You’re not picking your own tracks

Why your library isn't as neutral as you think

Hi there High Pass Hyenas,

There’s one thing that plays a massive part in whether our DJ libraries succeed or fail - our own bias.

In some cases, bias can be intentional. For example, you are actively trying to move your sound in a particular direction, or represent more music from a particular genre or label.

But often, our bias is unconscious. We always gravitate towards those 4A D&B dancefloor tracks. Or accidentally add too much tech house. And because it’s unconscious, we don’t even realise it’s happening.

Over time this leads to two big problems:

• You notice your sets sound samey, even though you are adding new music often

• Your library becomes very big but very narrow and gives you fewer options for creating more interesting transitions or sets

In this newsletter I’m going to share a few ways to spot bias early and fix it.

And I’ll share a little more on something I’m building to make doing that easier than adding a cue point.

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The play button doesn’t lie

The first place you can spot a bias problem is by analysing what you actually play in your sets.

Without looking I bet you could tell me what your top 3 most played tracks are. You might even be able to tell me the key they are in. These are your first clues in your investigation.

Activate the DJ play count column in your collection (Right click on column headings and select it) and then sort.

You are likely to notice a few obvious patterns emerge in your most played tracks. Similar keys, genres or artists.

If you scroll down to check out your 0 play tracks you will probably notice some patterns here as well.

Maybe they are longer tracks you can never be bothered to mix, or tunes from a certain era.

At this point you should ask yourself, have your tastes simply changed? Or is there something about these types of tracks that is actively discouraging you from playing them in your sets without you noticing?

Once you have the answer to this you can move from unconscious bias, to conscious bias.

That means actively pruning tracks you no longer resonate with, and/or purposefully adding lower play tracks into your sets.

But what if there was a way to get all this information without having to trawl through your whole collection line by line? Well..

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The problem with DJ software

Rekordbox is powerful. But it’s also useless.

• It’ll show you what BPM a track is. But it won’t tell you if there are particular BPM ranges your library is lacking in.

• It’ll show you the artist of a track. But not whether there are artists you love but are under-represented

• It’ll tell you the genre. But it won’t tell you if those tracks are under-prepped compared to others

That’s where the tool I’m building right now comes in.

Here’s an early preview of just one of the insights you’ll be able to get - an MRI scan of the BPM and key hotspots (and cold spots) in your library.

This beta tester probably has too much tech house

Unlike most DJ library tools that are designed to simply clean up metadata, this is designed to shine a light on the stuff that’s usually hidden in your library:

• The bias baked into your playlists

• The gaps in your crate digging you don’t see until you’re scrambling to find the next track to play

• The prep habits that shape your sound without you realising

I’ve been testing it over the last few weeks with DJs of all kinds from this newsletter. I’ll be opening it up for limited early access very soon and you’ll hear about it here first.

I’ll be honest, this is one of the hardest projects I’ve ever taken on. I’m not a developer by trade so I’ve had to learn things about data vectorisation I’d rather delete from my brain.

But I believe this kind of insight is what DJs need to truly create libraries that grow with them, instead of just mopping up the mess after it goes wrong.

If there are any other DJs you think would find something like this valuable please share the newsletter with them.

With that out the way let’s take a look at how you can spot bias in your playlists.

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Your playlists

Most DJ’s have two kinds of playlists:

• Category playlists: The tracks in there are based on what they are, e.g. same genre, same energy level etc

• Set playlists: More carefully planned and curated, drawing from multiple category playlists or the collection as a whole

Now you would expect category playlists to have the same sort of tracks - that’s pretty much the point of them. But the set playlists are where bias can creep in again.

If you don’t have this kind of playlist, have a look at a Rekordbox history playlists under the ‘Histories’ icon. It’ll show you exactly what you played in a particular mixing session.

Rekordbox history playlists

Have a really good look at what you played in there.

• Were there some energy levels you completely avoided?

• Were there similar artists you tended to play in a row?

• (If multi genre) did the tracks cover a wide range of BPM ranges or did they tend to stick within a few BPM of each other?

• Were you stuck in the same few keys for the whole set?

Try and do this every few weeks to make sure bad habits aren’t creeping in.

But this is still a manual task. I’m making it my mission to make this easier and faster in the new tool.

What’s the one question you wish you could ask your DJ library?

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Do you struggle to delete tracks?

Sentimental tracks. Hard to find bangers. Fear of loss.

In an upcoming video I’m looking to help DJs who know they need to clean up their library but just…can’t.

If you’d like the chance for me to help you tidy up your library in the video apply by June 18th

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In other news

• Big love to my beta testers. They’ve been helping me squash bugs like fat man on a trek in the Amazon rainforest. It’s been tough work but I’m really happy with where we’ve got to. I’m going to be putting the rest of the pieces of the puzzle together in preparation for the early access phase soon

• I went to see the Thrillseekers a few weeks ago for a nice dose of classic trance hands in the air action. I did have to laugh when we were 10 minutes into the set and still on the first track though but it was great to relive some of my earlier clubbing days again