I recently did a gig for a small brewery I’m friends with. I’ve been DJing at home and online for years but have only had a handful of public gigs so I was a little bit out of my element.
I have my own mini PA system that’s plenty loud enough for the 10-15 people having some beers. The PA is a little tinny so I’ll often cut the highend just a little. I guess I wasn’t paying close attention cause when I got home after the gig I noticed I cut almost all of the lowend and in addition to that I was outputting stereo audio. I’m seeing online that mono is preferred in uncontrolled spaces like this and that makes sense to me.
Thankfully everyone seemed to have a good time and I got invited back this week. I’ll make sure to tune my speakers correctly lol.
Anyway, just wanted to share my slight embarrassment. Does anyone else have any similar experiences or tips to avoid simple mistakes like these?
Mono or stereo depends on the situation and application. I am doing a lot of sound engineering and live audio mixing for some years now, and never I seen need to make it mono for the PA. And we are running line arrays and fill speakers.
It is not a rule, it is only a matter of need at the certain place / moment / setting.
As for the low end cut off - depends on the situation as well. Sometimes room can be so boomy, that you will have to cut out a lot, sometimes need to add - there is no golden rule - check what sounds best for you and your audience.
I don’t think the forum server is big enough for me to list all the mistakes I’ve made at gigs
I turned the wrong deck off a couple of weeks back, and I was sober
Mono is your friend in the main as it stops dodgy productions from coming out of only half the speakers. But stereo is great if you know your tracks are good.
For me it’s mono out for 60s to mid-70s stuff when they eventually realised that they didn’t need to play about with the panning of stuff and did it more subtle.
Some early stereo tracks have vocals on one side so that mono switch is very much needed.
For a standard room with the crowd in front of the stack and 70s music onwards I’d say stereo all the way. Even big festivals have started to use stereo now for DJ tricks and effects.
David Guettas “Distortion” track still used hard pan, among other modern tracks. But I won’t let this, or just a few other tracks, stop me from using stereo: lot of trance tracks use stereo to provide a thicker synth sound. I do.
For the rest of it: don’t be ashamed of your mistakes. I’ve been DJing in public for close to 25 years now. I do some brilliant mixes, but I also mess some up. I still switch off the wrong deck from time to time. Forget to exit loops. Pick the wrong records so energy on the dancefloor seeps away. And the numerous times in the vinyl/CD area where a CD or vinyl would start to skip on me during prime time
Best advice is: act like nothing happened. If you let those mistakes, or even technical problems, get into your head, they will influence your self esteem, and thus the rest of your set. Don’t. Mistakes happen, and a drunken crowd won’t make a big deal of it…
(Same goes for people demanding you to play better music, while the dancefloor behind them is going crazy, or asking you to play bangers when you are clearly in the warm up phase of your set. You are better than those people, don’t let them get into your head and influence the quality of your DJ set)
If you have access to Adobe Audition, it has a channel mixer feature. Which lets you mix a some of the right channel in to the left, & some of the left to the right.
I’ve done this with a number of old 60’s tracks with hard panned stereo. It makes the stereo image narrower, rather than completely mono-ing the track.
70% & 30% works for me.
I’m guessing a similar feature exists in other DAW’s?
and in addition to that I was outputting stereo audio. I’m seeing online that mono is preferred in uncontrolled spaces like this and that makes sense to me.
