SwingDJs

So, hi all -- I'm Barak and I'm new here.

A little back story: I'm part of Lindy on Sproul, a swing-dancing club at UC Berkeley, and a few weeks ago I had gathered enough swing music to volunteer to DJ our weekly Sat. morning social. It went over really well with the gang , and I've done it every week since, building and refining.

Next Fri. we're holding a large nighttime social dance which will be orders of magnitude larger than a Sat. morning. People from all over the Bay are coming in, there'll be performances, singers, raffles, proper sound amplification, the works -- and I'm to DJ this. So I'm a little nervous. Excited too.

So far I've been just working off of my laptop and iTunes, which seems to work. If I have a style, it's roughly 60% 30s-50s "classic" swing, 25% decent revivalist stuff (Indigo Swing, w00t), and 15% sort of danceable classic rock songs.

Anywho, I registered here to throw this out there and see what kinds of pointers y'all might have. It's all just for fun, but I want to show the throngs of people a good time, and I figure the more I know...

welcome to the forum!

i don't know what kind of advice it's possible to give without being on the spot and seeing the dance floor. as much as some may claim otherwise, i believe these things are really a matter of taste. two things you may wish to keep in mind:

1) 15% rock stuff is on the high side for the bay area (well, for the peninsula and sf--i have no idea what the east bay is like).

2) there will be a reasonable number of stanford students there on friday, i believe, and stanford has always had a pretty eclectic scene with waltz and whatever else thrown in at swing events. i don't know what the cal scene is like; kinda curious about it, actually. if you're all like bromley and jean it's sure to be a jolly party. :o)

i'm gonna try to be there on friday; looking forward to hearing what you'll play.

Well, the dance "floor" is, of course, Sproul Plaza.

1) This is my estimate based on my usual weekends, but I don't think it'll be that hard to tone down the dance-rock percent much -- I only have a few songs that meet my exacting standards (of much pre-testing) and I play them a lot -- but to fill up the extra time for the fullness of the event I'm tapping the other categories predominately so that percentage should go down to 10 or sub-10. I have added another one or two from this category from further testing special for the event though.

2) Yeah, hopefully we'll have a decent Stanford turnout -- I know we're prepping a good Cal turnout down there the next night. Waltz, though? Like, for people to waltz to? I mean, I could throw in a little Stanford eclectica, but it's sort of out of my range of normalcy, so maybe not. Plus, while there are some ballroom crossover folks, the majority are swingers to the core, so maybe not. Either way, I'm sure I'll come to fully understand it on Saturday.

Jean and Bromley are doing our Lindy lesson at the outset of the night; yeah, they're pretty awesome. Hoping for a positive review from those with cred.

The Cal scene is a little weird -- in the beginning there were the UC Ballroom Dancers, and that was all, but some years ago near the peak of revivalism some folks started Lindy on Sproul, which is the open, Saturday morning social dancing as the name suggests. It acted as sort of a counterpoint of the ballroom classes and performancing, being entirely social-oriented; there's always been a lot of mutual respect however, as LoS and UCBD fill different niches; a percentage of folks even do both.
LoS died for a few years but was revitalized in '04. Since then, the baton has been passed at least once and it's grown sort of exponentially; this semester we instituted a for-fun swing class on Thursday nights as a spinoff of Lindy on Sproul. Next semester we'll do it again, but this time people will get PE credit for it

Because of this and word of mouth, our group has increased in size dramatically in the past few months; the first night event was then about the size of a standard Sat. morning is now. The most recent night event in Feb, in the middle of the cold, gathered about 150 people over the course of the night, though it wasn't intended to be more than a slightly larger Sat. social. This time we're going all-out with performances and invitations and whatnot, so I wouldn't be surprised if we cross the 300 threshold* (There's already 133 Berkeley folks RSVPed on Facebook).

Anyway, back on topic, I guess my real question about pointers involves more of the prep work. I mean, I'm doing drafts of the playlist for given intervals (which I always end up munging as I play it) but are there any handy ideas, tips to watch out for, ways to make a playlist really cook theoretically? (if not in practice, based on on-the-spot decisions)

When/If you come out on Friday, stop by the DJ table and say 'hi'

*300 Threshold: Madness? No, this is Lindy!

For prep, I usually focus my efforts on learning my music and learning about the music rather than playlists. The better you know your music, the easier it will be to choose music on the fly and do a good job.

At an event, I try and pay attention to the crowd to figure out what people like to dance to. I not only pay attention to the folks dancing but also those sitting out. My goal is to select music that will please most of the audience most of the time.

I too would tone down the rock music and neo-swing. I've heard some express the opinion that you need it to attract newbies however I think in your situation, the huge crowd having fun dancing to swing music will be more effective.

There are plenty of other discussions here on the specifics but that's the general idea.