Not buying it sooner

Amen. Not buying it sooner.

Worst thing ever was loading the wrong tracks a few times when I was on v1.4 LOL

Another was when a DJ from the previous night at club (who uses TORQ) didnt hook the SSL correctly back... The music would grind to a halt, I would hit Internal and it would play at super slow speed before I clicked the right speed and play normal in internal mode. LOL

picking up the wrong needle, forgetting to hit "lock playing deck"

yep, I've done it both. DOH.

Excellent

I guess mine was buying Torq before Serato : (

I'm sure there are numerous others but I think that might be the biggest.

loading the next song into the deck thats playing. ive done this at least 10 times.

using instant doubles and switching to the other deck before loading the new song onto it.

accidentally hitting one of those little joystocks on the ttm and the song gets changed.

hitting the wrong cuepoint and fucking up my flow.

in other words, every possible mistake there is.

+1

(i wish there was a way to lock the playing decks and have instant doubles override the lock)

loading wrong deck like 3-4 times lol!

and when djing live for hot 102.7 at the club i (here in detroit ) i had the needle lose connection and the tracking went crazy! i could not get it to work.they had to go on commercial break while i fixed it.my first on air from a club!!!!!!!
i was sweating bullets - this is when i thought i knew everything about serato.
hahah i could of went internal but i never used or tried internal and had a nervous break down! lol!

it was the connection from the tone arm nipples to the head shells.
after this the night went well.

this is why its so important to learn serato inside and out.and to always have a cdj or mp3 player hooked up to the mixer ( rane 56-57 ) :) for backup.

Telling SOME of my DJ friends about it.

Yup!!! That was a huge mistake. I have some DJ friends who were really picky with their music before Serato. All their DJ sets were really pure quality. Once they got Serato, their sets went downhill and are now just like everyone else!!!

I gotta admit though, Having thousands of songs loaded into Serato can blank my mind at times and I won't know what song to play next so I end up playing the same shit. That's my mistake. I think I gotta narrow down my library to only a few hundred. Seriously, we don't need anything over 500-1000 songs loaded on Serato. We don't! At least not us club DJ's.

Back in the vinyl days we carried our Milk Crates with what? 50 - 100 records each? And that was more than enough. Being limited in how many records we could carry actually made us good. We had to pick our records carefully and the quality of the music on our sets was much better IMO!

I do gotta agree with you 100% on this one... I guess having too much can hurt.

+ 1

I've done this so many times

Accidentally bumped the needle and it jumped to the vinyl scroll section and it selected another song Lol

ctrl +Z

I had that happen once... Was playing Ant Banks and accidentaly loaded a song while scrolling from ABBA. LOL CTRL + Z, fixed it. LOL

Yeah I have been known to click on the wrong cue point...and also hit s for stop and not knowing what i hit...

yeah i always hit control z but this doesnt always make that much of a difference. I've done it while people were singing along to the song... OUCH

and it unloaded the playing track.

I once had Scratch Live crash on me at a bar I used to DJ at. I threw on some vinyl and had another song going in no time. While that song was playing I shut down my laptop to reboot it and didn't know/realize that without the extra power supply hooked up to my SL1 the music would stop again until the laptop came back up. So the music stopped, started, and then stopped again all within like 2 minutes. I felt like an ass. Oddly enough, I still have not purchased the extra power supply for my SL1. I just use an iPod as a back up now.

Lifting the needle on the playing deck,
Loading tracks to the playing deck

Very rarely, blend in next song and realize the up fader is down all the way, usually catch it about a bar before the outgoing track is fully faded out.

how about running it with a pc laptop for a year....

after I bought my mac it was night and day...no more headaches

I occasionally don't notice my fader is closed when I go to drop the next track in, usually pick it up pretty quickly though.

Hitting wrong cue points...done that alot.
Using internal accidently hitting the track into reverse before I'd learnt the shortcuts.
Also before I learnt the emergency internal shortcut...working in a booth that was really bad for vibrations, I would mix the track in then go to internal to prevent skips/pitch variance...about 5 times in one night when I clicked to internal it was just as the pitch had dived for a second resulting in internal playing at -50% pitch.

Hate that

A little twist - I don't use the kill button on the bass, I usually turn down the knob to zero...sometimes I'll forget to turn it back and fade to the next song w/ the bass down wonderin' why I can't hear it!

I see that everyone here has made EVERY mistake I've ever made. I haven't made too many major ones, but when I did, I felt HORRIBLE....made me feel like I sucked the whole night....

I did a HS Homecoming dance, and they were slow dancing...it threw me off and I didn't expect them to want to slow dance for 45 minutes, so I blended a Jeezy song next...when I did that, everybdy kinda looked like "WTF?" and I halfway froze up....they kept slow dancin, so I played another slow song for them after. When trying to figure out what to play next...........my stupid ass loaded the SAME Jeezy song right on top of the slow song playing!!!! EVERYBODY looked up to me like "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING????????" and I couldn't even play it off......I really just wanted to go home and hoped they'd all forget what I looked like and everything else about me. Worst night ever.

Plugging the SL! into the wrong USB port and freaking out because I didn't have the install CD. Once I realized I plugged it in the wrong port I put a label on the USB cord indicating which port to plug it in to the next time.

put the new track on the wrong deck

Ive put on a long song or a pre recorded mix to go grab a drink/piss/talk to ladies - this has happened more than once but one time....

I came back at prime-time, about 12:30 - I had been informed the music was dead for 5 minutes

Half the room left, the other half i told i was getting a blowjob upstairs, and then dropped some heat - felt like a douche put played it off

wtf. thats horrible. lol!

yep I also have done almost all these :)

the jeezy story made me crackup

playing a banger that everyone wanted to hear and then about a minute in loading a song onto the playing deck. Everyone went awwwwwww and gave me a real angry look.

Miss hitting cue point #1 on deck B (6 on the keyboard), and accidentally hit cue point #5 no deck A (5 on the keyboard).

Dark DJ booths + Macbook w/o backlit keyboard = FTL.

Ctrl+Z

One of the things I've done lately is trying to loop roll while I have a loop turned on somewhere else in the song. Loop roll makes it jump fwd to that point and then you look like a dumbass!

DUST NAZI

with vinyl, each time I swapped a record Id give it a quick wipe.
so for the first few weeks I wasnt doing that...

until...

welll

you know...

now I wipe between every few songs with a brush.
learned my lesson the hard way

i agree with you on that but the way i solve that problem is that i keep it alittle old school and bring a list of songs that i have in my serato that are bangers some top 40, hip hop, rap old school everything that was atleast hot at one time so i can bring it back cause like most of you DJ's out there already know its CRAZY hard to remember all the songs you want to play in one night.

1. loaded a new song on the wrong deck
2. forgot how to calibrate

The dust killed me too first set I did - I was wondering why I was skipping.. ahaha

Loaded wrong deck. I also started off with it on a vista laptop, the tracks kept resetting for no reason half way through a song. Sold it quick and bought a mac, been super since.

I usually run relative mode, in the darkness a lot of the time trying to hit a cue (before I had the nanopad) accidently hitting F1...laptop would switch to ABS, song would jump to wherever (usually to nothing if I hadn't bothered resetting the needle to the start)

at one place i sat my old laptop on top of a cushioned stool. the laptop had the fans on the bottom and the cushion meant the laptop had sunk down blocking the vents. 45mins into the gig the laptop shut down from overheating. duh. i had a CD ready "just in case" so there was only about 2 secs of silence but still a heart-stopping moment.

and about ten times a night the needle runs off the end of the vinyl and SSL goes into INT mode, leaving me wondering why i can't adjust the pitch :D gotta start putting the needle back to the start for each new track i think!

Most of these lol. The only one I can add is loading up my iTunes without having my hard drive plugged in during the week. Got to a gig at the weekend and then wonder why I've lost all my built overviews. I do this quite reguarly :o(

Yer i've had my mac rested ontop of boxes before and just fell off onto the ground. Music off for about a minute whilst i joked about it on the mic. Thankfully it was ok and it was a quiet night i was doing anyway.

I've done that too...and the first time it happened was at a DJ meet up with a ton of other DJs. I only had like 200 tracks total and couldn't figure out wtf went wrong!

