have to go home and wonder why you decided to play it despite knowing it didn’t fit. Instead of having an excellent set that you are really happy with, you have a stain marring it.
3. It breaks the flow of the set and you are unable to recover. Sometimes you mess up and you just can’t get back into the flow. Perhaps the rest of your set is decent but you are still bothered by that song that didn’t work. You might even start disliking the song or being afraid of playing it. Worst case you played the song so wrong that your scene starts thinking your great song is a bad song.

You have very little to lose from not playing a song you want to play but you can ruin a song or your night by playing it in the wrong spot. Don’t force it if it doesn’t fit.

6. Know who you are playing for

Different scenes like different types of music. If it is your local scene you should have a good idea what the scene generally likes. If you are playing in a new scene ask the organizers what kind of music their dancers are usually into. This will help you adapt your set to the local tastes and make sure both you and the dancers have a great time.

When playing for my local scene there are still things I like to take into account. Before a gig I always write the organizer to ask what the lowest level of class they had that week was. Did they focus on Lindy or Charleston? Did they learn a specific idiom dance? How long have they been dancing?

This information helps me decide how to start my set. I generally try to devote at least the first 30–60 min of my sets to the most inexperienced dancers. This is something to keep in mind if you are playing the opening set of an evening or if you are the sole DJ.

7. Don’t ask if a song is “dancable”

When you are sitting at home sorting or researching music, don’t say “oh I like this song, is it danceable?” I have a personal hatred for the term “danceable”. Any song can be danced to, question is what you dance to it and if you want to dance to it.

A song I want to dance to is the lowest grade of song I will play. I generally prefer playing songs that force me to dance. If I hear a song that just makes me want to jump up and do swing outs or that has me dreaming of slow dragging across the floor I know it is a song I want to DJ.

I don’t care if it is your favourite song to listen to and you deem it dancable. If it doesn’t make you want to get up and dance, why would anyone else want to?

8. Don’t be “samey”

Samey, another one of those made up terms. What does it mean? It simply means that everything sounds or feels the same. It can be tempo, style instrumentation, vocal styles or many more things. If you want an example of a samey playlist, here is one that is samey on purpose.

Now we need to differentiate between Swing and Blues.

Blues

There is no excuse for being samey. Blues is a rich family of different music styles. Get to know them. Play them. You have to work hard to be samey. Actually, even if you play a theme set centred around one style of blues you can still avoid being samey. Mix up the tempo and feel. 60s Chicago style blues can be fast, slow, shuffle, latin, straight, sad, happy, angry. Mix it up but make sure you maintain good flow [subject of later post].

Swing

If you play a set for Lindy Hop you have more constraints. You are only DJing for one dance and you need to make sure all your music fits that dance. However, within that dance you have a wide variety of music. You have small combo v. big band, you have instrumental v. vocal, you have male vocal v. female vocal, you have forward driving rhythms and you have laid back rhythms. And that’s not to mention tempo and energy. Mix it up, you are not a band, you can have different styles in your set. But remember that you need to maintain flow.

Just one line about flow maybe. Flow is the sense that you are telling a cohesive story. That there is some reason that you are playing one song after another. You might not always be able to articulate what that reason is, but you have to feel it is right. There are actual reasons why somethings flow but I will get into that later, and some of them I lack the musical knowledge to explain or even understand.

9. Don’t dance while you DJ

There are many reasons why you shouldn’t dance while you DJ.

• You are there to do a job and it is unprofessional to leave your duty to go dance.
• As discussed in the article about motivation, you take yourself out of the zone in DJing which switches your focus and make you enjoy DJing less.
• You necessarily have less time to spend watching and reading the floor and adapting your music to it which makes you a less good DJ.
• You break the energy flow between the floor and the DJ which I think is what makes DJing fun, and also what makes a good set. DJing is about the connection you create between the DJ and the floor through the music and the interplay between the three. When you go dancing you move your focus to your partner or yourself and you are no longer with the floor.

Quite a few people wrote me after I mentioned this in the first article. Yes, there are exceptions. My standard local gig is 23:00–02:00. I will probably catch a few dances after 01:00 when the floor has cooled down. There are exceptions to the rule. For example if you are co-DJing with someone, if it’s late night, if you need to do it as part of your socializing because you are also the host, if your friend that you haven’t seen for ages wants to dance, or have a plethora of other excuses. So yes it is not a hard rule but learn how to do things right before you learn how to do things wrong.

