Are you starting to form solid DJ skills? Congrats! – But don’t be too sure of yourself yet.
Many DJs get a little bit of experience behind the decks and end up ruining a set. There are many DJ mistakes that can turn a mix into a disastrous event.
DJing is a detailed process that requires heightened vigilance, so watch your every step. From distorting the audio, using the wrong file format, down to pretending like you’re better than everyone else, here are the top 10 DJ mistakes to avoid as an artist.
Some of the best artists in the industry have made these same DJ mistakes. You are a leg up on everyone else if you learn from them fast!
The 10 DJ Mixtakes To Avoid
1. Mixing on Cheap or Out-Dated Gear
Beginner DJs usually don’t have a lot of money to spend on equipment, so they buy lower-quality stuff. We’re not hating here; you do what you gotta do. Mixing on old rigs & base-line models is fine for forming your style, but you should step your system up if you want to play shows.
What you practice on is what you know. Unless you practice on industry-standard equipment, you are going to be in trouble later down the road. When it’s time to step into the performance booth you are in for a shock. Unless you cart your equipment, you’ll be confused on how to operate the booth equipment and you’ll stumble, stutter and falter.
Eventually, you’ll want to incorporate top-of-the-line performance models by Pioneer DJ & Denon DJ. Getting a second-hand model of the Nexus 2 or Prime 5000 CDJ is a great way to step things up and boost your skill level.
2. Drinking on the Job
This is an easy DJ mistake to make that has ruined plenty of DJ mixes. The club environment provides party-goers a chance to let loose and drink till their livers give out. We don’t fault any DJ for accepting a few drinks from the bar before your performance, but we strongly discourage participating in it.
We know the feeling of stress before it’s your turn to start mixing. Don’t let your nerves get the best of you. Taking a shot or chugging a beer before you start DJing will harm how well you perform.
Keep your professional composure and say no to drinks ‘on the house.’ The crowd will notice something is off, as the alcohol causes delayed transitions and awkward behavior. After a while, you’ll adapt to the stress with sharp skills & tight sets.
3. Ignoring Volume Meters & Red-light Indicators
Every DJ’s first inclination is to twist the gain knob all the way up. Blasting the crowd with enough amplitude is important, but you can easily overdo it. Every audio signal peaks out at a certain level. If the volume reaches above a nominal limit, the audio will distort and make the music sound like spattered garbage.
Even with a good set of headphones or mixing monitor, a DJ can’t hear an audio distortion as the audience can. The mixer has volume meters and red-light indicators for a reason. Distortion occurs when audio levels clip into the red on any channel or the master mix.
The volume meters are a DJ’s visual guide to distortion, but not every DJ follows the indicators. Even a millisecond of red-light clipping and amplitude peaking is too much. DJs that don’t use the volume meters to set amplitude will destroy their mix fidelity.
Set gain levels to about 3/4 of the volume meter indicators; right before the light turns from green to red. Monitor the volume throughout your set to readjust gain knobs if the red-light indicators flash on. If you think there isn’t enough volume coming out of the speakers, tell the club tech or engineer to turn the amps and/or stage speakers up.
4. Not Reading the Crowd
Out of all the DJ mistakes, this is a massive DJ mistake that DJs usually make and correct early on. While mixing with your head down, it’s common for a DJ to think whatever they are mixing is straight fire beats. As their gaze wanders up, they see that the crowd just isn’t feeling it.
Your role as a DJ is to make your audience pulsate along with the mix. If at any point the crowd is looking sad or perplexed, you’ve failed at your job.
Beginner DJs will drop whatever tracks they themselves like to listen to, which isn’t a formula for success. Don’t make this DJ mistake, do your research about the venue, the event, & the audience before your show to curate a specific setlist.
Don’t blame it on the crowd; It’s your fault if people aren’t bumping and grinding on the dance floor at your show. Have a variety of banger back-up songs to mix in case your audience falls asleep.
Every time you transition to a new song, look at the crowd to interpret their reaction. If you see salty stairs coming at you hot like deadly laser beams, that’s your cue to avoid that type of genre or artist you’re mixing.
Reading the crowd accurately is a skill that takes time to perfect, but start by paying attention to people’s reactions while you are mixing.
5. Turning Down Small Events
Most DJs have their sights set strictly on performing in the club. Your DJ name flashing up on a massive LED screen is pretty cool – but you might think the pay is pretty lame.
DJs shoot for clubs & bars thinking that’s where they are going to land a name for themselves & make big cash, and they shun all the rest. It’s a huge DJ mistake to pass up the opportunity to DJ at weddings, birthdays, soirees, and other smaller events.
Clubs notoriously pay their DJs next to nothing, while event DJs get paid a decent wage per hour. While I was event DJing, I was making a consistent 35 USD per hour, plus tips.