I do it all the bloody time. :o(

not building overview
not rescanning/removing files for dead tracks
not turning off the wifi

MUST.. when doin mobile/club gigs

using 2.0

ive never ran into any issues with keeping my wifi on, now if only more spots i played in had wireless wed be good

not calibrating it lol

i was at a small gig with a friend helpipng him with a setup, at like a minute left of a song with no next track cued up he asks me to hop on so he could go use the bathroom (im guessing he really just didnt know what to play) well i pick a next track just cause of the BPM being the same, i load the track with about 20 seconds left so i just jump to cue point at the start of the lyrics and slam it in....little did i know that on his cd players (i use techs witch only have 2 pitch options) he has it set to wide pitch and had the previous track pitched about half way down......so the track started and sounded like it came off a DJ screw tape for about 15 seconds before i recognised the mistake and corrected it

Letting drunk girls into my booth.....

had an instance where this girl wanted to be in the booth with me.. she was cute and i said sure.. While a track is playing i lean over to get something out of my record bag. At that moment i here this Horrible backspin/ scratch.... I turn back confused... the girl in playing with my decks...

i ask her what the hell she was doing... she said she wanted to hear the song again so she was backing the song up to the beginning... meanwhile the entire dance floor is looking at me like what the fuck.... FML lol

Amazingly, that's never happened to me yet, but it's bound to happen sooner or later.

My worst fuck up was leaving one of the control records at home. Luckily, I played most of that gig with (regular) vinyl anyway, but at the end it was making a switch, changing to internale mode, switching the control record to the other deck, and the same game from the beginning. sucked pretty bad :-)

Other thing was plugging the USB into the ethernet port of my MAC :D

Agree with every word, and I have to say this is one of the things I miss about playing vinyl.

I've done the ethernet port thing in quick setups, then when I'm trying to figure out why SSL is saying "No hardware connected" it takes me a bit to realise they USB cable feels really loose, then notice it's not actually in a USB slot.

recently Ive been not making the tone-arm rings tight enough apparently.

mid show, its just enough to lose 1 of the 4 connections...and that makes the dust garble noise sound like sweet sweet bliss.
(at least I hope its that, its fixed by a quick re-connect of the haedshell)

buying serato. its all about torq.
















(you know im kidding)

on my first practise with serato, i forgot i was playing the cv. i thought i had loads of record left then everything went quiet. i then realised the track had finished. then i remembered it wasn't a 12" on the turntable. luckily i was on my own in my living room. never done it since.

i was drunk off my ass when this happened, made me determine i will never get drunk during a gig ever again

track playing on left side. therefore, i should load a song to the right deck. shortcut to load a song to right deck is shift + right. i clicked shift + left. DOH!

CTRL Z undoes that quicklike

Worst for me was playing some control tone for someone's first dance at their wedding.

that would be okay if they were whales. otherwise, not so much.

I'm actually have an issue with the SL-3 at the moment. I used to always press F9 to switch to internal before remembering it's actually F8. With the SL-1 it isn't a big deal. With the SL-3? switches to Thru mode, nothing like sending the control tone to the floor system.

- When setting up, loading SSL, having used all correct settings on the mixer, load a song, nothing... check tracking which is perfect, serato sees the Timecode... no play... Happens once in a while and usually takes me several minutes to realize that SSL loaded in INT-mode so my CV's won't do shit... *DUH*

- loading song to wrong deck (thank god for CTRL Z)

- and the dumbest actually had nothing to do with Serato... I had a TTM56 and I never use monitors, always mix using headphones. While I was pre-listening/pre-mixing a track, I was making this fantastic combo, bouncing my head, snapping my fingers, feelin' real good about it... Until I noticed everybody staring at me, so I took off my headphones and came to realize that there was NO sound since I accidentally pushed the channel-reverse button, so I was the only one hearing it and bouncing to the track... Must have looked really retarded.

Well, I have definalty experianced most of these.. One thing that did happen to me once, that was not mentioned. Which actually turned up in serato's favor was one time, I was going in on some reggae when all of a sudden.. HEADPHONE DIES!!!!!! Nothing like having 3hrs left on a set with no headphones. Now I dont know if it was the Liquor or just knowing what songs go with what. But I swear, I played better without the headphones than I ever had. Mabey it was the pressure, mabey it was the crowd, Mabey it was the Liquor.. But now, an extra set of headphones is always in my bag!!!!!

^^^^ Plus 1 for waveforms. My old Vestax was playing up and I couldn't hear shit through the headphones. Having the waveforms definitely saved me that night.

coming on here laughting at alot of the dumb post, that people say. And that lets you know their new to djing. Since all these dvs came out. My mistakes you won't know.

Instant doubling the wrong deck, therefore emptying my playing deck.

same here :( but i sure love my sl3 :)

new one: spending 1 year on updating my 2004 desktop, to find a better desktop on roadside .. that works perfectly.

Showing up with all my gear...besides the laptop.

2 things, back when playing with CDs still, showed up to a wedding an hour and a half away with all my gear and no CDs.

Second, I was given a CD and told to play track 2 for the B&G's first dance. Set it up and listened to it, sounded good. For some reason I decided to eject it to listen to something else. When I put it back in, I forgot to forward it to track 2. First dance starts and I play track 1. Track 1 spoke about how the woman was a cheating whore. Only the B&G noticed but they didn't say anything and danced the whole song. Had to redo it for video purposes.

I didn't calibrate the needle and it was wobbling like a mofo for the first 10 minutes.

dance floor is popping, everyone is dancing... go to drag new song onto oppisite deck... dragged the song on to the wrong deck, the one that everyone was dancing too.. musid stopped i got booed.. lol recovered a few min l8ter.

OOPS!!!
Maybe I should have read the title before posting. I guess I wasn't using Serato yet was I.

I think my biggest public mistakes came fromt he 1st night i used a 57, i had never messed with one and didnt have the concept that i had to push the button to switch decks for my cues down....you you can see where that ones going

This happened to me on Saturday night.

No one even noticed (or said they did) lol

yif that ever happens hit control Z real quick and it undoes it, it makes it alot less noticable

accidentally hit my snoop dogg "deeeez nutzzzz" drop during jay-z's new artist alexis jordan's soundcheck. it happened this past tuesday. outrageous. there was no control Z for that shit lol.

First gig ever i forgot to turn down the stylus guard and started freaking when my needles danced across the record.


ANother time i forgot to exit serato and just pulled my external out of the USB port. Corrupted my whole SSL library, had to redo all the crates by hand.

The 447s get me like that a fair bit too, I only use them occasionally (friend has them on his tables) but the amount of times I've dropped the needle only to see it slide across the record I couldn't count.

I was using Itch and the NS7 last weekend when the power went off for a second or two. My Ns7 and External HArdrive went off, the music stop playing and i had to turn Itch off and turn it back on aloing with the ns7, in the interim I had no back up music. I had to turn itch on again and wait until Itch re-booted the whole library.... it took tow minutes for the music to be back on

leaving home timecode cds.

fist pumping like pauly d...;-=P

Looks like most people on here have loaded the song into the already-playing deck (me too!)--hallelujah for "Lock playing deck"!

The worst for me has to be letting the laptop overheat. It was during a wedding; most people didn't notice much had gone wrong--made a quick recovery with a pre-made mix on an ipod--but i was shittin' bricks. The laptop was totally toast--rebooting did nothing. I was scrambling for a while; had friends driving laptops in from all over town, none of which worked thank you Vista). In the end, somebody that worked at the venue drove home to get his laptop which had Virtual DJ on it. I had a 30 second crash course in how to use it, and then I started mixing with it. It was total garbage to use, but it saved my ass!

when dropping a new song on the wrong deck seems the most common screw-up in this thread, why don't yall fools just lock the playing deck?

