Step One: The Gear
The five steps are Gear, Music, Techniques, Playing Out and Promoting Yourself… and today we’re talking about the first of those steps, which is Gear.
Now we’ve all seen crappy laptop DJs with a cracked copy of Virtual DJ and no DJ gear to speak of, sat in a corner train wrecking tracks together in cheap bars, right? Not a good look, and frankly an insult to the art of DJing.
These people are an extreme example of DJs with no knowledge of, respect for, or frankly it often seems, no desire to learn about, what we here call “the gear”.
In the five steps, “gear” means “the geeky stuff” – not what you DO with the gear – that’s “Techniques” which we cover later – but your UNDERSTANDING of how it works.
Another example: The music suddenly stops at a gig. The DJ or DJs flap around, trying all sorts of things, nobody knows what to do to get it on again.
When I was at a DJ convention in Vegas recently, several DJs take SEVEN MINUTES to get the music back on at a club event – trust me, those seven minutes would have felt like a LIFETIME, and it was ALL anyone was talking about the next day.
Knowing what to do in situations like that? That’s mastery of “The Gear”.
Another example: If the music is distorting, and the DJ doesn’t even realise it, then that DJ is guilty of not understanding the gear and therefore is not able to play a set that people love, and that gets him or her booked again. Ignorance is never bliss.
Yet another one: If you spend thousands on DJ equipment, only to move a bit down the line in your learning and realise you made the wrong choice – you’ve failed in having a proper understanding of The Gear, and it’s just cost you a LOT of money.