DJ'ing Homecoming... Programs, speakers, setup... help?

Uh...

Nothin I give ya is gonna be good news.

My suggestion? Get someone to do it but see if you can learn from them.

Ok that being said Ill give ya advice that I can. The best and probably easiest thing for you to do in as far as source material being that you are starting out is going to be create some premixed CDs. No Gap on the track, just let them roll. ITunes is another option also like you mentioned, however it will probably be easier for you to have your program coming out of the CD player, and crossfade into your computer assuming the next point...

Rent some equipment at the least. If you are doing a homecoming you will want a PA system of some sort, but honestly again you are going back to the, you will probably do better with someone being hired in. Unless you know someone that knows what they are doing at least a little in Pro Audio, or are in a room no bigger than a conference room at the most, you wont get a good sound at of home speakers(Which I believe is what you were referring to?) and considering what is pop music in the US these days, you will at least want a decent sub(More if your school is heavy on the rap hip r&b genres) to pair up your system with. Home systems wont fill an gym which is what my ghetto school did their homecoming in, not even close, really no matter how many you have unless you have speakers and home subs spread every 5 feet. Not to mention you will want the ability to crossfade between sources for requests and the like which will require a basic soundboard or some decent software. I dont DJ anymore and when I did it wasnt off the HD no matter how much I wanted to I couldnt afford it, so I cant reccomend any good software for that unfortunantly. Sorry.

So yea really if you can get someone that is decent and has their own system to use for 300, do it. If your school wants to do a homecoming, they should be selling tickets and should have SOME money for t his, if they dont there is something very wrong with your school, sorry. You should not be doing this out of your pocket no matter what.

Seablade

PS Renting a system is an option ONLY if you know how to wire a PRO PA system(No Offense intended if I am wrong, but somehow I didnt get the impression you knew how), if you dont you could do some real damage to the equipment, even if it seems to be working at first. When you overdrive an amp by driving the impedance to low by wiring to amny things in parrallel and halfway through your homecoming smoke starts rising from it despite working fine for an hour or two... that is a bad thing.

Well heres my $.02. I have dj a few formals for my friends frats and sororities. Know this was done while i was in college so it may not help you much but who knows. WHen i did it, we used the schools speakers and amps and mixing board (a very basic one). I had a friend hook it all up, i ended up using two laptops mine and a friends for all the music and i was pretty easy i have to say.(i have no djing experince) I dont know your school and what type of equipment they have but if they have they could set it up for you im sure. Also on a side note one of the places that i djed had wireless internet, so i would dl songs that people whould request if i didnt have it i always had a blast doing it and they kept the drinks coming.

No prob, sorry I cant give you better advice. I will say one thing though, beware running many speakers off of one amp, I am not to familiar with Home Amps, but I KNOW with PA Amps this can be a VERY bad thing depending on how you wire them(Serial vs Parrallel vs a combination of the two) and you can fry amps doing that. Just something to keep in the back of yourmind, if you want I can go into more deatil on that though, just post back up, I dont think I have seen that covered here so it might not be a bad idea for me to have an excuse to post something like that up. Good luck though.

Seablade

PS Definitly if you havent already take the other person's advice and look into seeing if your school has a system, possibly the band or theater department if you have one?

Also if you are going to be premixing CDs that you just want to play, and not worrying about requests, dont forget to look around for small time engineers(Not just DJs) for hire with a system. Many starters do both though I believe to bring in the money(Or at least trickle it in) but the engineers would probably be renting them to set up and tear down the system, would still need someone to run it as most probably wouldnt do something like that to much, that might be an option for you, compare prices and see what you get.

Seablade

If I were going to "DJ" and I wanted to use a computerized system, I would get Ableton LIVE, load up all my tracks on a fire wire external hard drive hooked up to a powerbook, and have some sort of audio out device (echo indigo dj).......hook that up to the PA system, whatever that maybe, and go go go. With the comp, you can even sync your light show.

you can do all your mixing in Live (using the mouse), cueing, prelistening,crossfade, etc...if you hook up a controller, you can even play vsts and samples too.

It's a fairly easy program to use. you just drop the clips (songs/tracks) into a pattern grid. you can add effects too and the native effest sound pretty good. You can take requested song too. Just make sure you have the song in your drive, drag and drop it in the sequence.

There are some computer issues you need to familiarize yourself with first, and maybe practice with it before you actually perform. But it's really cool and you can have fun with it.

It would be better with an echo dj, but it is not necesary. If you are not doing any live work, you can actaully preset and crossfade you entire set, with crossfade s and effects, and everythig else, provided your hd is big enoough. Just watch you cpu usuage.

Check out the Live forum. There area bunch of experienced DJs there that can help.

check it out....
http://www.ableton.com/

if you just need to dj, then try to find an older verson like 2 or 3, if you don't need the vst capability.



Regarding PA, my band has a PA system, but if your school does not alread have a house system, maybe you can approach the school and ask them to purchase one. It is really a long term investment that is good, and would cost a whole lot of money.


Other products to check out are from Stanton.

They make a lot of dj stuff and scratch controllers if you ever wanted to get into that.

http://www.stantondj.com/v2/index.asp

Another quite popular prgram for DJ's is NI's Trakto DJ. I had this program but found that Live suited me more due to the fact that I actually play keyboards.
http://www.nativeinstruments.de/index.php?id=djline_us



hope this helps or a least lests you know what is available if you didn't know already!

Rog

Hmm Fachiro I am curious how you would do things like crossfades early and such like that in Live, I think I missed that point and is a little useful to me, or are you referring to programming the crossfade in and making sure the clip played all the way straight through? Otherwise whenI alunch the next clip all that I am aware of is it will try to quantize it and do a clean break?

I started using it for live theater work, pretty decent program but wasnt aware of those features and that could be useful to me.

Seablade

Seablade,



I'm sorry, let me clarify!

You can set up all you tracks as clips. you can arrage them however you want and add effects. etc.

Once everthing is set up, then when you are perfroming your set, you don't have to keep dropping in your tracks. It's all there already.

As for crossfading, I don't believe that function can be automated in the current Live software, but I may be wrong. I have Live 3, but
it currently isn't loaded in my pc. I'll give it a try once I get some time.


If you wanted to automate an entire set of songs, track, or clips, there still is a way. It would require some time to set up, but with Cubase, you can load up all the audio tracks and crossfade them in all in one big track, then save it as just one track and there you are. lol


followup--It looks like you can record crossfades as automation. Just move the slider when recording.

Ahh I see what you are saying, you were referring to automation during recording, I was referring to when using it live, via the clip view.

Would love to eventually see a function that would fade out or crossfade instead of just stop alltogether or quantize switch in there, but then again I think that is why I am starting to look at programming a peice myself for linux since I prefer that anyways for my work

Seablade

I think that was discussed a lot in the "wishlist section" in the Live forum!


I used to used Live and Reason quite a bit, but I like the daw environment of Cubase much more. WE did use live quite a bit last year for some wedding gigs that required some dance tracks. It was fun to use for a live situation, but for composing, I prefer Cubase. You could potentially DJ with Cubase, but it would be much more involved and less convenient. Live really is a great program, especially with all the new features in the latest version. Another place where it can potentially shine is use with tablet pc's.