- Forgot timecode vinyl at home. (I always carry at least 2 pairs now)
- Forgot external drive at home. (switched to all music internal since)
- Forgot headset at home. (always hang it around my neck when leaving home now)
- Forgot headset mini-jack adaptor at home. (carry an extra in my bag now)
- Forgot Mac power cable at home, (after a 2hr flight and 4 hrs extra travel, always double check now..)
- Forgot Mac at home. (doh!)
- Forgot needles at home. (double doh! - always carry 4 in my blue shure box now)
- Forgot USB cable for SL1 at home. (have a little UDG SL pouch for my cables now)
- Forgot RCA cables (have a little UDG SL pouch for my cables now)
- Forgot USB cable for Denon Midi Controller at home (no big deal really)
- Forgot my SL1 at home. (tripple doh! - Big deal...)
- Blowing the house fuse when connecting my mac, lights and sound cut in half of the venue, and my mac power cable died, had to go home for a backup cable. (now use a surge protector)
- And the usual suspects: load wrong deck, hit wrong cue, taking to long before switching from PC to Mac, having too much in the SSL library leaving me "blind"...

As the opening DJ at a new venue for me, I played on my SL1 for the first time in a really long time (I've brought my 57 or had one on site everywhere I've played the last year). I brought the power adapter but didn't plug it in, and during the normal record transition I killed all of the sound when I yanked the USB. Right at midnight in the middle of some Pauly D-esque fist pumping at midnight. Yay for the mic.

no buying it sooner.... bought mine in early 2006

In other words, ever since moving to Serato, I gave never had a problem. I've been perfect!!! He he he! Especially since I lock the playing deck.

Djing with 1 deck in a couple clubs with not enough space, and hitting reverse input on the wrong time . Deadly silence for like 5 seconds before sorting it out.

(hate using 1 deck)

Yeah, forgot about that one, did it too.
But now there's Instant doubles, so you don't have to hit the reverse input anymore...
Just instant double, cross over on the fader and load next track. Not so fond of 1 deck mixing myself either...

Locking the playing deck is no fun, can't really do quick mixing that way...

It's aaait. I just hold the platter still with my hand

Hitting the cue point on the wrong track and sending the playing track back to the start...

Not RTFMing. I've had Serato for years and i'm definitely not getting the most from it.

No no, one hand on the mixer, another on the midi load button, no time to stop the platter... Have you never dropped a tune on the playing deck? (deliberately..)

And for quickly going through a crate/album, just like you would on a cdj...
lock is your enemy ;-)

Same here!

I always use lock, if I need to do something quickly I just have the track highlighted in the library and as I drag it up stop the vinyl for a second.

I've messed up while trying to loop on my keyboard for the right deck. The in/out points are L/; keys, respectively. But I've hit K instead of L and that I believe ejects or rewinds the song all the way to the beginning.

Another thing I've messed up is trying to do the "trancifier" effect (ctrl + t or ctrl + g). It sounds like crap if you don't have perfect timing.

I play a lot of broken beat house stuff. I have, on more than one occasion, pressed the autoloop button on a track that had incorrectly autofilled its bpm. 97bpm loop on a 125bpm track DOES NOT sound good!

done that too...with transitions.

+1 57 echo out fail on songs that change tempo.

LMAO...now thats just wrong....

Drank the bar dry of Jack Daniel's, then went to play and ScratchLive "wasn't working", unplugged the master out of the mixer in my attempt to fix it.

Oh yeah and loading onto playing decks etc.

Yeah, I tried doing that after making the worst Serato mistake of my life, but I realized it sucked...so now, I just double check and make SURE that I'm playing it on the correct side. I've still messed up a few times, but it didn't hurt too much like it did that one time which was during a HS Homecoming, and I threw on the song I had just played, which had just killed the vibe when I had dropped it.

I played a new spot the other night, hadn;t planned on going there but last second got asked to do it.
Couldn't find a single powerpoint to plug my laptop into. Asked the manager and he said there weren't any. I spent the best part of 15 minutes trying to follow cables out of things that didn't need to be connected. (extremely messy booth) Even when I finally found one I was so nervous it was going to actually be the mixer or something else important.

Playing off a cd, then forgetting I was playing off said cd, then hitting eject.

HS prom, I was able to recover, but a moment of silence with these guys and your DONE!!

forgot about X1 at a gig when one of my needles decided to fail.. that sucked.. but everyone thought I did it on purpose because my homie who mc's quickly backed me up...

"HEY CULPRIT STOP THE MUSIC!! STOP THE MUSIC!!"

I really did feel dumb tho my homie came in was like "X11!!! X111!!!" ... OHH YEAHH!! DOH!!!

So true, can't mess up around middle school/high school dances. They are like wolves.

Loading the wrong deck (one thats playing), ejecting the timecode CD when playing on a cdj setup, letting the timecode run out (apparently when spinnin on DVDJ's Serato will NOT default to internal mode when the timecode ends), forgetting to throw the playing track into internal mode at parties when the table keeps getting shoved causing the needle to leap off the record and cause a few seconds of silence, and of course getting a little too fucked up before spinnin' (couldn't figure out why why the song wasn't playing when I started the record) was hella nervous as it was one of my first club gigs (turns out I had Serato on internal)

So pretty much everything you can think of LOL

But what doesn't kill us makes us stronger, these were mostly when I first transitioned to Serato and luckily I haven't made these mistakes in quite some time.

Oh yeah! And using a PC for so long. Macbook Pro FTW!

these are all hilarious, and I've got to admit, stopping the playing deck after a smooth mix is by far my worst.

losing control signal on deck because of dust build up while mixing

simple solution - carry a couple of record boxes full of control records, and change them after each song :)

+1

Yeah, I am going t agree with you on this one too. I am new to serato, but my sets always suffered when I bought too many crates of records. Any time I bought over four crates (about 400-500 records), it just got me into trouble. I had to learn to whittle my crates down to choice selections and remove all the filler.

+1

QFT!

just a few weeks after getting m447's for first time, after being mostly an ortofon boy, made a biiiig mistake.

got a 10'' for first time in long time, dropped needle down and hit the slipmat. Dug in a little. Pulled it up and needle was bent down about 4 mms. Argh!! I pushed it back and it seemed to stay where it should be.. intense sweaty moment hehe.

Also, defragging my external hdds for storing my tunes, for some reason something made them start ticking endlessly. The only way to fix was WD diagnostics quick test, for some reason fixed it up. Before that, they were ticking every 3/4 or 1/2 a second regularly endlessly even after 'safe removal' and unplugging the USB cable. Not really a serato mistake, but sorta related hehe

Now with SL3 and 3x decks, i'm expecting a whole new world of msitakes I will make ahha

For me, I always have 100-200 new tunes I love and want to play.. so for the past year i've had serato, i've been mixing just new stuff. before then when borrowing others SL1s etc, I would go through my wax and my digital and select top 60 tunes or whatever, just the best stuff, practice all the blends, spend at least a month preparing before every mix/set.

Now coming back to that, I've spent a year sorting my digital and id tagging and cueing.. got 2000 of my fave tunes of all time including new stuff and oldies in a single crate.. gonna subcrate with genres when done. I still need to go through my folders for another 2-4000 tunes. So total 4-6000 tunes. All cued up, serato incorrect bpm readings corrected, keys set where possible, correct genres, correct artist/title/remixer tag formatting for set list output..

With this preparing comes confidence to be able to be more creative and pull out whatever tune u feel like, like having your entire favourites catalog of wax on hand but a lot lighter.

I think its real important to spend the time getting your tunes sorted overall. DELETE the chaff.. tag the wheat. Then you have endless selection. You can make new smaller 100-200 tune crates for specific mixes when you have set blends and track orders u want to stick to.. but I think as a base, you must sort your collection first.

So for me, a big error the past year has been being lazy and not wanting to spend weeks working on my tunes, to get them all ready to play. So then having bad tunes with errors slipping in, tunes that never get overview scanned and end up lagging the interface while djing, accidentally playing crap versions of tunes you have have higher quality of (duplicates etc), having corrupt mp3s you dont know about that glitch because you haven't tested them before etc.. I think everyone on Serato should go through their entire music collection, put to WAV anything good and delete all crap. Save anything you like, nothing for anyong else mwahahaha.

Should have said "no misquote." Just a few character and word fixes necessary.

That's something I need to work on currently.

Looks like we all have done most of the same mistakes at some point.

