Why You Should Train Wreck Your Sets
Is sucking the thing your DJing is missing?
Hi there Low Pass Legends,
A few weeks ago I released a video on the channel about different ways to approach constructing a playlist.
At this point I’m pretty comfortable making a standard tutorial video. However, I wanted to try something a little different this time - heavily using metaphors and characters.
The video was a flop. Views and retention were down, and some comments were less than glowing.
A few questions started swirling around my mind:
Had I pushed things too far?
Why didn’t I just use my standard approach?
Why didn’t people like it?
After I stopped weeping, I realised I needed to reflect on why I even bothered trying something new in the first place - instead of sticking to what I know works.
The truth is, I’d got too comfortable and my creativity was suffering - which is half the fun of making videos in the first place.
It made me realise I’d been doing the same thing in my DJ sets, avoiding risk and letting them grow stagnant.
In this email, I’ll share 3 key lessons I gained from this failure and how you can use them to bring more creativity and excitement to your own sets.
Lesson 1: Comfort: the silent assassin
Doing what you’ve always done, and what you know you do well is a nice feeling. It’s comfortable, like a nice pair of pyjamas.
When I’m mixing I’ve got a couple of standard blends or transitions I do all the time. I know they sound good 99% of the time and I can do them without thinking. So why risk changing it?
The problem is, being comfortable comes with some big downsides:
Stagnation: You never push yourself to learn new techniques that could add to your sets - holding you back from your full potential
Competition: You fall behind the competition. They keep developing themselves and their DJing whilst you stay static
Changing trends: You don’t keep up to date with trends on the dancefloor or with audiences. For example, long blends used to be the way to do things. But now attention spans are shorter and mixing has generally got a lot faster
I realised I’d been playing safe in my sets for too long. So I started doing something I haven’t done for a long time - watching some videos with new transition ideas.
I’ve found throwing one or two of these new transitions in every so often keeps things sounding fresh. Importantly, it gives a me level of challenge that I didn’t even realise I was missing. It helps me be more engaged with my DJing and stops it being robotic.
💡Tip: Try to introduce at least one new transition or technique into each set. Try it more than once - learn the situations it does and doesn’t work in
Lesson 2: Get your toys back out
The other day I was mixing a few nasty new rollers and I pressed a button. I haven’t pressed this button for about 4 years. I don’t know why, but in this particular moment it called to me like a quadrilateral mermaid.
For whatever reason, I decided to use the roll effect during a transition. It created a really cool and unique drum pattern during the mix. I actually said out loud: “Oh yeah” - because I used to use roll all the time. Probably too much tbh.
Because I’d been doing blends that worked perfectly well for so long I’d fallen out of the habit of looking for ways to add extra sprinkles of creativity and uniqueness to them.
Of course FX are easy to overuse. But I’d gone so far the other way that I was barely using them at all. Other than the high and low pass filters which work great but are so generic they might as well be a tin of Tesco’s value baked beans.
Just like many adults, I’d forgotten how to play.
Play is how kids explore and learn about the world and discover what is possible. The ability and willingness to play (and possibly fail whilst doing so) is so important for creativity - and for creating unique sets.
Pressing that roll button opened up my mind back up to the concept of ‘let’s just see what happens if I press this’.
💡 Tip: Use a button on your gear you’ve not used for ages and throw it into your set. Key shift, slip roll or even the crossfader
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Lesson 3: Let yourself fail, often
Our friends at Digital DJ Tips posted a reel a while ago asking a question: what people missed about DJing in ‘the old days’.
One of their points was that on modern DJ gear it’s much harder to mess up. This is in contrast to Vinyl where the needle could skip, there’s no sync, grid or any other safety nets we enjoy as DJs today.
As a vinyl alumni, I can verify that these mess ups were a regular occurrence (or maybe I was just crap).
These safety nets can be a good thing. But having the possibility of screwing up is actually one of the best ways to find out what does and does not work. And it’s also kind of fun in a twisted way.
The thrill of skydiving comes from taking a calculated risk and hoping your parachute opens. It would be a whole lot less of a rush if you had a 100% guarantee of survival.
Failing helps you learn a few important lessons in your DJing:
How far can you can push things before you realise you’ve gone too far?
When do you need to learn a new technique to cope with something that went wrong?
How do you improve things for next time?
Taking this it back to my YouTube video - I learnt that I went too hard on the metaphors this time around. But I have other videos where I used metaphor to a lesser extent, and they worked well.
By failing, I’ve learnt more about where the boundary lies. I’ve learnt where metaphors can have maximum impact, without becoming a distraction. And most importantly, I’ve learnt more about my audience.
I now want to recreate some of the terror that Vinyl DJing bought to the table when I was first learning. I want to actively introduce more risk.
💡 Tip: Turn off quantise. Hide your waveforms. Try and mix in something weird.
What topics would you like to hear more about in this newsletter? Just hit reply or drop a note in the comments
I love your videos.
You bring sense and humor into educative material.
At least it's not boring and one will laugh instead of falling asleep.
Also you don't charge for your videos so whoever has an opinion... Fine, they are entitled to it.
Please keep coming up with more staff and stop caring about negative comments. Yes read them and listen to everyone but still do your own thing.
Thank you, Filip
Hi Chris,
Thanks a lot for the really useful videos. I enjoy them as well as learning something every time. I like your approach on to the FX part.
I recently started using the Massive Delay (Xone PX5) on beat 2.5 or 3 of the last 16 (4/4) just before the Mix out and just stop the track with delay without fading it out. so to speak the delay fades it out.
What also sounded quite cool is Echo on Pioneermixers and short one beat reverse on the CDJ, letting the Echo fade out the reverse beat on the track you're transitioning out of.
Sometimes i really wish I had 4 arms&hands. :-)
Thanks a ton and waiting for your next vids.