Organising playlists by energy levels, vibe, and flow<\/p>\n
It would be interesting to know how you prepare your DJ sets, how you decide which track will be mixed well with the previous one, how on stage you choose such tracks that were not included in your planned tracklist, etc.<\/p>\n
Vlad Zabolotsky<\/p>\n<\/div>
How to organize your music collection in order to quickly pick the right track at the right moment out of tons of material?<\/p>\n
Dj Nerva<\/p>\n<\/div>
Preparing for the performance includes a lot of things: negotiating with the promoter, visiting the venue (when possible), agreeing on a technical and domestic rider, researching the lineup and communicating with other artists, thinking through and launching an advertising campaign, recording a video invitation or a promo mix, working on social media and much more. Maybe someday I’ll tell you about it, but today is all about the “creative” part, the music.<\/p>\n
I don’t think of DJ as a creative profession, hence this word is quoted. I’ll write my thoughts on this later<\/p>\n
Vlad, to answer the question of how I decide which track will be mixed well with the previous one, I have to explain the structure of my DJ collection first. A similar question was sent by Dj Nerva, so I will combine them into one.<\/p>\n
DJs play on various media, apps, and gear: laptops, disks, flash drives, vinyl, smartphones; on Pioneers, in Ableton, Traktor, Serato, and many more options. Speaking of myself, I use three things: Recordbox, USB sticks, and Pioneer media players.<\/p>\n
On audio formats support <\/a><\/p>\n Here is how it works. First, I add music to Rekordbox on my laptop. Then I carefully tag the tracks so that they are automatically distributed among the ‘intelligent’ playlists, and sync these playlists to the USB sticks. Then in the DJ booth, I connect my USB sticks to the Pioneer players, and inside I see all the playlists exactly as I structured them on my laptop back home. And this is the key moment because thanks to these playlists I can easily find that very track I want to play next<\/i> within a few seconds.<\/p>\n Now I’ll tell you about the key playlists that make up the structure of my collection.<\/p>\n First of all, after adding tracks to Recordbox, I assign them the energy level. This is the main criterion. The most important thing here is that the level of energy is how I feel the tracks and not a formal thing like the tempo or anything like that.<\/p>\n How DJs usually do<\/b><\/p>\n Here I want to make a little detour and tell how DJs usually do. Most DJs pre-select the required amount of tracks in advance and arrange them in the order in which they plan to play. So that is complete predestination. Of course, such pre-planned sets can sound great at home, but they might be completely inappropriate on the dancefloor.<\/p>\n It may seem that only newcomer DJs do this, but no: even those who have been performing for more than a decade are doing this, so it’s really common. Some DJs even record the whole mixes in advance and during the performance they basically fake, but this is just so wrong so I won’t even discuss it.<\/p>\n More proficient DJs don’t prepare sets in advance in such a way but select tracks right during the set looking at the crowd in front of them. Most often, they use tempo<\/i> as a plain simple criterion for choosing the next track.<\/p>\n So it turns out about the following. Let’s assume the following track is playing on the dancefloor:<\/p>\n A DJ thinks: “Aha, 122 BPM. The dancefloor is going on well, everything is fine, let’s not slow down the pace.” He is looking for the next track in his digital library of hundreds of tracks, scrolling and scrolling that rotary knob, and he finds this — a track in the same key and even two BPM faster<\/i>:<\/p>\n Obviously, the energy on the dancefloor went down; people going out. Lowering the energy during a set down is fine if you know why you are doing this. But if the DJ from the example above wanted to keep the driving vibe, then this is a failure.<\/p>\n Or here’s the opposite example. Suppose a DJ is playing such melodic progressive:<\/p>\n He does not want to speed up the tempo, so he finds the track in the same key and even one BPM lower<\/i>, and in addition also from the same record label:<\/p>\n Do you get it?<\/p>\n It is clear that the energy is partially correlated with the genre, and as a result — with the tempo. However the relationship of energy level and the tempo is not always that obvious, and it is not always predictably linear.<\/p>\n This is why relying simply on the tempo of the tracks and thus mechanically selecting the next track for mixing is clearly not worth it, and hence I organise my tracks by the energy levels instead.<\/p>\n<\/div> So, now going back to the energy levels I use in my Rekordbox. In total, I make five levels:<\/p>\nEnergy levels<\/h2>\n