When im searching for a new song, i use cmd+F to jump to the search-box. A couple of times now, i havent hit the cmd button hard enough, resulting in that the search-box isn't highlighted. So when i search for a song with the letters "i" or "k" in it, the song thats playing starts from the beginning. (i & k is a keyboard shortcut to restart the song) That is not a fun situation to find yourself in. Usually with my luck, this always happens in the middle of the hook, and the crowd goes WTF?

it was to good not to capitalise on

not a mistake i made, but it effected me. my mate and i were booked to play in poland, i played my set and he was next. he asked what he should do, so i said play some vinyl and then we'll swap the mac's over. due to the free bar for dj's (we drank the club out of whiskey) he just looked at me with my mac in his hands and pulled the sl3 out. the club went silent and i asked him what the fuck he was doing. he just looked at me. i shouted just plug your mac in and play something. unbelievably no one seemed to notice the problem and he played his set.

nice job droppin that pootie tang throwback joint LOL

early on in my career i was doing a show with some friends and it was PACKED and i was playing on a pioneer CMX 3000 dual deck and the cd player portion was off to the side behind me (in my days BEFORE serato). So its my turn to get on and im SHITFACED by this point, so i mix into my next song im readin my floor and workin the pitch bend button with 1 hand and im reachin back to eject the other cd with the other......then SILENCE.....instead of hitting eject i had hit the POWER button LOL, my homeboy jumped up jesus pose style and started yelling LET ME HEAR YOU MAKE SOME MUTHAFUCKIN NOISE WE BOUT TO SET THIS BITCH OFF ect to the crowd while i hit the power and hit the next track so i wouldnt repeat the one i was playing......noone knew i fucked up since my boy played it off so well. Learned a HUUUUUGGEEEEE lesson about inprov in a bad situation

Quick thinking on your friends part, nice cover!

[quote my homeboy jumped up jesus pose style and started yelling ]LET ME HEAR YOU MAKE SOME MUTHAFUCKIN NOISE OR WE GOIN TO SHUT THIS BITCH OFF

fixed :)

Again.

my biggest mistake was thinking serato would come through with native support for the dn-s3700.

also once having my sleave nudge up the fader on the through channel making the tone come through for a few seconds.

When I first bought SSL I think I had used it at a gig that same night.. and when a song was done, every now & then I would see myself take the record off the plater to switch another record in like I was playing regular wax.. always crack myself up when I did... lol

SO TRUE MAN, SO TRUE!!! I COULDN'T AGREE MORE WITH THIS QUOTE RIGHT HERE!!

I have a USB mouse for all cursor usage and always click onto the search box - I never use keyboard shortcuts especially with my laptop since it seems to mess up EVERY few words if i'm typing on net or whatever. So I stick to the mouse. Which isn't the best really, but I feel a lot safer. Is there a way to remove default key mappings?? I wouldn't want most of them.. just to type right now on the net with my laptop, I use USB keyboard plugged in.. I can't stand the sensitivity of my touch pad it's useless

So that was something I saw as a mistake as soon as I got my laptop - If I were to use the keyboard (it's set a little further back than a lot of laptops too so its hard to get to without bumping the touchpad) it would definitely hotkey me all over the place without my intention!! Even just using the touchpad I would accidentally drag folders into other folders without noticing or meaning to etc.. so annoying. So I've learnt to use USB mouse for performance - even though it's using a tiny bit of USB power + latency, I'd rather not accidentally mess up my crates or performance!!

dj jay b LOOOOL, it's like band gigs where u have 20 minutes wait between bands, and if no engineer or crap one they dont play any tunes and every one just standing there in silence for 15-20 minute changeover. So boring lol

mikep ahh the sleeve - this is why I wear my dressing gown if its cold (short sleeves) or just t-shirt.. I want to wear hoody cuz its cold, but definitely not worth playing in a jumper imo for this sort of problem!!

m-bezzle, thats cool lol - it can be funny if you scream and rant and get obviously annoyed at the fkup too as a bit of theatrics, post-pones the boos ahaha

melonhead looool at least people would think u playing real wax or at least doin something, more than putting the needle back to the start :) :)

grits, asus k52f cheap lappie but doin the job real nice, effects, 3x decks n all.. still breaking her in tho atm

ha! i did the same thing when i first got serato. i still compulsively reset the needle to the beginning of the record when switching tracks.

my biggest mistakes were playing strictly in Absolute mode for so long before getting my mind around Relative mode. Also, waiting so long to get down with midi.

relative mode, cue points and dicers have literally changed the process of djing for me. i spend less time screwing around with controls and more time selecting music and focusing on my blends.

You really like the dicer? I pretty much don't loop anything (being jungle/dnb dj) so I see no use for it

Another mistake I made, putting my SL1 on ebay BEFORe finding the receipt with 2 months still under initial 2 year warranty.. thereby reducing my final sale amount under average heheh

Your right that shits so chaiotic noone knows what the hells goin on anyway so theres no reason to loop LOL

hehe yep :) especially on the breakcore/choppage tip mwahahha :P

i have been using a laptop for three years since i brought it, not had one problem other than my own mistakes, another Dj i know got the Mac and was getting USB drop outs and even lost a gig because of it!!! harsh!!
the laptop/mac debate will run for years!!

I just got my mac last Friday. Just playing with it in my office thus far. Holy cow! Yeah night and Day, my old dell laptop, just couldn't handle the stress any more, and neither could I. I had resorted to burning mix cds to pull from for each gig and put the turn tables away for a couple months. (My lp collection is mostly punk, blues and old obscure rock.)

Most Mac users are barely computer literate - so you got to excuse em.. Mac was made for dummies..

not knowing about the autoscroll feature lmao

What's auto scroll? You mean using the record to scroll through?

ya lol

1. spinning in abs for the first year

2. came to a gig without building overviews for some music i ripped + shitty laptop

3. loading the next song onto the playing deck



#3 seems to be a pretty common mistake with everyone lol. i was hiding the 'oh shit!' look behind the screen of my computer last time it happened

Fixed.

often killed me lol

Having the reverse button switched on the 57 and bringing in the next track only to realize there was no fucking music and didn't realize the button was pressed. Had to load to the other deck and start the track again.

worst mistake this week: not realising that when i installed 2.1, it would make the faders on my korg nano control work backwards. finding out DURING a gig sucks :(

Forgetting my laptop. I was SOL because I lived 30 mins away from my gig. Luckily I was able to use my girlfriends laptop and quickly downloaded Serato on it.

wow serious?
that shit woulda have jacked me all up...

external HD im assuming

"...and the BEST thing about scratch live is not having to carry all that heavy vinyl around. here, feel how light my bag is!"

lols for days!

^^ you must have been lolling for days because it took 4 to reply. XD

I forgot that I had borrowed Serato to my friend and didnt realise it until 30 min before going to the club. My friend was not home, so I had to pass the gig to another DJ..DOH!

I loaned my SL-3 to someone nearly 5 days ago, it seems to have disappeared.

I was still in school and I took my laptop to the library in my school bag and forgot to take it out and put in my DJ bag. Sucky thing was that my external at the time was only Firewire and my girlfriends computer only had USB. So I was DJing with her MP3 library all night. It was strictly top 40 and playing songs almost all the way through. I was relieved I made it through the whole night without having to play songs twice.

I think my worst serato mistake so far happened last weekend....wasnt really even that big of a serato mistake as much as a dumb ass mistake. Got invited to do a labor day gig at a club with 5 other djs..im up first so i get there early, stroll up to the booth the resident (one of my homies) powers everything up, i plug in the headphones, plug in my external HD annnnnd.....nothing.....im like WFT....take a step back, put on the thinking cap.......MAC FORMATTED EXTERNAL IN A PC...NO GO!!! Ya Kinda sucked.

If you format your externals in FAT32 they will work on any computer. I have one backup that is FAT32 just in case something like this ever happens!

Ya i could have sworn thats what i formatted it as but i guess i ddint...noted for my next external purchase which needs to happen soon cause my terrabytes full

^^I keep my DJ hd formatted to FAT32 just in case I spin with someone with a PC. What sucks is that my 2 computers are macs and so is my girlfriends but FAT32 can't be recognized or shared on a apple network. If my girlfriend wants some songs she has to plug my hd in her computer. I'm gonna have to get a backup and format it to mac

After Reading this Thread I feel Much Better.
I had my External Drive Playing and My Mobile was over the Power Strip, it fell hitting the strip. turning it off. full Dance Floor. music Cut, I jump on the Mic. getting the Crowd Pumped. and turned to Vinyl, hitting my classic Section. Coolio Gangster Paradise. I was Sweating Bullets.

