DJ Chasing 10K – 1% Completed

If you’re here for the running content, feel free to skip this post. If you’re here for the DJ content. . . LOL. Nobody’s here for that.

When I retired, I decided to pick up DJing as a new hobby. Since I have pretty much zero musical talent (I played cymbals in my high school marching band), I’m starting out from absolute zero (no, seriously – cymbals!). I’ve decided to keep the moniker Chasing 10K, however instead of my running 100×100 meaning it’s based on Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours rule. I figure if I spend enough time practicing, then I’ll eventually get good at DJing. And since I’m a numbers guy through and through, I’m keeping track of how much time I’m spending on my new hobby. I hit 100 hours right before leaving for HOTS, which took me a hundred days to reach.

Building The Perfect Beast

When you think of DJing, you think of someone standing behind a deck mixing music. You think of the performance aspect of DJing, however there’s quite a bit of prep and behind the scenes work that goes on before you can even get to that point. My Opus Quad DJ controller plays digital music and while it will play a random MP3 file, it works better if the file has been analyzed by a software package first. This will provide the BPM, key, and wave forms of the songs which makes mixing easier. I use Recordbox which is the Pioneer DJ software for this purpose. It also acts as my DJ music library.

Building the perfect music library is currently taking 30-40% of my time right now. I already have all my music ripped down to MP3s or FLACs, however I don’t want to just dump 25,000 tracks into my DJ library. The vast majority of those I’ll never have any interest in mixing and decent number I’d be fine to never hear again in my life. So I’m slowly going through my music artist by artist and deciding which tracks to import into Recordbox. I’m then assigning those to one or more playlists that I’ve got created. I’ve gone through about 200 artists so far which has yielded 1,400 songs. I have another 300 artists to get to, however probably won’t add more than 400-500 additional tracks as I’ve already gotten to most of my favorite artists by now. Best guess is this takes me another 3-4 months to get through my entire music collection.

Getting songs into my DJ library is really just the beginning though. There’s a lot more work I can do to organize it. I haven’t started assigning ratings to my tracks and my playlists are still pretty generic (i.e. punk, techno, hip hop). Then there’s a whole process to add cue points into the songs to quickly jump from one part to another. I’ve decided to wait on all the bells and whistles until I’m a little more experienced. I don’t want to spend 50-60 hours organizing my music one way only to decide I’d really like it done differently. So the first step is to get my favorite tracks into my library.

It’s worth mentioning that I’m over a hundred hours in and haven’t really spent much time working on the technical aspects of mixing. I’m spending time creating 60-90 minute playlists then recording them (i.e. still the world’s most expensive MP3 player), but I’m mostly just playing one song after another without really mixing them together. Partly this is because I’m playing songs in different genres/BPM and partly because I haven’t spent the time to learn how to do this. I’ll get to it eventually. As with anything in life, there’s a “correct” way of learning something new and a correct way for you. This is working out well for me so far.