10. Take your foot off the gas

If you constantly put the pedal to the metal there is no where to go up from there, you can only go down. You need to make sure that your base line energy, and I am talking about energy here not tempo, is not 100%.

I am guilty of this myself. I am a bit of an energy monster when playing swing. I love high energy and I love for the room to be boiling over with energy. However, most dancers can’t take that amount of energy for very long. They get tired. If you are playing a prime time set at a festival and there are more dancers than can fit on the floor at once, that can work. If you are playing a local gig it’s less of a good idea.

By keeping your baseline energy at below max you have the ability to play with the dancers emotions going both up and down, not just in one direction.

11. Put your foot on the gas

It’s rare to find a swing DJ that only plays low energy tunes. However, there are quite a few that stick to the low and mid energy tunes. Perhaps they play a lot of “pretty” songs and stay away from the “punchy” ones

Don’t be that way. Put some energy in there if the situation asks for it. Sure if you are opening the floor or playing late night it might not be the time to try to start a high energy party (though it might), but if you have a full floor, make sure they have a party!

This goes for you Blues and Slow drag DJs as well. It is especially important for you. Just like you can’t go up if you are already at max, you can’t go down much if you are constantly near the bottom. If everything is constantly low energy you will put people to sleep and even if you vary styles, you are likely to become samey very fast. Don’t be afraid to keep your baseline a little higher up, you can always lower the baseline if you need to,

12. Walk the floor

This is a must when you first start your set and I recommend doing it at least a few times during the night. Walk to different parts of the dance floor and check the following:

1. Volume — Is it too quiet or too loud? The volume may be different in different parts of the room and when the crowd ebbs and flows you need to adjust the volume accordingly.
2. EQ — Your EQ will depend on a number of things. The venue design, the speakers, the positioning of the speakers, the amount of people in the room, the type of music you are playing and many other variables. Walk the floor occasionally to make sure that all the dancers have a pleasant aural experience.

13. Know your tech

I will write an entire post about tech and software later but here are the basics:

• Is your external sound card working and do you know if you need a backup?
• Is your computer charged and you have a charger with you?
• Do you know how your DJ software works?
• Learn how to use your EQ [might add that to a later post but you can learn a lot from google and YouTube]
• Do you have all cables that you need? At the very least check with the organizer if you need to bring your own cables. I recommend always having your own cables anyway because sometimes they don’t exist and sometimes they are awful.

14. Know the Venue’s tech

If you play the same venue regularly you will get to know how it works there. You will know what EQ is needed, how their mixer works, how their sound technician works and any other peculiarities. It is important to know this so that you can fix any problem that might come up, and there will be problems. Have the organizer walk you through the system when they have time if you don’t know it.

If you are playing a new venue, ask the person responsible to show you how the sound system works well in advance of your set. This could be the organizer, the sound technician or the DJ coordinator. If there is a sound technician, make friends with them because you will need them. Figure out who is responsible for EQ and volume and make sure they get the amount of signal the need (that your output volume is correct).

Most importantly, learn their speakers. Some systems have way too much bass and some have none. Some are killing you with the high notes and some don’t. Ask the previous DJ or anyone who is in charge. If they don’t know, walk the floor.

These were a few basic do’s and don’ts that I have developed over the years as a DJ, DJ Coordinator, and organizer. I would love to hear what you think about them as well as if there are any you think I might have missed.

12. Walk the floor

This is a must when you first start your set and I recommend doing it at least a few times during the night. Walk to different parts of the dance floor and check the following:

1. Volume — Is it too quiet or too loud? The volume may be different in different parts of the room and when the crowd ebbs and flows you need to adjust the volume accordingly.
2. EQ — Your EQ will depend on a number of things. The venue design, the speakers, the positioning of the speakers, the amount of people in the room, the type of music you are playing and many other variables. Walk the floor occasionally to make sure that all the dancers have a pleasant aural experience.

13. Know your tech

I will write an entire post about tech and software later but here are the basics:

• Is your external sound card working and do you know if you need a backup?
• Is your computer charged and you have a charger with you?
• Do you know how your DJ software works?
• Learn how to use your EQ [might add that to a later post but you can learn a lot from google and YouTube]
• Do you have all cables that you need? At the very least check with the organizer if you need to bring your own cables. I recommend always having your own cables anyway because sometimes they don’t exist and sometimes they are awful.

These were a few basic do’s and don’ts that I have developed over the years as a DJ, DJ Coordinator, and organizer. I would love to hear what you think about them as well as if there are any you think I might have missed.