Running relative mode with a cracked control CD (relative mode) and having the music change tempo or stop intermittently (it would hiccup for about 15 secs and start back up around the 7 minute mark, so it would only do it in relative mode if I hadn't reset the CD player for a few songs). Then I hadn't realized half my control CDs were copies of this one (after the crack). Even the ISO I had ripped of my control CD was THIS control CD. So I went and burned fresh CDs, still had the problem.

So only some of my control CDs were affected. I changed out the CD player, had a different CD in this time, no problem. So I thought, hmm bad CD player (the screen was already not working on it). Next time around, wrong CD, new player, bam, music problems again.

It wasn't until one day I found the original CD with the crack in it and it finally hit me what the problem was. It was so bad and i was so paranoid I was using 1 deck with internal mode on the other for a while.

You can always create a seamless loop as short as 1 second and Serato will work just fine.

I sometimes do this now, but I usually forget. I was a CD player DJ before Serato so pushing CUE is normal anyways at the beginning of the song.

I hate playing on someone else's laptop/having them play on mine. At an old residency some guy got "hired" to play a 45 minute set for a big birthday group at close to peak time. Most of his files were corrupt (Limewire tracks from the look of the ID3 tagging) and it caused the spinning beachball of death as soon as he plugged his shit in.

Thank FSM that one of my CVs had a Pitbull track on the other side.

Spoke too soon, the friday night after i wrote this my laptop fucked up and shutdown completly... took seven hours to reload windows, copy all my tracks from my hard drive (11000 of) and then put them into play lists for the saturday night gig (i have now lost the friday night gig because of this!!!) where it worked fine... ALWAYS HAVE A BACK UP PLAN - EG... 4 hours of a mix on a Ipod ready to play!!!

had the same shit happen to me, i was at my spot and were doing our 1st fri party (which is kinda cool cause i get paid to be there as just in case situation but i dont have to do anything lol) so the guy djing tells me he has to use the phone and asks me to spin for a minute.....no overviews no bpms track IDs were all over the place stuff was mislabeled no cue points ect. After the gig the mian DJ (i think it was HIS computer the other guy was using) was breakin down equipment and i mentioned it would help him out if he scanned his tracks and did some organization...he told me "real djs dont need any of that shit".......so apparently real djs dont need high quality MP3s or correct titles for their tracks, interesting

PS not he didnt "mix" anything that night he was on that funk flex slam the next track in style....ill give it to him he was good at it and his timing was great but it kinda got old

I've had that before, somebody elses computer. Barely running properly with no overviews built and all dodgy (think limewire) track tags that had never been changed.
Just trying to find a track to mix into was a pain because the overviews were taking so long to build I was thinking the playhead would overtake it, I didn't know if doing that would stop the music but didn't want to find out.

also u can try macdrive for PCs, lets u load mac formatted drives

^^^ Yeah, me too..

Also having TOO much in my library & crates, making me forget to get to certain songs that should have been played at a gig....

Set a personal record and loaded 3 times to the playing deck last night. I think I played it off each time (fortunately dropped really big tracks and on the right beat) but still disrupts your flow immensely. Ugh.

Accidentally pushing start/stop with the sleeve of my jacket. I need to figure out how to make that button less sensitive.

^^ Play out in muscle shirts.... That would be awesome....

I use my dressing gown from when I was 5 years old, very short sleeves but still warm n cozy for cold venues or outdoor :)

Too cold for muscle shirts here in Detroit. (by that I mean I'm too skinny for muscle shirts)

man I can't front I used to rock some muscle shirts back in early 2000. An Armani Exchange muscle shirt, dress pants, and some kenneth cole shoes. Alot of Vietnamese guys still dress like that though

you gotta wear something that wont clip the stylus :)

i had to play in a superman costume last week - what i didn't realise is that they make them rigid cos they sort of have muscles built into the costume. i could hardly move in the wretched thing - could just about press play and push the fader up. before i put it on i was thinking "cool, a costume that won't interfere with my ability to put headphones on" - yeah, just my ability to do everything else all night :(

HAHA^^

em but ended Buying (Serato) SL3 today! WooT!! =P lol

pressing f6 instead of 6 (first cue point on right deck) that triggers the rel mode :S

I feel you completely... When you are building you library.. You are like "yea Imma need this song" and then you never use it.. What makes matters worse the min you do need it.. You don't have it..

last night.
I played a different room, and Ive got complacent with being able to have my computer to my right.... so last night it was on my left.
no biggie right.

but its like driving in europe.
it takes a little bit ... just like stopping taking the record off the platter the first
times you played with serato...

last night I loaded the track on the playing track... TWICE.
I havent done that in like 3 years.

I'd like to wear a dust mask or gask mask but seriously way too hard to breath lol

lol you gotta keep to your ritual :)

I hope you were at leas loading tracks with the same bpm's.......

Yeah, Ive become customed to only hitting buttons on beat.
I dont know why... I just do.
and I have my setting set to start @ a cue point

so, each time I did it it was like doing a real amature drop in.

just at horrible times.

mistakes keep us humble I suppose.

LOL i had a funney one this weekend. I broke a needle fri night so i went by GC and copped a new one. I roll up to the club and take apart the broken one and then fasten the new one onto the headshell. I put it back on the tonearm and put the needle to the record and the waveform goes uts. Im like shit did i cross a wire on the headshell? So i look and everything checks out but the waveforms are still goin nuts, check the scopes and their goin nuts too...so i switch with the other table and same thing is happening....so i put em both back on and now BOTH tables are having this issue. Im like shit i hope i didnt mess up the connections somehow. Im kinda in panic mode because its like 30 minutes till needle drop and i have ZERO tables, then i realise what the issue was.......had the stokyo breaks on the audio side and not the CV side of the record

lol

Not really serato, but my last gig was without a booth monitor and couldn't really hear the main speakers, so was mixing in the headphones. Thought everything was going OK for the first hour, till one guy came up to me and told me they could hear me cueing up my tracks over the main system! They must have thought I was a terrible DJ as I started tracks all over the place, trainwrecking everything till I got my beatmatching right, ugh.

'Twas a 4 channel DJM mixer and I hadn't realised the cross fader could be disabled with the channel selector knobs.

....oh wow....

DAAYUM

Ouch

wow... thats a tough one... thats like a DJ's worst night-mare..

Yeah I'd need a drink or a few.

For the first time ever I had a complete silence moment (that was my fault). Normally any silence in the club is the result of someone or something else. Either a drunk chick leaning in on me and touching the decks, amps going out, club mixer fail. But this time it was me. I get OCD and love everything to be square, look good, and be in it's place. Well my laptop was a little off to the right on my stand and I decided I wanted it to be equal on both sides. So while moving the laptop a nudge the usb cable briefly comes loose. Not even out, just loose. So the music stops and the "Ohs" come. I had to reboot serato to get anything back up. Luckily the first track in the library is a good one and it was only 30 seconds.

The odd thing about fuck ups like those is the damn audience seems to enjoy them

^^^^
So true.... LMAO!

I usually yell "DEEEEEE JAAYYYY" any time there's extended silence. It calls 'em out to a point but it also seems to lighten the mood and offset the confusion.

^ (When I'm a patron, that is)

I remember once at the the club this old man was the bathroom attendant for like 10 years, well he died (at home) and everyone know the guy, so the DJ comes out and says "Rest in Peace, Pops, we'll all miss you..." and about 2 minutes later the power goes out to the entire block for about a minute...

I think that's probably the strangest club moment ever... Considering that block has never had a power failure like that...

^cool story

i just tried it it didnt work DAMN IT!!! our help is slackin

what did not work?

