Jester_Fu

Fucking spammers in this thread - 2 in the last day bumping it. Thread locked... spammers be gone.

Inspiration is something you can't buy and no amount of gear will make you inspired. That's the way it seems to work, i'm afraid. There's a thread on here somewhere about finding inspiration and different things people do.

I'm not familiar with Virtual DJ but DJ'ing doesn't require you to have a great deal of 'engineering' knowledge... and if you already have music to mix, then it doesn;t require loops and samples. These might spice up your set later... but not necessary.

My tips for the beginner DJ are pretty simple:

1. Play music you love. If you can't get inspired by the music you like to listen too... you may have an issue.

2. Think about set structure more than the technicalities of making a mix. Most modern software makes the mix pretty simple, but the art of DJ'ing has always been picking the right music. You need to blend the right tracks together. Start by going through your music collectionand maybe grouping like genre's or similar 'moods'. You may even want to sort things by BPM, like in them olden skoole days when i use to muck around on the wheels of steel... which have now become the binary wheels of virtual stuffyness.

3. Practice. You get better with practice. You'll dig out something that really grabs you and make a great mix of tracks and that'll push you to keep going.

4. Listen to more music. Even other DJ's mixes. You may not want to imitate for ever, but it's not a bad place to start to listen to some DJ's who play music you like and try and 'train spot' what they're doing in the mix and what track's they're playing.

When i got pushed into DJ'ing by friends it was because i already had a big collectoin of records (yes, records!) of music i loved... they just thought it was time i tried to string it together. Already loving the music you play and enjoying listening to it certainly provides incentive to keep playing around! Most of us have 'real jobs' now showing we were never great at marketing or great at getting proper gigs... but we all still love to have a mix and still love the music. Making music - production - i think kind of floods your brain, though. It's very hard to get away from it IMO, no matter how long you;ve done it or how little success you have commercially.

There's a Justine Beiber? Is she hot?? I'd totally do the boy Beiber if he had boobs... so i guess a girl Beiber would be just awesage.

Oh, and i recind my previous offer to participate in clinical/scientific testing if a requirement is to remix or listen to a Beiber album. Even for 5 seconds. Unless the girl Beiber is given me gobies... in which case i'll stay for the required 15 seconds.

Funny story - i'm on my 3rd MacBook Pro now. Guess that means i'm not going back either... and i work in an industry where ALL of the software is Windows based. The Mac run's the VM's i use so much more easily than Windows (ironic running windows on Mac better than it runs on a PC!) and the power management on the laptop is still a good 5 years ahead of the PC crowd.

Shit, my 3YO MBP still gets 2.5 hours from the original battery after being thrown to the ground from 3m's and generally abused. The case is so badly warped and dinted you'd think a bus ran over it. The 18 month old one i smashed last week after letting it roll off another machine from 2m's up for the 3rd time still gets 3.5hrs fro mthe battry running a Windows VM on top of the base mac image doing wireless programming. Yeah, also got dropped on the road 5 or 6 times as i kept using the stuffed backpack when the zipper didn't work. Then i managed to fix the fracker after work paid for the new unit !DOH! Would have prefered to wait for the next gen...

So, yeah. I guess i'm a convert and waiting for my skivvy. Not sure i could go back to PC now - the way the touchpad works so damn well for site commissioning where i don't have the 'luxury' of a desk or chair... hence droping the laptop all the time as you type while balancing on knee/arm/fence/motor/wandering goat.

I've found the more you drink and smoke, the better everything sounds. So, there must be some sort of ear fatigue relief in drinking and weed. I'm happy to participate in a clinic or scientific test of this... but would prefer not to be on the palcebo team, if that's OK. I don't care what you think, i'll know the difference.