I Touched DJ Gear and Broke the Broadcasting Room Curse

Background#

For starters, I’ve been to a club about twice in my entire life. My usual routine is sitting in front of Cubase writing orchestral-style music, so dance music has never been anywhere near my world.

Which means I had no idea what a DJ actually does, or what’s fun about it. My resolution on the subject was roughly “a person who slaps on some effects, makes a turntable go wiki-wiki, and links songs together without ever letting the music stop.” I assumed it was a world that had nothing to do with me, one inhabited by party people and street folk.

But if I’m going to stand in front of the equipment, I at least need to know, at a fundamental level, what a DJ even is. So I used Professor Gemini (the AI) as a sounding board, researched and argued my way through a bunch of things, and it turns out DJs are not nearly as far from me as I thought.

A DJ Is Someone Who Curates the BGM for a Totally Wasted Party (?)#

When I asked Professor Gemini what someone who doesn’t understand club music should even play, I got this suggestion: “If you don’t have a particular genre you love, just pick a concept and string together songs you like around it.”

That’s when I realized I was already doing exactly this, when picking background music for videos.

For example, for a 30-minute explainer video on toki pona (a tiny constructed language) that I made a while back, I picked the BGM like this:

1
Chapter 0: Greetings
2
Chapter 1: Letters and Pronunciation
3
Chapter 2: Let's Make Sentences
4
Chapter 3: Modifiers
5
Chapter 4: Prepositions
6
Chapter 5: Auxiliary Verbs
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Chapter 6: Questions and Commands
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Chapter 7: la
9
Chapter 8: Colors, Numbers, and More
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Chapter 9: Final Exam
11

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§0 jan Japali - luka sama mi (no Vocal)
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§1 STRIKE WITCHES - ウィッチの斗い
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§2 Master of Epic - BREEZE OF MIRIM
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§3 The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Far Horizons
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§4 Pilotwings - Hang Glider
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§4 Pilotwings 64 - Hang Glider
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§4 Pilotwings Resort - Hang Glider
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§4 Pilotwings 64 - Birdman
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§5 I.Q FINAL - The 2nd Tide
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§6 ACE COMBAT7: SKIES UNKNOWN - Magic Spear I
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§7 Genshin Impact - Rite of Battle
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§8 jan Japali - Sunrise Harbor
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§9 Genshin Impact - Lamentation et Triomphe
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§9 jan Japali - kanasimi

Basically everything is video game music. The first half conjures up a vast world with stuff like Skyrim, then builds tension toward the final exam in the second half. I also baked in micro-level context: for “§4 Prepositions” I stuck to the Pilotwings series, where you glide through 3D space, to hammer home the sense of spatial relationships, and for “§6 Questions and Commands” I went with ACE COMBAT, because, you know, commands.

I showed this to Professor Gemini, and the verdict was: “You’ve already partly got the setlist-building mindset (the perspective of a meta-composer). However, mixing these live as a DJ would be extremely difficult technically, since the genres, BPMs, and keys are all over the place.” Yeah, fair.

Based on the discussion that followed, here is how I understand it, Word2Vec style:

DJ = BGM for a video - the video as the star + dancing/the totally wasted party as the star

Since the video is no longer the star, the visual-side constraints, like “does the song’s running time cover the length of the section?”, vanish.

On the other hand, you now have to preserve the lifeblood of club music: the trance-like euphoria of the same rhythm going on and on. So you must never let the sound stop, and a new set of constraints appears: match the BPM, and work the EQ so the bass lines don’t collide, to blend things beautifully.

And within those constraints, the freedom of the transition, meaning “when and how do I mix in the tastiest part of the next track?”, is where a DJ gets room for creativity. That’s how I understand it, anyway.

I Touched It#

So I gathered up some Touhou arrangement CDs I bought ages ago (not many of them are electronic…) and Synthwave tracks I’ve been into lately, dumped them all into Rekordbox, lugged in a USB cable and headphones, and played around with the gear a few times. Honestly, I’m still at the stage where I can’t even link songs without wrecking the phrases, but when a transition lands, it feels so good I go out of my mind.

Also, strictly speaking, you’re not allowed to touch this equipment without a reservation, but I ignored the rules completely, so I may have gotten to taste the joy of an illegal rave party too. The Anemo Archon (the god of wind, in Genshin Impact) would surely applaud me.

What I Learned#

Until now I knew nothing about electronic music.

Why do these songs just keep thumping out a four-on-the-floor beat? Why are the intros and outros so ridiculously long? Why do songs in the same genre sound so alike that you can’t tell them apart after hearing them once? Honestly, it all seemed boring to me.

But after trying DJing and grasping the electronic music paradigm, everything finally clicked. All of that is building material, standardized parts, optimized so that a DJ, a sort of meta-composer, can mix it seamlessly with other tracks on the spot.

The moment I learned the context of “music made to be used,” the way I listen to electronic music was turned upside down, and it felt like a completely new horizon had opened up.

A Personal Realization#

And there’s one more thing. Touching DJ gear gave me a very personal and fairly deep psychological realization.

It was this: “Have I been unconsciously afraid of fiddling with knobs this whole time?”

Come to think of it, even with my own audio interface and the volume knob on my speakers, I’ve always tended to set it once and never touch it again. But after the DJ experience, I started wondering, “Why on earth had I never actively tried to touch these knobs?”

I traced back through my memories and figured it out. This “imprinted fear of knobs” of mine was most likely acquired back in elementary school, when I was on the broadcasting committee (the student volunteers who run the school PA system, with a little broadcasting room of their own).

The equipment in the broadcasting room had a ton of knobs lined up, but touching them was considered “the absolute taboo that causes a broadcast accident.” All we were allowed to do was press the button that switched the input channel and raise the volume fader up to the prescribed position (marked with a red circular sticker). Knobs were “things you must never touch if you want to keep the peace.”

For decades, I may have been dragging around the curse of “knobs are not to be fiddled with.” If that’s true, it’s both absolutely terrifying and, at the same time, it means I finally noticed the curse and managed to break it with my own hands.

Trying DJing was totally worth it!