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-- How to build up a liveset?

Posted by djxtension on Apr-27-2002 16:02:

How to build up a liveset?

I was just wondering how you woudl build up a liveset?

I mean: do you start of slow, and then smoothly build up, or just start hard and keep playing hard?

Posted by El~ZaPo on Apr-27-2002 16:30:

Usually you will want to make your set go from point A to point B (or more points depending on how much time you have). Normally sets start off slower and each following track has more energy than the last one and so on until you reach a climax, then the songs after that go down in energy and so on.

It also depends if there is someone spinning before you because you have to fit in where they left off. (ie: if they are building up and there is a moderate amount of energy, dont play a really boring song). Sometimes though if the DJ before you is just blindly playing boring songs its your job to liven up the place with a big song to get the people dancing.

Hope that makes sense.

Posted by Kid_Lax on Apr-27-2002 17:44:

it really depends on how long of a set you have, when you're playing, and what style of music you play

if you have a long set 2+ hours then the tracklist is very important...because you don't want to play your big climax songs at the beginning or people will get bored...but you also don't want to progress the set so slowly that after 45 minutes of building up people are bored of you...its allabout balance

so for lengthy sets all you really have to do is start off nice and slow and (lets say you havea 3 hour set) progress to a couple banging tunes by the end of the first hour...then progressivly bring the energy level down a bit for a couple trakcs and keep toying with the crowd...bring them up and down again...just don't go from a climax track to like...a really boring progressive track... i can't stand when dj's do that
then for the last 45 minutes or so just destroy the crowd with pure climax tracks, slowly building up to the last 20 minutes, then bring them down with the last couple of tracks

it also depends when you're playing...if you're on first then you really have all the freedom in the world to play whatever (since nobody will be there at the beginning anyways, not really a point to progressing the set imho)...
any other times you should startoff by maintaining the energy level of the last dj

there's nothing worse than a dj finishing with an amazing epic track then the next dj just killing the energy level by playing a really downtempto shitty track

though if you're playing a 3 hour set or something, then your'e allowed to kill the energy level becuase well...you have to

enough rambling for me