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| quote: | Originally posted by Tangil
Definitely, once this happens track selection happens.
Also Nem, was that the gig where you were warming up for pvd and got to have a good look at his set up? Care to elaborate on it all?
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Yeah that was the night I was supposed to be, but got a call saying that he was bringing Col Hamilton with him (Nice bloke by the way) so didn't get to spin for the man. I have time for both PvD and his warm up guy no doubt.
PvD was doing a lot of cool tricks and stuff but nothing so out of it that I don't feel that I could have done something similar with decks although perhaps less things on the go.
What makes this interesting is that PvD might actually have been the wrong DJ for the club in my opinion. Playing there I have learnt that the crowd like it quite chunky. PvD did play some tracks like that and the crowd did start to go off on it, but he didn't up the stakes by following that and just slipped back into his zone.
His set up was laptop, midi keyboard but as stated before he didn't really use it too much but notably did use it on For An Angel when applying a filter effect.
One of the major problems was that his laptop was set up a little too far away from the decks, (I have photo of this on my phone, will try to post it) so he kept on disapearing from the decks and the main focal point of the night kept for a lot of the night was staring at a set of empty decks. Not the best move perhaps, but you work with what you get in this business and not his fault.
I can't fault the man for his mixing in terms of matching and he was using the CDJs with this time coded stuff. (Or at least that's what I thought he was doing).
You could definately tell that he was going back to stuff that he has prepared and worked out before hand, but then techno DJs will also have stuff they have worked out prior but will intermix these segments with random selections based on crowd response etc.
Without trying to hijack the thread with another Digital vs turntable/cdj. It is completely obvious to me at least, that the very essence of digital becomes more of a performace. The problem is that this works against the one thing that the DJ had in his/her favour, which was the ability to read the crowd.
It is my belief that both Armin and Ferry are more deserving of the #1 spot than PvD, as the latter are actually still doing what DJs do. Especially Ferry in my book.
It was actually a weird night and the crowd didn't actually kick off until the final DJ came on, was almost like PvD was the warm up. Sad, but I don't think he will be re-booked for this. Didn't fill the club to capacity either but that might just be a reflection of the state of trance at the moment (No pun intended). But I do see lesser names sell out and perform better than the really big guns on a constant. Perhaps it's a question of how much they want it.
Don't get me wrong, there are I'm sure people out ther who are going to understand and push the boundaries with laptop performance and will definately work the crowd reading aspect into it. Or I hope it will otherwise we will have a generation of clueless, self endulgant digital geeks as DJs and that will never help dance music.
Mind you probably the majority of the people in the club didn't know he was using a laptop or even give a shit about it. They probably just thought he was alright, nothing special.
Bit of a dispointment for me, but I had a feeling that would happen. I was also completely sober which may have played a large part in it, but was no different for Oakenfold, whom I really enjoyed.
Cheers
Nem
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