What makes a good house DJ?
April 8th, 2008Last weekend, I visited Los Angeles to catch house DJ Danny Howells play a 6 hour set. It turns out that some of my other friends were going to be in town that weekend, so I had invited them to join me at the show. Most of these people were unfamiliar with house music, so they couldn’t really understand my excitement about over a DJ. In their mind (and in my mind only until recently), a DJ is not an artist. My respect for a DJ matched the respect I had for someone who set up a Winamp playlist.
So understandably, I was asked the question, “So what’s so good about this Danny Howells guy? What makes a good house music DJ?”
A good DJ is someone who can keep his audience engaged for an extended period of time.
In most cases, being engaged means dancing. But I appreciate listening to a good DJ mixset on headphones at work or in the car as well.
The mechanism of keeping listeners engaged is playing pre-recorded songs by others artists (and often his own) in a seamless progression. In my opinion, the most relevant metric of a good DJ is how deep into his set can you get before the thought of going home or enters your mind. If you make it all the way to the end of his set and still want more, the next metric is how badly you want him to play an encore. The best DJs leave you wanting more at 2, 3, or 4AM, and make you forget the fact that your body is dead tired.
Obviously there are many outside factors involved: mind-altering substances, the venue, the sound system, the crowd, the people you are with, and your overall mood/energy level going into the night…I acknowledge these variables, but I will leave them out for this discussion.
So what are the qualities of a good DJ? Let me preface by saying that I am by no means a DJ, so there are probably many subtleties that I am missing. But here’s what I’ve gathered:
Taste. The most obvious and important factor is song selection. A house DJ is different than a Hip Hop or Mainstream/Top 40 DJ because his pool of music to choose from is much larger and much more obscure. His goal isn’t to play songs that everyone knows. In fact, it’s usually the opposite. Part of the excitement of seeing a great DJ is hearing new sounds/styles/ideas. Most great tracks don’t have a very long lifespan in house music. To me, house music is about staying on the cutting edge.
Mixing ability. This involves beat matching and gradually moving from one track to the next by fading in/out. But that’s just the technical aspect of it. If both songs are in different keys or the overall feel clashes between both songs, the listener disengages (which violates my definition of a good DJ). A seamless mix is critical. I’ve read that a good DJ, like a good chess player thinks 3 to 4 moves ahead. He thinks, “If I want to play song X and I’m on song A right now, the most seamless way to get there will be to go from song A->B->C->X.” He has to use his mixing ability and knowledge of the music to gradually take the listener in that direction.
Variance. This is a tangent of mixing ability. House music is a generic term. Saying you like house music is like saying you like rock music - it’s not very descriptive. There are many sub-genres of house: tech, deep, progressive, funky/soulful, french, garage, hard, electro, detroit, tribal, vocal…among others. A DJ might start you with deep house, then having you asking yourself how the fuck he got you to to tech house 1 hour later. Listening to the same thing too long gets boring.
Pace Similar to variance. Good DJs don’t bust out all the hard hitting tracks together. The DJ needs to pace to crowd and prevent them from getting tired too early. Also, having good buildups, climaxes, and beat drops get a crowd going too - but overdoing it gets annoying (a la Justice). Also, I’ve never measured it myself, but I’ve read that good DJ’s slowly increase the BPM of the set as the night progresses. So at midnight, the set set might be at 123BPM, but 4AM he might have brought it up to 130BPM to compensate for crowd tiredness. I’d be interested to know how often this happens. Maybe I should be a huge nerd and measure BPM at shows against my watch. :-X
Effects. This is a tough one to detect, since I don’t always know what a DJ is doing and I don’t know what the original song sounded like. But the use of delay/echo, EQ, phaser, beat repeating, filters, tremolo, and other effects enable the DJ to express himself and make the performance more “live.” Effects are also used to help transition between songs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_Sc1wlIJDQ
Stage presence. I like watching a DJ have fun. Watching an artist enjoy performing makes me enjoy the performance more.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlkBXqG5Uio
But they shouldn’t look like an idiot:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecyuBs3WotI
Technical ability. In my opinion, this is one of the less important traits of a good DJ, but can still help keep me engaged nonetheless.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9I8VXgiGqF4
Reading the crowd Arguably one of the more important traits, but honestly, I’m not convinced that all DJ’s do this. Basically a good DJ needs to read the crowd to see how tired they are and adjust accordingly. If the crowd is dying down, he throws in a big hitter to wake them up and get them moving. I have a feeling that a lot of DJ’s have the set lists chosen in advance, but honestly I have no idea.
Really this whole breakdown is overly analytical and academic…but if you know me, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The beauty of a seeing a good house DJ is that the ability to recognize all these traits only marginally enhances the listening experience. In my opinion, the best DJ’s are those who hide all these subtleties from the listener. The listener should never realize a subtle BPM increase or a filter effect - if the casual listener notices this, the DJ is doing something wrong. The only thing a DJ needs to do is keep the listener listening.
What’s your definition of a good DJ? What are some things that I missed?