The dumbest thing I ever did DJing with Serato was forget my laptop plug. Oh yeah once I forgot the Serato CDs at home. Lets just say I had a short night...lol. I have done all the basic stuff everyone else has done, like change the wrong side, load the wrong song. Switch to track to and shuffle through my music library while looking for a song. Id Tags marked clean when the song was dirty, ID tags say one song and it was a totally diffrent song. I guess you live and you learn...lol

I forgot the usb cable @ home this past sat,luckily i live 10 min away from the club lol also i went to the bar,got a drink,came back and saw te 5% battery left on my laptop lol i never moved so fast in my life getting the charger and connecting it to the computer lol crazy weekend....

I only use virgin black 100% controls , none of that MUSIC crap :)

he tried to summon HIS clubs dead janitors ;)

Worth having the 'filename' and 'location' settings viewable so you can check if its in a dodgy folder or has the RIGHT track name when WRONG id3 tag. I'm lucky I keep my stuff tight but still it happens and good to have handy, ESPECIALLY for many versions same tune to distinguish

1. Loaded song into playing deck
2. Pressed cue/ejected cd out of playing deck
3. Forgot power supply for MBP at home
4. Forgot to plug in power supply to MBP and it went dead during a set

Did u end up getting another power supply?

^^^ I always arrive early to my gigs, so when I was unpacking my laptop and serato I noticed it. Luckily the gig was only 15min from my house, and quickly ran home to get it.

^^SWEET!

the comments section is brilliant for this. before my gigs i always use comments so when its peak time and i need a banger i tag all the songs w/ the same comment. search the all crate and boom they all pop up! fucking beautiful :)

Just an offtopic question, is that really a big problem in America? I notice the clear/dirty variations on USA websites all the time, but can someone explain me what/where you're allowed to play them? I'm from the Netherlands, here it doesn't matter how many f#cks or @sses are mentioned in a song. Just curious.

Depends on the venue. Wouldnt want songs dropping f-bombs at a school dances and such. Here in southern Louisiana you find clubs that play uncut music really late at night or clubs in the hood. Most mainstream clubs wont really say anything, but generally ask to keep it relatively clean. A swear here or there wont clear the room.. A lot of places on Bourbon St play uncut all the time.

it seems to vary place to place, but the FCC dictates that, on the radio, nationwide, you are NOT allowed to use "extreme explicates", and you pretty much can't say the N word unless you're on a left-wing wacko talk radio station. even pg-13 movies get a few explicits in there, but not on the radio.

it's fairly common (at least where i've been/played at) for a lot of the bars/clubs to play only censored versions before 10pm, but there's quite a few exceptions. my 'rap night' gig, i'll play some dirty dirty tracks, and nobody seems to mind. this is the same place that has 'back dat ass up' and 'free bird' on the same playlist during the lunch rush. YAY!

as far as i know, there's no law (around here) that says that bars have to censor music. owner's choice, as it should be.

put a crappy scratched CD-R in the laptop (this is DJing at a MMA cage fight) It was the fighters entrance music... I hit play and proceeded to watch the wave-form about to run out only 10 sec. into the song. Thankfully I hit instant doubles and kept playing the song from the beginning (juggling with cue points) only after a second or two of silence the first time - which seemed like an eternity when the crowd gasps like "this DJ sucks" and it wasn't really my fault, except for the fact that I didn't have some obscure NU-METAL rap-rock song in my library...

OB1 i feel ya. Ive had this happen at least 3 or 4 times this year. I do alot of hip-hop shows where i spin the artist music. I always get shitty wal-mart grade cds. (side note: i wish serato had a self contained cd import feature. this would help out alot. something that could flag errors and could be placed in a temp folder that would delete the song after they are played. something similar to prepare but for cds.)

Ive also picked up the needle on my left deck while in rel. thinking it was in int. right during my groups performance. it was cool for a min cause people was thinking i drop the beat out while my group was rapping but i wasn't able to recover in time. we had just made a new set and i didn't have any cue points.

Not really a serato mistake but buying a DDM4000 is on the top of my mistake list. got in june and im already sending off to get repaired. its was great when i first got it but almost killed a set. glad i have my trusty vestax backup.

Oh yeah, somehow a mixtape version of the song got in my crate. had some random dj yelling all over the track. for a while it seem like it was me. could have played it off if i was looking for the next song to jump in quick

+1 to what the other guys said - it really depends on the venue. I have had some places ask me "why are you playing the clean version" and want me to play dirty versions of everything, and now I spin at a casino and they want me to spin ALL radio versions. I guess they figure that you can hear the club out into the casino and they don't want to run anyone off of the slot machines? lol.

Ive always hated the hypocrisy of playing clean versions in a 21+ room.

your can do sooooooooo many bad things in a night club.
but all breaks loose if you hear someone say "Fuck"

"I was cheating on my wife, after drinking 3 jagr-bombs and doing a line of coke,
and after i wiped all the blood off my face from the fight, I head the dj play a song
that used the word fuck... what kinda place is this?"

@ Eric N.

haha at my Casino spot last week I was playing the dirty "I'm in miami Bitch" video with LMFAO sucking titties, on all the big screens - and the sound guy runs up and asks me "what song is this?!" so I tell him and say "I've got the Clean version too should I play it?" and he goes "Fuck that!"

different strokes for different folks...

LOL, I want to play YOUR casino.

A couple weeks ago I played the radio edit video of "How Many Licks" and got told not to EVER play it again just cuz of the one part where she makes the fake orgasm sound (uuuh- uuuuuhh - stop, look, and listen get onto your position etc etc).

The crowd would totally prefer the uncut versions, but I have been having to carefully tag everything before I play it there. It's a hella sweet residency and if that's all I have to do to keep it going, it's not that big of a deal to me. I need a version of "How Do U Want It" WITHOUT titties and 90s bush now. HA!

Funny to see the diffrences between cultures in other country's. I can understand the reasons for a club not wanting to have bad language in his place, but in my country it is so opposit.

Could it also be some religious matter? How i see it Americans are far more into religion, and bad language is just not done. Here in the Netherlands we don't even have clean/dirty versions, only the uncescored.

Same goes for TV shows, i never heard a 'beep' in a TV show.

Thanks for the responses, it's clear to me now.

thats quite and assumption there

Depends on the region of the USA, but Seattle is a VERY independent-thinking, non-religious area. I really don't get it either in the casino. Even if you WERE looking at it from a religious standpoint, people are already drinking, gambling, smoking, coveting thy neighbors' wives/riches etc. just by being AT a casino!

But the management there is very corporate, and if that's the way they want to run their business, it doesn't bother me.

Depends on the region of the USA, but Seattle is a VERY independent-thinking, non-religious area. I really don't get it either in the casino. Even if you WERE looking at it from a religious standpoint, people are already drinking, gambling, smoking, coveting thy neighbors' wives/riches etc. just by being AT a casino!

But the management there is very corporate, and if that's the way they want to run their business, it doesn't bother me.

we def have extremists...just like alot of religions.

sadly, extremists are the ones that draw all the attention, and press.
(and generally live south of the mason-dixon line....Ba-Ziiiiiing
take that you confederate squatters!)





(Sorry, I thought it was 1863)

Double post fail! It said my post failed, I didn't do it on purpose. :)

this weekend i played a remix that i didnt know i had, it said riverside motherfucka,motherfucka,motherfucka,motherfucka,motherfucka,motherfuck
a,motherfucka,i was like shut n fuck up, everyone turned around and gave me the wtf look, i think it was just too much, i play any dirty versions and never a complaint but this was just making everyone feel unconfortable, my club its just 2 blocks from the beach house so you know what kind of crowd i get.

Lol great example. It's a song from the Netherlands, if i play it, i can mute all audio, and the whole crowd will shout:"Riverside MOTHAFUCKAAAAAA!!!" :)
I think it's cool to see how many diffrent people with so many diffrent habits we have on this small planet. What's normal here, can be very weird to other country's, ofcourse it works the other way too.

Oh by the way, don't see my questioning and thinking in any way as a critism to your country, i'm just curious. Been on vacation twice and had the time of my life, great country! :)

Yeah you can't be a white DJ who sings the words to We Steady Mobbin in the mic....

