The quote below sums it up well. Another thing to keep in mind when reaching out to a label is honesty. For example, you might have had interest from Label X for a certain song. Time passed by, and I had a few gigs here and there, but they were mostly local gigs for youth events and the odd house party.
Anyway, a manager at a well-known club in the city closest to me was looking for new DJs. People recommended me to him, and I reached out to him directly. So I told all my friends. I boasted about it. Was it my fault? The point is that I was being dishonest, and it affected my reputation. I had bragged about an achievement before it had actually happened. Maybe a label has reached out to you, or a promoter wants to book you as a support act.
How should you deal with them? They say they can get your music to thousands of listeners and help you build your audience. Sure, they might feel a little uncomfortable being pressed for answers, but your integrity and career is more important than their brief moment of unease.
You probably started producing because you thought it would be fun or interesting, and it was. You spent every waking hour in your DAW, trying to figure out why things worked the way they did. Eventually, you encounter resistance. You push past it, but it keeps coming back.
If you want to be a successful artist, you need one as well. They focus exclusively on the end goal reach fame, get a lot of money, etc. For the person who is driven by the above goals, the process will become torture. Very few people are content with that happening. For the first year or two, he enjoys it. He has a disposable income, the work is relatively exciting, and people are congratulating him. Years down the track, he realizes that he never sees his family.
He realizes his whole life has revolved around work that is a necessity rather than a passion. You end up treating your craft as a means to an end.
Most music related whys will implicitly state that a career is essential or ideal. For example, if your why is:. It lets you spend the majority of your time making music. But you can get even more specific. In fact, the more specific your why is, the more powerful an effect it has, or the more motivating it can be.
I also make music so that I can build a career out of it and eventually support my family through it. Your why is similar to a vision statement. It may change over time also, as your perspective and life circumstances change. The more music I make, the more I learn, and the more I can teach as a result. However, my why statement does mean I should make music as much as possible so that I can teach more effectively. Teaching music production can bring in a living, and thus I can make more music than I would if I was working elsewhere.
Before moving on, spend some time and come up with your why. Write it down on a piece of paper, turn it into a wallpaper, do whatever you want with it, but make sure you remember it. Remember why you got into this in the first place, and why giving up is a bad idea.
In addition to a why , we need a set of specific goals with deadlines. While the number of goals you set is entirely up to you, most people make the mistake of setting too many goals and not achieving any. I like to set 3 goals, one with a 3-month deadline, the other with a 6-month deadline, and the last one with a month deadline. Stop reading and write down some goals now. Just write them down and make a commitment. Physically writing the same goals down every day causes them to stay at the forefront of your mind.
Note: I recommend using a spiral bound notebook or something similar to write your goals in. Keep it dedicated to your goals and nothing else. But in order to make dreams come into reality, it takes an awful lot of determination, dedication, self-discipline, and effort. Drive is fundamentally important. A constant drive.
A drive that forces you to work harder and faster, to not only fit more into the day, but also to be doing the right things that well help you make it. Drive alone is not enough. You must be dedicated to your craft. That means spending 2 hours making music instead of watching Netflix. This is what DJs are doing when you see them listening in their headphones and nudging the platter. The platter is the circular disk in the center of the deck head here to see our recommended decks.
However, matching the speed of songs to one another is only step one in answering what do DJs do. Related: How long does it take to be good at DJing? As mentioned above, you can just turn the volume up and down on the tracks to switch them over. However, to make a mix as seamless as possible, a DJ has a lot of finer control over different elements of their music.
And this is why the mixers and the controllers i. These control everything from effects, to being able to control the volume on certain parts of the track. It is being able to manipulate parts of the track like this, that allows DJs to seamlessly mix from one track to the other so that, to the crowd, it sounds like a never-ending stream of music.
Often the buttons on the equipment control FX. This allows a DJ to add extra elements and layers to their mixing and their sets. They can apply things such as echo, which will repeat a certain sound, or in some cases, they will play sound samples. For example, one DJ, Tim Westwood, used to have sound effects of gunshots or glass breaking cued up on his mixer. He would then play them repeatedly in order to cover up the switch from one track to the other.
The best DJs use FX sparingly to enhance their sets, as opposed to using them to cover up for a lack of skills. The amount of techniques and methods a DJ can use when mixing their tracks together is almost endless. Some will work non-stop to loop sections or mix three or four tracks together to create entirely new tunes. While other DJs will do fairly simple mixing techniques and rely on playing exceptional music that their audience just loves.
