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Less Organized, Better Swing DJ

Posted by on 10.06.11 10:02AM under Swing DJ Tips, Swing DJ's Corner

Can you be a better DJ by being less organized?

Christian Bossert has an interesting article about his personal method of organizing his music through iTunes. (Of course, iTunes itself should not generally be used for DJing, but that’s a topic for a different article.) It’s not how I do it but certainly worth a look if you have a geeky mind and do a lot of swing DJing.

But for my own time at the turntables, more organization isn’t necessarily what I’m looking for.

Even though digital music offers a lot of organizational advantages over CDs and vinyl, I find that it’s harder to get into the same groove that I did when DJing from CDs because–ironically enough–things are too cleanly organized.

I kept spinning CDs for years past when most swing DJs had moved to MP3′s, for reasons ranging from sound quality to the superiority of physical controls. But there was an added bonus: intuitive organization. With CDs, finding a song meant I had to choose a binder, find the right section of the binder, and then the right track on the right CD. My organizational system was very fuzzy and intuitive. After all, if you have one album with songs ranging from slow blues to fast traditional Jazz, and another featuring slow blues, some Louis Jordan covers, and some WCS-friendly tracks, your categorization system needs to be flexible and intuitive.

But as a result I found myself getting more varied inspiration intrinsically from the inefficiencies in the system. As you can see from the “Tree of Choice” diagram, most CD’s really have more than one place that they could be organized. Does a modern band with a truly authentic 30′s sound really belong with the “Modern” albums or in the Early Jazz binder? What about a female vocalist singing with a big band? The fact that I was forced to glance at a bunch of CDs that weren’t precisely in the same category as the one I was looking for, or to look in multiple places, tended to give me a lot of new ideas as I put together the next few songs in my head, and developed the general plan for the night. The fact that most of my music was organized by album rather than by musical style or tempo or dance style meant that I would end up considering a greater variety of ways of achieving the flow or vibe I was trying to create. Sometimes it might mean finding an opportunity to play a song I’d almost forgotten about, and other times it might just mean a more interesting series of song choices.

Now at the same time DJing digital music has a lot of advantages. While in the days of CDs it was common to burn CD mixes with songs organized by tempo or style, that kind of sorting has been taken much further. For example, a single song can be simultaneously filed under:

Since it’s easier to categorize every single song according to each distinctive characteristic, you’re less likely to overplay fetish songs, such as having a tight-knit group of go-to songs for “brisk Balboa in a crowd of mostly Lindy Hoppers,” “crossover songs to please Westies, blues dancers and Lindy Hoppers,” or “energetic songs to incite a jam circle.” Better organization means you’ll see your whole list of songs within a certain tempo and stylistic range, and so individual songs can get more even distribution.

But ironically, for me the main thing I’ve been looking for is a way to make things less organized. Ok, not exactly less: what I mean is to escape the logical, orthogonal organization that’s both the blessing and curse of the laptop DJ era, and to recapture some of the advantages I enjoyed from the days of CD DJing. Even simply doing the album search doesn’t do the old method justice, because it’s alphabetized and searchable.

So contrary to the trend that many DJs have followed, of taking computerized organization as far as possible, I’ve been looking for ways to preserve a little more chaos and intuition in my system. Here’s how I’ve done it:

  1. Extensive use of playlists. Instead of trying to organize songs primarily by genre, I organize them in groups. Every song I import in iTunes is in at least one playlist, and my preference is to have them in a number of playlists.
  2. Keeping playlists fuzzy. In contrast to many DJ’s who have things rigidly organized, a lot of my playlists are fuzzy, to reflect how my CD’s tended to be organized. So instead of having a “200-220bpm” playlist, which is mostly unnecessary with modern software, I’d tend to have a “brisk tempo swing” playlist ranging from 185 or so to about 225bpm, with most in the 200-220bpm range. I’d have songs in that range that wouldn’t be in the playlist but would instead be in the “fast” or “medium tempo” playlists. The idea is to focus on the feel of the songs rather than something as simplistic as tempo.
  3. Keeping playlists incomplete. Rather than have all of my playlists be exhaustive, I’ll deliberately omit some songs from playlists. For example, if I notice that I’m overly tempted to play a certain song when I’m looking for a “big band song at the slower end of the Lindy Hop spectrum” then I may remove it from the Slow Big Band playlist and add it to one of my “overplayed” playlists so that I stop seeing it so often. If a given song belongs in 6 categories, I might choose to put it in only 4 of them. That approach artificially forces me to dig just a bit longer to find the song I’m looking for, in the hopes that I might notice some other ideas along the way.
  4. Quixotic, intuitive playlists with funky names. Rather than focusing primarily on strict categorization, I use playlists to group songs together psycho-acoustically according to how I think about them or how other people react to them. I recommend putting together playlists with names like:
What do those even mean? Exactly what you want them to mean.
Spin outside the box.
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