Sure, you won’t craft a huge industry name quickly in the event space, but you will network a lot. Building a Rolodex of clients will lead you to bigger events – and you’ll get paid to do it! Money that will come in handy to purchase better equipment and fund your extravagant DJ lifestyle.
We’re not saying that you shouldn’t DJ in clubs. We’re trying to tell you that you shouldn’t limit yourself while you are starting out. DJ everything. If some crazy lady wants to throw a party for their cat’s baby shower, then you should DJ the event.
6. Out with the Old, In with the New
DJs tap into the latest hits, mostly from top 40, billboard, & other high-ranking tracks, to create their setlists. While you should pull a lot of songs that are popular at that moment, don’t omit the oldies and favorites from the past.
Remember, music is timeless. Songs from previous decades will get the crowd moving fast. Hits from the 80s, 90s, & 2000s excite neurons in the brain that leave listeners filled with dopamine. They reactivate memories of fun times & forgotten love.
DJs that only mix popular songs from the last few years are doing their crowd, and themselves, a huge disservice…a whopper of DJ mistakes! If you want to solidify yourself as a top-tier DJ, mix songs from a variety of music epochs.
7. Low Fidelity Audio Formats
It takes a trained ear and a technical mind to interpret a music library’s audio fidelity. So, many DJs play songs with terrible audio file format and compression, and they don’t even know it. Your audience’s ears will notice when a track’s quality sucks.
Many songs get ripped from CDs or the internet with 16-bit/44.1kHz format with MP3 compression. This is the lowest possible audio format and the worst type of compression algorithm.
MP3 compression greatly reduces the song’s file size, but it also decreases the song’s harmonics and frequency response. For the best sound quality, download all your files in a lossless audio file format like WAV, FLAC, or AAC.
Every song you use should have 24-bit depth, so you get the most audio information embedded into the music. For the best audio playback fidelity, make sure your songs have between 96-to-192 kHz sample rate. Something so small has a huge impact on your mix and the impact the music has on the crowd.
8. Relying on BPM Matching & Auto Sync
Ahh, the worst crutch ever to lean on for a DJ; the BPM counter & auto-sync button. Beginner DJs can’t comprehend why they should learn how to beatmatch manually and sync musical phrases by ear until it’s too late.
There are still players & software in the DJ booth that don’t have BPM counters and auto-sync. You’ll inevitably run into DJ setup gear that doesn’t have these automated features and you’ll be screwed if you haven’t learned how to do them manually.
Or, how about when the DJ equipment offers the functions, but then they don’t work right! The auto-sync button isn’t full proof. There are times when auto-sync doesn’t recognize each song’s beat grid appropriately.
A BPM counter will match the BPM of two songs, but that doesn’t mean the melodies will line up. The only way out of this catastrophe waiting to happen is to learn how to manually beatmatch.
Check out our full tutorial here to get up to speed!
9. Never Recording & Reviewing Their Mix
After you get done behind the decks, people may come up to you and tell you your set was the hottest thing they’ve ever heard. While that might be true to some people, that doesn’t mean you don’t have room for improvement or areas of growth.
The only way to know how the mix sounds definitively is to record it and then listen to it afterward. Most DJs don’t start this practice until later in their career, and maybe after a few gigs that went wrong.
Record your set and then listen to it repeatedly. Find areas to improve like a missed peak, rolls that are slightly off, and phrasing that could be better aligned.
Also, keep an ear out for how you could make your mix more unique. Places that you could experiment and try something different. Use the recording as a refining mechanism.
10. Amateurs Acting Like the Best
We can’t stress how much of a DJ mistake and utter nuisance it is when a DJ acts like they are the best, even though they’re just starting their career. We all fall victim to our egos, but you have to keep it in check.
Event managers & staff want to work with someone professional. Shoving your talent in people’s faces will turn people off and you may not get a second gig because of it.
You can still be confident in your skills – just don’t hype yourself up like you’re the next Kid Kudi. Keep your ambition to be the best inside. Let that internal fire drive you – perpetually pushing your skills to the top.
If people give you props, simply acknowledge the applause and move on. Keep pushing yourself like it’s still day one.
DJ mistakes bonus tip? Get Smart Quick
There are a lot of mistakes DJs make and sometimes learned the hard way. Here are a few important ones to catch early on. If you master them quickly, you’ll be way ahead of everyone else. Your DJing evolution will hit fewer road bumps for a smoother ride to the top.
Just by using the right file format, making sure the audio doesn’t distort, not drinking on the job, keeping your DJ bag safe and organsied, and keeping your ego in check, you’ll be leaps and bounds further than many DJs.
These 10 most common DJ mistakes aren’t comprehensive in any sense. There are other mistakes DJs can make that will sidetrack their progression. We’d love to hear about the ones you’ve made, so you can help other budding DJs along the path!