+1000

I am now in the process of REALLY going through all of my digital files, adding Key info, removing corrupt files, etc. It is a long and painful process, as I currently have about 30,000 songs on my main drive, but it is SO worth it. I spent like one whole weekend sorting through all of my Deep/Soulful House music, and it paid off immediately in my next gig, as I had all the hottest songs organized into sub-genres and nothing but the hottest songs in those crates.

Now I have to get to my Classic Hip Hop and Funk/Soul joints, and that will a task.

I am trying to step away from practicing mixes, and just understanding my fav joints better (where the breakdowns are, acapella moments, etc) and being able to get my hands on joints that have a certain feel or flavor quickly, hence better organization through subcrates. I believe this will help keep my mixes fresh, as I have a tendency to rely on the same mixes, because they become "safe", as I have practiced them so often. I want to be more spontaneous with my mixes.

my white crowd sure as hell does lol

I grew up and live my life without racial bias, so saying something as blatantly racist as that (for a white person to say) seems a bit wrong to me.

oddly enough in my area noone seems to care

It's probably a topic for a whole another debate.

Unknowingly trip the reverse button on the 57 and then trying to figure out wtf happened. Now the first place I look when shit acts up.

haha yah thats happend to me 2

Messed around and left my dj bag at home. It's my backpack w/ headphones, sl-i, external hd... Not a good look :(

Luckily I had a homie in the area, and he let me hold his Sl-1 for the night

not on the 57 but accidentally got the deck playing in reverse when trying to go into anti-trainspotting mode while on 'int' - still don't know what the shortcut comb is that triggered reverse but note to self - turn AM mode while on 'rel'

A is play reverse right deck, Q is reverse left deck. I've done the exact same thing.

I may have hit 'A' a few times to. Luckily I keep the left deck loaded from doubling over. Last time this happened it shot into reverse and was spinning double speed. I also had effects on. Manager comes up and says what the hell was that? sounded cool. I still dont know what the hell happened there but I skated through it unscathed.

So tonight I went to take a leak and had a
Mix on while i left. Totally forgot to take off loop1 and let an 8bar loop of "I'm so hood" ride for about 3 minutes. Ahhhhh haa manger came up while I was takin a shot of jack and was like your cd's skipping! Wasted face I was like nah, impossible. . . Got in the booth n was like o shit, my bad

ha.. i've done that before too.. letting loops ride... never for 3 minutes but definitely for 8 bars of the same line.

On a few occasions I have forgotten to take my control CD's with me assuming the club had turntables only to be greeted with CDJ1000's and a sinking feeling in my stomach knowing I will be using internal mode.

It actually makes me want to cry inside.

Clubs still have pre-setups???? Wow..... I haven't seen one in a club for a while....

In my best Kenan and Kel voice, Pre-setups?

here in the uk its normal for the club/bar/whatever to have the tt's, cdj's, mixer, sound and lighting already installed. i didn't realise (until i joined this site) that in the US you guys have to take your own equipment to gigs. usually its only mobile guys who do that here. thats harsh

The term used in the U.S. in referance to a bar/club owner doing that is called "being cheap" or just straight up "being a douche"...... Not sure what the UK term for it is called. lol

Mighty Dragon is from the Virgin Islands, I'd say in the continental US most clubs have pre-setup lights, sound, CD players, mixer and/or turntables. A small bar might not and a large concert style venue may not (which would assume the event promoter would be providing the show equipment). Usually I find it's like this - if there's a jukebox present, there won't be a DJ setup.

Well I have done alot of gigs in the U.S. Mostly Texas and Philadelphia.... BUT it may be because I've always played in hole in the wall spots? A few places I played looked upscale. The only thing close I've came to having a pre-set up like that is a Computer with Virtual DJ already hookedup in the club.

I'm with you now, I didn't realise that a lot of places don't have anything at all. Here (UK) most clubs/bars will have equipment but it's really a lottery whether it will work well or be any good

Forgot my control vinyl this sat, doh!
Luckily I had some control cd's (which I normally never bring...)

Even if the venue has a setup... Show me where to plug my ish in at... 95% of the time club gear is sub par or abused.

Pulled my worst move this past Friday night......didnt really find out it was due to my own error until yesterday. I thought I was losing audio completely on the right channel of my mixer, I had a song playing on the left....went to fade into the right...NO AUDIO! Waveforms still there, I can still maipulate them with the record but no audio in the headphones, master or otherwise. I freaked. Quickly loaded a song back on the left and proceeded to try and troubleshoot the problem. No Luck. So I made a quick playlist on my iPhone and plugged it into the right channel of my mixer just to see if I could get sound in the headphones. That worked.....so WTF! I played a long song on my phone while I shut ScratchLive down and brought it back up. Seem to fix it.....but it happend again after about 45 minutes. Did the same thing to try and fix it a second time and it worked again. Turns out I was not turning off the ECHO OUT effect after mixing out of the right channel....but didnt realize it because I was closing the effects pannel since I dont use them that often yet. With the pannel closed I had no clue it was still activated and didnt even think of lookin for that to be the issue. Closing down the program was re-setting the effects button to off. I had the same thing happen at home yesterday but the effects pannel was still open...so I caught it. Just glad it was not my mixer or a bug in ScratchLive.

I rarely post on the forum.....but I searched here yesterday to see if anyone had related probs. Found some posts of a similar problem and got worried. Just glad it was something I did myself. But a few other people might be mistaking it as a bug like I did at first. It was surprisingly easy to overlook.

thats the reason most of us use the nik39 trick with the fx routed to the flex button! :) you should take a look at it, works like a charm!!

here is the link..

ssl-wiki.help.bootlegs.de

Not calibrating it right for the first few weeks of use.

Best decision- buying the SL3 over the SL1

Slick trick.....too bad I use a Vestax Pro5 with SL3. lol I just click on the effects manualy on the laptop.

Best believe if it happens again.....It will be the first thing I check.

SAME

The one I remember is my 1st night using it and I dropped the track on the wrong side.

hitting the "cue" or temp cue key on the keyboard thinking i was in search mode... that just kills the night. i wish it could be a "hot temp cue" on the first hit and then be the temp cue trigger after that and if you wanted to reset the temp cue you had to hold down the ctrl.

I was trying to get the song on the right deck ready but I accidently pressed shift+5 (left deck's 5th que point) instead of shift+6 (right deck's 1st que point)

my worst serato mistake... playing "teach me how to dougie"

Haaaaa!.......Too damn funny.

deck on lock!! if i didnt use this i would be screwed every damn gig LOL

Other than hitting reverse faders on accident.... Accidently hitting flex button. Took a good minute to figure it out. Lesson learned with the 57. Always look for the simplest reasons first.

+1.

Deck lock STAYS on....lol Never really needed to load a song that quikly.

Although I guess some people could benifit from it. NOT ME!

Broke a needle once....left back-ups at home. Had to run left deck on internal.

Made it thru the night just fine....just sucked not using both Techs.

On second thought...that was NOT a serato mistake...IT WAS A PLUS!

Could not have done that if I had been rockin ALL vinyl.

Thanks ScratchLive!!!! lol

Like a dumbass, I loaded a track into the playing deck last night.

Did you do the step back and look at the guy next to you like wtf...

Lol, actually yes I did... definitely a face palm moment. I was about my third song into the night and there was a large crowd there, they also were like wtf.

Command+Z ftw

or CTRL+Z on a PC?

<-- doesnt even know what that will do and not going to fall for checking it out.

not really serato related. But the other night playing some jams and accidentally hit the stop button on the tech that was playing the song then quickly started again. Looked at the people that were right in front of me saying WTF did you do? hahah

nope he's right we have spun together and we were setting up the techs at one spot spinning and then tearing down and moving to the next spot. I dont mind its fun when you have a buddy to help you

Getting 2.2!! wow that things sucks! shit froze on me in the middle of a set and took me like 5 minutes to get it working again smh...*goes back to 2.1* which sucks too

Im running it on 3 setups since beta. 1 pc 2 mbp's no issues period.

I've run 2.2 for 3 gigs already, with Video SL, on Mac. No problems so far.

Ha Ha this thread..."Worst mistake you've ever made using Serato?"
Hopefully its not using 2.2

showing up without the power adapter... went to bestbuy and bought one. ... (now i have 2)

not putting the left deck into internal mode before this chick with big tits leaned over the turntable to make a request and knocked the needle off the record with her tits.

