SwingDJs

Hello,
I have participated in some so called "Battles of DJ" with different formulas, and now it is my turn to organise a battle of DJ in the Swing Festival of Barcelona (www.balliball.com). Since we won't have much time (max 2 hours), I have decided to limit the number of DJs to about 6. Which do you think is the best formula ? One song each, 5 and 5...?

By the way, if you want to come to Barcelona, you will be very wellcome.

P.S. Sory for my english (hope you will understand my question !!!)

I'd definitely avoid the one song each thing, that sounds like a pain to do. It could end up sounding like someone hit random on the 200 disc changer, especially if they all have different styles.

I'd suggest keeping it simple with 20 minute sets each or maybe 15 minute sets and then do something in the last 30 minuted with the top 2 DJs trading songs or something. A longer set gives a DJ time to show off their skill in a more realistic situation. Even 20 minutes is a little short, only about 6 songs give or take.

Be innovative but consider what the audience will likely hear and consider the logistics of that many DJs and that short a time period.

I agree with Dave. It's also hard for the audience to keep track of who is DJing during a song. If a DJ is setting up the next song in the DJ booth, it may look as if s/he is playing the current song.

So I'd suggest 5-6 songs for "preliminaries" and then 2 DJs playing 2 songs each for the "finals" ...2 hours isn't much time.

Have fun!

if you want to have the dj trading songs then it's better to set up two dj stations maybe with lights to indicate with dj is playing.

I think format at Lindy Summit was pretty good. The DJ's face off head-to-head for 30 minutes, and then the winner stays on stage.

I will ask the organisers to use the two nights, so maybe I will have the first night for preliminares and the other one for the finals. Lindy Summit format seems pretty good, so I will try to follow it a bit.
Thanks

P.S. I never thought on doing it like one song each. I had to do it once (and we could only play 3 songs) and it was...comic.

We might be doing a dj battle sometime soon and I had a few questions. We probably will only have 2 djs battle (because we have very few djs), I was thinking maybe giving each of them a 30-45 minute set. How do you determine who won? Thoughts?

If you've only got 2 DJs, make them work back to back!

Although it's something of a tangent, I actually prefer DJ'd band battles over actual DJ battles. For example, what we're doing at an upcoming event is to have one DJ spin 1/2 hour of one artist and then another DJ spins 1/2 hour of another artist.

But, that's really more about hearing an hour of good music from two artists than really "battling" to determine a winner.

The djs here are very limited in their music selection. They usually have about 20-50 cds and about half of them are neo. I don't think they have enough of one artist to do a half an hour .

A big pet peeve of mine is that nobody really listens to the music in our scene. It's just a beat to dance too. So I want to get more people paying attention to the better music that we do have (the little we do actually have). Even the "advanced" dancers don't really listen to the music. I want to draw attention to it but still keep it simple.

So to determine who won I've heard of doing crowd applause or secretly picking 3 random people who walk in the door (advanced dancers or not)to be judges. Any other suggestions? I would like to get more in depth and have some more battles later on, but for now I think we need to keep it small and simple just to get the idea in the door.

I'd go with applause if your goal is to get people to listen more closely.

On the other hand, maybe getting some teachers to teach "musicality" classes would help...

I was thinking of setting up a DJ battle in Chicago where the format would be 2 DJ's going back and forth between songs for an hour. Each dancer when they walked in the door would get 5 poker chips. When they heard a song they really liked they would go over to a box on the other side of the room and drop 1 poker chip in a box coresponding with the DJ who played the song. Someone would be back by the boxes insuring people knew who played what song. At the end of the battle the chips would be counted and the winner announced.

Roy wrote:I was thinking of setting up a DJ battle in Chicago where the format would be 2 DJ's going back and forth between songs for an hour. Each dancer when they walked in the door would get 5 poker chips. When they heard a song they really liked they would go over to a box on the other side of the room and drop 1 poker chip in a box coresponding with the DJ who played the song. Someone would be back by the boxes insuring people knew who played what song. At the end of the battle the chips would be counted and the winner announced.

My suggestion about this is that "flow" is more important than "songs". There's a limited amount of swing music out there, and eventually we'll all own the same cds, right? So if you judge people just on what cool songs they play, you're not really judging them on DJ skill as much as on $$ that they have to spend.

Maybe you could have mini-sets where each DJ spins 3 or 5 songs and then the crowd votes with their chips once all the DJs have played. Run a bunch of those mini-sets over the course of the night, and whichever dj gets the most chips wins.

That gives the DJs a fair chance to get people moving onto the floor.. I find the one-off battles to be just a total hodgepodge of styles and tempos that really shakes up the evening.

d.

Roy wrote:I was thinking of setting up a DJ battle in Chicago where the format would be 2 DJ's going back and forth between songs for an hour. Each dancer when they walked in the door would get 5 poker chips. When they heard a song they really liked they would go over to a box on the other side of the room and drop 1 poker chip in a box coresponding with the DJ who played the song. Someone would be back by the boxes insuring people knew who played what song. At the end of the battle the chips would be counted and the winner announced.

That sounds like a cool idea, but I think it would make it too easy for people to vote for their friends by simply dropping all their chips into one box.