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First Dj gig on the 22nd of December: Gig review blogpost

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After all the preparations I did in advance I headed out the door of my house with confidence that everything would be alright. My dad drove me to the venue with the car because we to take all the dj controller up and then continue on to do soundcheck. Setting everything up went quite smoothly until I hooked up my DJ controller to the mixing desk which I had totally forgotten was analog instead of digital. Because of that, my computer didn't recognize it as soundcard so I had to get my interface from home to be able to hook up the controller to the interface and then the interface to the mixing desk. Fortunately, a friend of mine who was playing in the band had a car so he drove me back to my place to grab the interface. We lost about 30 minutes in the process and once I was back it took us another 12-15 minutes to finally get sound out of the PA. It was 18:40 by then and we were running very low on time and for some reason my headphones weren't working because I had routed the input wrong in my DJ software which I wasn't aware of at the time so I panicked a bit and tried everything to fix it but I was getting more and more nervous which made me not think logically and clearly anymore and that would have been my downfall if it wasn't for my friend who told me to shut up, stop panicking and take a moment to breathe, think and figure out what the problem was. So I followed his instructions and tried to think of the signal flow of the gear, if I had made a mistake in plugging something into the wrong input, but that wasn't the problem so I checked if I had selected the right soundcard which I had and lastly I checked for the in and output configuration in my DJ software and finally found the problem. I had selected the PA-system for my monitoring device instead of my headphones so I changed the configuration and it worked.

light equipment, which my friend who had rented and stored at my place. We got there at approximately 17:10 so we had about two hours to set all the gear for the band (instruments, amps, mics, etc.), the PA-system, the lights and my
I was incredibly relieved and thanked my friend for making me think straight again despite the pressure.
We then did a quick soundcheck with the band and started the event 19:05 pretty much on time. Everything went smoothly from then on and the kids were super motivated and danced a lot.
Later at 21:30 the older kids arrived and the venue was packed, I estimate that there were over 300 people there at one point. Unfortunately, the newcomers weren't that motivated to dance and sing so most of them just stood around talking. I had a lot of "classics" (those sing-a-long songs that everyone knows and loves) which I had planned to play but since the people weren't really motivated it would've been a waste to play them at that time so I had to kind of improvise and try to reorganize myself. Fortunately, the band started playing at 22:30 and the crowd loved it, I managed to regain my confidence and after that the rest of the gig was great.
It ended at about 23:45, unfortunately, we weren't allowed to go longer due to noise regulations after 23:30.
After the gig, we had to get the gear together and store everything which took about an hour so I went out of the venue at almost 1 am and was very exhausted but happy with how successful it was.
Critique:
I was very close to not being able to get any sound out of my headphones which would have been a disaster because I couldn't have DJ'd properly then.
This could have been avoided by looking through the i/o options of myDJj software so I would have been able to spot the problem quicker.
We were also running very short on time which made the situation stressful and it's hard to think clearly in a stressful situation especially if something goes wrong. Next time we will try to arrange with the venue to be there earlier in order to allow for a bigger time buffer in case we need it.

What I gained from this experience:
- confidence to perform in front of a big crowd
- experience in setting up all the gear and lights at a venue which does not have a preexisting PA-system nor lights.
- communicating with the band and with staff
- staying calm despite a serious problem and solving the issue with a clear head
- managing expectations

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