DJ Mistakes

Many to choose from:
Taking the needle off the wrong record on my first big gig and having a club full of people turn and shout at me.

Forgetting to exit a loop after I had mixed in the track and noticed about 30 seconds later when the track hadn’t really got anywhere.

Forgetting to set the Serato loop "on"

Hitting the wrong Cue button

The 2 pint challenges with OTG…. actually that wasn’t a mistake it was fun

otg wrote:

‘taking the wrong record off the decks’

+1

I’ve never played live yet, so I guess this doesn’t really count. I left the bass and treble killed for almost an entire song :O … …. Actually it sounded pretty awesome when I dropped it back in because it was unexpected.

The worst mistake I have made was after switching to Serato, I generally do quick loading of the decks and sometimes forget which is which. Well you guessed it, I picked up the tone arm on the wrong track and yes, it is VERY noticeable. I have made it a habit to lift the tone arm as I get to the end of the track and THEN select the next track to load.

More of an embarrasing moment but my mate tommo used to make his own mash ups and remixes which i used to play when djing and i think it was a dooms night mash up he did , i heard him play it and asked him for a copy , a few days later he gave me a copy of what i thought was this mash up , so i played it and when the bass cuts out the bloody teletubbies theme came on , he stitched me right up , oh well my fault , should of checked it 1st but i got my own back a few months later when he werent expecting it lol

LoL… Let me just say right now that if you have been a DJ for any amount of time and you don’t have ANY notable mistakes then you weren’t enjoying yourself as much as you possible could… I have three main noteworthy mistakes… I will share the intermediate of the three stories…

Mistakes usually occur when
a) You are having way too much fun
b) The crowd is having way too much fun
c) A series of unfortunate events
d) Any horrible combination of a, b and c

As i have mentioned before… sometimes I like to join the crowd in dancing with them for a few minutes at a time (although you should NEVER have a complete set worked out… on this particular night I had an extended mix of (this was about two years ago) S.O.S, Pon De Replay, songs like that… What I like to call the ‘safety’ songs… every genre has them, where no matter when you play them people will still dance to them…

So this was a good 15min mix… I was out dancing with the crowd and having played this mix over and over I know that there is an Airplane sound effect in it to tell me that its time to head back…

So what happens is, the few lights that were on in the room dimmed but didn’t actually go off and the music sounded blurred (apparently, a few people said they heard a weird airplane type sound but really couldn’t make it out when the lights dimmed… didn’t find that out till later though)… Then everything went right back to normal… (music was still playing, all the speakers sounded fine… green light). BUT to make the situation worse, I was slowly being drawn into the middle of the dance floor by a very beautiful young lady who later turned into my girlfriend for a few months (so much for not mixing work and pleasure right). So dancing with her… and I start to worry as I never heard the Airplane sound effect… not 5 seconds after thinking this, the music cuts out (the mix had a drop out ending)… So here I am, trying to squirm through 150 drunk people (and you can tell the really drunk ones as they are thinking I was about to do something INCREDIBLE). I finally get to the table and slide the crossfader over to get the music started up again (at this time I am standing on the wrong side of the table as all I wanted to do is get something playing)… Pu-pu-pu-pu-pu-pu… The song i had intended on playing next was Satisfaction (remember this one) by Benny Benassi… and I loop into that song… Pu-pu-pu-pu-pu…

Now… I do not know why I decided to do this… But I somehow figured that the quickest way to get back to the other side of the table was to go UNDER IT (retarded I know… but its a very true story)… So I dive under the table (which was one of the pretty cheap tables that forms an X type shape to reinforce its stability) CLUNK! Head bashes right into one of these poles and I know people heard the bang as I heard some shout "Are you okay?!"

I reemerge on the other side a little dazed but I was finally able to get the song going… which I then proceeded to switch to the next song on the CD (which I can not remember what it was… but it did get people dancing again… and needless to say, I did not dance with the crowd again that night… although I did dance with Jasmine (the girl who dragged me to the middle) behind the DJ table a few more times…

lol

Ofcourse i’ve done the "standards", ejecting the wrong cd and lifting the tonearm of the wrong record, kick the power cable out of it’s socket and emptying a floor by playing the worst song I could find in my collection (well, to defend that last one, it was time to go home)

But I think the most stupid thing I’ve tried was to fix a speaker on the fly. I was thinking mabye the speaker connectors were loose, so i pulled them out of the speaker.
But PA systems realy do deliver more power to their speakers than an avarage home compact system…

So I managed to elecrocute myself on the speaker wires, and had to finish the set with a banging headace…

listening to a few drunks

I blagged a gig and i was headlining this quite well known venue in North London, had all my stuff set up and got playing, people were loving my first track…then everything died, realised I had overloaded the power supply and it took 10 mins of silence to get everything back up and running

I made up for it with some neckling noisia tunes and a sick light show though

the frustrating mistake i`ve recently made was going out from the club a couple minutes before dj`ing. I came back and played the song that dj I played with had just played.

or

Scratching too much and too loud while being too drunk to scratch

ahhhhh… last Friday night whilst playing i was thinking how long its been since i last ejected the cd that was playing (i was proud of the fact that i must have been at least 4 years!)… Last Saturday night i ejected the cd that was playing!! =(

leaned on the off switch and the live record came to a VERY slow embarrassing stop…lol

I was trying to scratch, but didn’t realise how high the music was on the turntable I was going to scratch on, before I got started. Luckily everybody is still hearing. That was embarassing.

I’ve committed a lot of the egregiousness posted so far, but there’s at least one more I’m guilty of. I have on more than one occasion picked up some digital clips of tracks the hour before a set and decided to throw in a new track I was really excited about, only to find out that it a) ends earlier than the track length would indicate or b) has some dance-floor-killing anomaly in the middle of it that completely kills the mood. Taking another DJ’s word for it that a particular song would be right is also a dangerous game. Back in ’06 I played House of Jealous Lovers in a packed bar of tourists who promptly wet themselves and headed out.

[color color=#004080:31zxj0ky]i’m guilty of just a few of the ones mentioned, not recently, but when i was still fresh meat

worst thing that ever happened was burning a disc right before a party set and trying a new track.
turned out the download had messed up and the track had a ton of empty data half way through the song, its a killer. [/color:31zxj0ky]