Monday, December 10, 2007

Technology in the DJ Booth, Part 2

So how are clubs adapting to the changes in the DJ booth? Most of them, well, are not, but some are. The approach being taken by the forward thinking clubs largely depends on the crowd they are catering to and subsequently, the DJs that they book..

The clubs that cater to the traveling DJ, i.e. superclubs and destination clubs, work around the limitations of having a set DJ booth through several means. Some clubs customize the DJ booths for the headliner and change their setup every night. This can be typically found at clubs that have a stage for the performers and not a set DJ booth. Examples of this set-up would be Ruby Skye in San Francisco and Avalon in Los Angeles. Clubs that have a more traditional DJ set-up, such as 1015 in San Francisco, or Circus in Los Angeles have gone another route. Circus depends on DJs doing a sound check early in the night with the equipment being installed directly into the DJ mixer while 1015 has installed a patch bay accessible from above that lets people easily reroute the audio going into the mixer. These systems work at these clubs primarily due to the star power of the DJs that they bring in and the fact that the equipment is not typically plugged and un-plugged through the course of the night.

Going down a notch to the smaller club, lounge, bar arena it can be seen that a new standard has emerged. Along with the CDJs, and Technics turntables either a Serato box or a Serato certified mixer can be seen more and more often. The multi-format nature of these venues have lead DJs to rely heavily on the Serato system. Venues, tired of having their gear ripped apart night after night are providing the necessary equipment for their DJs and if they don’t want top invest in a box that might walk away they are turning to patch bays specifically setup for the Serato DJ to plug into.

The last arenas we will look at are house parties and underground raves. At these events DJs are lucky to find working mixers much less anything beyond turntables. The only positive is do to the temporary nature of the setup there is typically more than enough room to plug into the mixer prior to a time slot, just be wary of pissing off the vinyl diehards.

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