The best DJs are able to do this and adjust the direction and flow of their sets to make sure the crowd has the best possible time. Often musicians i.
However, all the same musical rules apply so, the better a DJ knows music and understands its theory then the better overall DJ they will be. Zedd, for example, is a classically trained musician who started learning his first instrument at the age of four. Beardyman beatboxes, generates and captures most of his samples in realtime.
For other shows artists will actually code music in realtime, typing commands into special programs and generating musical tones and effects in that way. Other artists will use modular software programs like Max MSP with Ableton Live to manipulate audio feeds from contact microphones or other sonic sources. This is very common in sound installations requiring some kind of participation or interaction from the audience.
Sound9 at Roskilde. Most live electronic acts will be artists who are primarily producers playing back compositions of their own creation, either in whole pieces or broken down into loops of key parts like bass lines, melody lines and drum tracks. We can then reorder and remix the tracks in real time and run individual parts or whole sections through effects like delay and reverb to create a build up or break down and other dance floor shenanigans.
To me it's more satisfactory when there are physical knobs and buttons and keys, and that can be achieved by having real outboard synths and effects units with their own knobs -- or by having MIDI controllers hooked up to the computer.
This often requires virtuoso expertise from the musicians concerned, because they are playing parts that were originally created for machines.
The Vancouver band Holy Fuck are a four-piece consisting of a drummer, a bassist, and two musicians who work the electronics. The drummer plays real acoustic drums. The bassist plays a real electric bass. They supply a genuine live feel to the music. The other two work at trestle tables filled with circuit-bent "toy" keyboards, guitar effects and so on. They work with "loops" in the sense that they use heavily distorted preset patterns from the keyboards, but they also play those toy keyboards, or simply coax drones out of them.
They also sing or hum into microphones, again heavily effected. Their time is spent starting and stopping patterns, playing keyboards, and adjusting effects. They make a tremendous sound, and it's unusually entertaining to watch, for an "electronic" act, since the rhythm section is live, and all four use eye contact and gestures to synchronise each other.
The well known techno act Orbital consists of two men, working with sequenced synths, drum machines and effects.
I'm going to talk about their "classic period" live act, because that's what I've observed most closely. I know since then they've moved on to using Cubase, although that may not make much difference. Orbital worked with hardware MIDI sequencers, driving hardware synths. I think they had a sequencer each, synchronised, so they could each be triggering loops or transitions.
A performance involved both of them constantly hitting buttons or twiddling knobs, to prepare the next pattern, trigger it, tweak the sound of a synth or an effect, and so on.
I don't agree with the answer by KeitS: just because some visible producers perform their music live by just DJing, that does not mean you should be doing the same. First of all, people like Tiesto have built up a reputation based on their productions, and can afford to just do a DJ set, or perhaps not do anything at all live, but just pretend they are doing something put your hands in the air and pretend you are DJing.
If you are not a major act yet, in my opinion you should seek venues where you can create a real live performance and perform your music live, just like traditional musicians with guitars and drum kits do.
And the reason some acts that are electronic like Milk Inc play with guitars on stage, is because they cannot figure out how to handle their tech setup live, and are afraid that it might break. If you know your gear and are a bit technical, you don't need guitars to do a live gig. Look at people like Orbital or Aphex Twin who play live shows. They are all electronic acts and perform their music, they don't DJ.
Can you imagine a rock band producing their music in the studio and then just DJing live? How lame would that be? Don't let people tell you that you should DJ live and that that is the norm and how it should be.
Have the balls to put down a real performance. If you want to show the audience what you're doing and you want to put down a presence, work with visual elements in your show. You can either use lighting, video, or just make sure that you as a performer are the show element see Deadmau5. If you want to bring live arrangements of music that include many instruments and you can't play them all, because you're a one man show, then go find someone to perform with you who is also electronic and can join your band, or use things like sequencers and controllers, to "conduct" rather than "play" the different parts of your performance.
One solution for that is by using Ableton Live, combined with a high-level live performance tool like AudioCubes by Percussa. AudioCubes also have a visual aspect, besides allowing you to control your effects and sounds, and can generate patterns for you while you play live like an arpeggiator.
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