A: I'm probably going to start djing in the next few months...for my local group. But I will start by playing music I know and love so it will be well known tracks. Also the dancers here are mostly new, so I want to play things they may have heard to get them up.
But even just getting a tanda with a similar sound and mood from about the same era, which is danceable is no mean feat. I haven't tried blending tandas yet. And I haven't checked the dates on my tandas!
B: If you feel the music, dates are of no value. Most of what is said about matching dates is for DJs that do not feel the music.
A: I am so relieved by what you said about the dates, because I had in a way thought that but until then I would not have been brave enough to go with my instinct.
B: :)
A: I can't imagine how or why anybody could or would want to dj if they didn't have a feeling about the music.
B: Many people have no idea what it is to feel the music hence don't know they are lacking
Instinct is tricky. Some people are instinctively attuned to BPMs and other to the pitch of the vocal. Some people are blind to the distortions at the edges of the frequency spectrum and some are very sensitive. Reverb instinctively drives some people nuts even if they don't quite realize what's up. For some people tango is instinctively masculine and they can't take female vocals. Where instincts pull in different directions, it's progressively harder to rely on them.
ReplyDeleteAnd then, of course, it's just so much harder to match tracks with a vague feeling; it's way faster going with clear categories and labels. That's why it's said that the strict-match fans may include many who don't quite feel the music ... because the formal rules of record-matching make it easier for everybody, even for the ones whose got feeling is slow and imperfect.
(It's the statisticians' favorite Berkson's fallacy: we think that DJs have either gut feeling or formal parameter-matching skills, simply because aspiring DJs who can do neither never go anywhere ... so in the resulting set of DJs, intuition and "algebra" appear to anti-correlate)
ReplyDeleteMockba wrote: "That's why it's said that the strict-match fans may include many who don't quite feel the music ... because the formal rules of record-matching make it easier for everybody"
ReplyDeleteI think the Strict-Match Formal Rules school of DJing needs some kind of promotional slogan. One that gives it the kind of recognition it deserves. One that proudly acknowledges the country of its origin.
Perhaps "Vorsprung Durch Technik".
:-)