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First DJ gig on the 22nd of December: Preparation blogpost

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So I'm playing my very first gig ever tomorrow and I'm pretty excited. I will be the DJ at the xmas clubbing of my school and there will be approximately 180-300 people and most of my friends will be there so I feel quite a lot of pressure since if I mess up it will be in front of all my friends instead of a random crowd who I wouldn't have to see again.

I will be playing 4 hours which is a big amount of time but it will be split in half, since the first 2 hours I'll be playing for 10-14-year-olds and my set will mainly consist of mainstream radio dance music. The second half will be the fun part because the older 15-19-year-olds will be there and I'll be able to play a lot of different genres of music.

I started preparing for this gig 10 days in advance, the first thing I did was try to get hold of a dj-controller because I had left mine in England and unfortunately the venue didn't have one. Fortunately, the organisers are friends of mine they said it's in their budget to supply me with a new one. After some research, I decided I wanted to get the Behringer CMD Studio 4-a  and only 3 days after ordering it arrived. In the meantime, I had put together an extensive playlist of the music I believed was fitting and then proceeded to download it and put together a library.

At this point, I had 5 more days until the gig and I hadn't dj'd in such a long time that at first, I was afraid of what I had gotten myself into.
This fear really helped me focus and I spent about 3 hours a day practising and figuring out what transitions and mashups worked with the music I had and how exactly I would switch from genre to genre because I have songs from at least 4 different genres with massive bpm changes and making massive transitions for example from EDM to rock can be quite tricky.

Today is the 21st of December, it's already almost 23o clock and I feel quite confident about tomorrow. I'm going to the venue 2 hours before the gig starts because I'm helping to set everything up and I'm also doing the live sound engineering of the band that will be playing between the two sets I'm doing. I'm very excited and hope all is going to go well, I feel prepared and if something goes wrong hopefully I will be versatile enough to fix it.

Blog post of how the gig went and an analysis of it will follow.
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