sup guys i was wondering how you lot started getting booked to play at shows and how your first show got booked/how it went. im fairly new to production but iv been djing for a while and have no idea how to start getting mixes out there and getting asked to play at venues. also would be really interesting to hear some stories of what happened at your first shows, anything go horribly wrong, were you shitting urself? peace
ok so this is my point of view - you wont get asked to play at venues, you've got to ask. The biggest thing iv'e learnt over the years is that you get out what you put in - seems pretty obvious and logical but you dont realise at first how much you have to keep circulating your mixes/bugging promoters/getting people to pass on mixes etc. You have to think that if your trying to get a set at a well known/established night theyve already got their residents playing on top of the booked artists which doesn't leave much room for the 'unknown' DJ's for that night, and the popularity of the night will clearly effect the amount of other DJs asking to play sets.
This has lead to my conclusion that if you dont bring anything special to the table and you dont have much of an edge over your average DJ, you have to know the promoter a bit or at least have spoke to them. They're much more likely to book you if you've been to one of their nights and chatted to them a bit, just common sense really, if they just get a message from you on FB it doesnt look like your going much out of your way to get the slot your after. End of the day like most things, its who you know - im not saying completely but from experience it helps
alot.
To conclude get down to the nights and get to know the people running it, keep sending round your mixes and try getting as much exposure as you can (putting up mixes/tunes on soundcloud and sending it round to various groups etc.)
I can remember one of my first sets at a squat, terrible set up - all the equipment (x2 turntables, x2 CDJ's and the mixer) were in their own seperate flight cases, I was playing only on vinyl and of course they were on the outside of the set up, so you had the mixer in the middle, two CDJs either side then the turntables. As you could imagine i was literally running too and from both decks because they were so far apart lol and then half way through (i dont know how) some button got pressed on the mixer and i wasn't getting any levels out of one of the turntable and just couldn't figure out what was up with it, with no sound engineer i just had to call it a day and let the guy after me go on early as he was on CDJs.
Many scary stories like that but its all a learning curve - once you have something like that you know what to expect next time and how to solve it! end of the day most people in the club are so fucked they hardly notice when something goes wrong lol