It will un-do your last command. In other words, it will put the old track back on.

pics ?

That would suck

Why would it suck? It's security if you accidently load the wrong deck.

if you accidentally load a new song to the playing deck,
- i did it on my 57 when i tapped the bpm with the p1 button thinking i was still in effects group, and CTRL+Z saved me by picking up the previous song exactly from where it left off...

(on a pc)

I personally dont touch the computer at all. I instant double so if by some reason i did load a track in the playing deck I can flip the fader over and be back on the same song. O.B.1 get them dicers and map em to effects.

what effects do you use or recommend for the dicers? how do you have yours setup?

I will try to explain it without having the setup in front of me. In the green I have the 1 and 2 triggers for on and off for right and left deck. I leave the actual effects on but the 1 and 2 decks are off for effects until I trigger them. 3 4 and 5 triggers left side, turns on and off individual effects, same with the right side. they have preset effects in the 2.2 so there are six that I have loaded, echo reverb crusher. I try not to use to much effect, only when Im mixing out a song usually. I found myself getting dicer happy and using them to much which I thought was cramping my style a little bit. The red triggers my 6 favorite one shots wether it be a dj drop, accapella, or one shot. My main reasons for getting the 57 was to keep my hands off the computer, The 57 can do all of the above too but switching the groups can implement a mistake, specially if you drink. The dicers keep me out of swapping group buttons and even that much more easier to trigger what I want faster.
I usually trigger multiple effects on certain songs where I let the ending song ride out until I fully drop the new track.

yeah i use the genre tag to fill things up, and use the comments tag for things like 'bpm shift' or 'start/end bpm' or notes about quality or other issue with tune.. I like to fill the tags up in the genre section so don't even need to search/type, just click on the genre column .. also this way, it's easy to select altogether for things like colour-coding or dragging into a genre-based sub-crate..I tend to have a 'best' folder, within a 'selected' folder..





That's the way - it makes such a difference aye!! I have around 60,000 files all up and half way through.. took 6 months for the 30K hehe.. hoping can get the other 30K done a lot quicker!! I wish serato had a SUB-sorting method tho.. as no matter WHAT you sort the files by, they are ALWAYS then by alphabetical artist name.. I want to change that to key, genre, anything else.. so I don't have an A-Z artist name tracklist!!! or Z-A etc.. I gotta keep using the prepare screen to vary it more as my laptop screen only 15" and a bit small for me with 3x decks.. I can't imagine 4x deck screen size.. I would love a button to make prepare screen full size...




I really wanna use an external keyboard & mouse for shows, but usually no room and also waste of USB slots (I only have 3x, 1x serato, 1x external hdd...).. I just try not to search anymore, for shows n mixes I just use mouse / touchpad so not so likely to do any damage (my keyboard on laptop is really sensitive and annoying and does lots of random crap from my wrists leaning).. I'm thinking of at least using an external mouse so I don't need to touch the dang thing at all unless searching





gotta have a gig checklist!!



Effects not worth the hassle until bug-free imo.. nice mixer better for effects, less time staring at screen and more time on mixer I think is better



CTRL-Z = when you put wrong track on, it instantly fixes it back !! 'UNDO' SHORTCUT~!!!! So you definitely should bother learning that one mate!!



2.2 more stable for me for tag editing, haven't tested actual play yet




time for a tit slap!!!



Well your setup doesnt matter. You need to touch the keyboard if you do that problem again. Next time, push ctrl-z, as soon as you realise you screwed up. Within milliseconds it will go back to the track u had on before, at the exact position it should be at if it continued to keep playing. Seriously this is a lifesaving feature, I only use it when i do that mistake too hehe

Well my new one - playing regular vinyl 'thru' serato without it being on on my laptop.. recording 44 khz 24 bit to get some archives of regular vinyl.. and finding the recordings are extra slow like the 24 bit screwed up... I'll try 16 bit and see what happens, but does anyone know if the 'thru' mode of serato is 16 or 24 bit?? I assumed it would be 24 bit... my mixer digital processing is 24 bit too... not that that means much

Been waiting for 10,000 tags artist edit with a 'blank space' so they all list in order.. for about 2 hours now. External hdd still making noise.. but totally feels like its crashed. It would be nice to know if I should leave it or if I should close and restart!! I guess I'll wait a couple more hours.. grr!

Ps... Get a MBP

Last night I used a CDJ 800 for the left deck and my Kontrol X1 to control the right deck. The first page of the X1 is setup for effects & video control and the second page is for pitch control / bending + cue points etc.

I accidentally changed the effect of the left deck from "echo out" to "Crusher" (right deck was live) and thought Oh shit do I need to restart my mixer now (using a TTM57) as there have been similar issues reported. Quickly called the resident DJ to load a track on the other CDJ so I could restart but then realized that this dumb effect was on!

I was knocking the effects because they have some bugs because a new feature, as well as require you to fiddle around a bit, also they are tied to your CPU / USB latency to the SL box, so that the more you do this, the more likely a USB dropout might be.. I'm still nervous to do too much that might give me dropouts.. Now with the newer updates, I still have to try re-enabling the effects and see if my laptop can handle it. But frankly, I prefer 3x decks and using hardware or mixer based effects than use up my CPU power.

Hardware effects/aux sends for the win!! When DJ mixers all have aux sends for hardware stomp box/effects units, would be a lot better than using Serato imo

MBP = 2x cost of PC equivalent. = no.

Sticky K , now you see why I don't even touch em. Too much room for error. For me DJing is more about blending than editing things on the fly

I did the biggest noob thing the other week. I recorded one of my best mixes ever.. with a whole bunch of USB dropouts.

A week later, I look around and see I've somehow unplugged accidentally the power supply for the SL3, so the power was coming from the USB :( :( I was freaking out turning my USB latency way up to 15-20 and wondering why all these dropouts lol

I laugh at people that use those Lacie drives etc that are 'bus powered' .. I want external power for all my external disks!! You'd have to be a noob to take strain onto your laptop for DJ performance just to power a drive..

So I was very happy next week later to just plug it in and put latency back down under 10ms hehe :)

if your computer is plugged up it doesnt matter if you are using usb power or not

With the SL-3 at least I know you can prevent some USB drops by having the adapter connected rather than USB.
When I first got mine I was getting occasional drops where I'd never seen one with my SL-1. Asked on here and someone from Serato told me to use the power pack, fixed it straight up.

the first time i took it on the road at my sis bday party. ( a home pc and a crt monitor and ex hd) and i didnt fully understand then how to use sl1 back in 2004.plus my amp overheated that night( funny thing is people still said i rocked the joint, i thought i was trash ) beside that the usual that all djs have done on here.not have the decks locked and hit the wrong deck to load the track on.

It matters at a wedding or a High school prom or school event.

read on a forum in here that you can gain a few dB's facing a sub toward a wall or corner, so I did it. it was set up left of my coffin and around 1 am everyones dancing having a dandy of a time until a chicks heel gets caught in the power cord and unplugs it... radio silence. she didn't pull it out all the way either so it took me a minute to figure out what happened, manager runs over saying "do something!" have never tried that again.
strangely enough i felt like with that minute of dead air the crowd appreciated me more when i came back on.

LOL! I thought you were putting yourself on blast...

Developers, please get rid of the "restart track from beginning" button.

pressing "thru" instead of "internal"

last night, had a needle crap out on me and went into single deck mixing with instant doubles. I like to eq and swap basslines and such so when I moved the fader over to the internal deck the bass wasn't there... oops! (happened twice before I just left the channel settings the same)

I NEVER play without pack :) MANY USB dropouts if you are 'wasting' USB bandwidth on 'power' use.. I want it for audio thanks!!

Had my friend over the other week and another one a month before that, both running through the gamut of '1st time' problems :)

Personally my latest one was finding my continually re-used side B of one control vinyl has some crud in the centre of the disc.. time for a clean!! Last mix you could hear it going 'chooomp chooomp chooomp' through the crud before going to internal mode at the end of the 15 mins record side. I had only cleaned it 3-4 weeks ago.. I guess more regularly will help!!

Another issue atm is the occasional bad blend.. I see so many tunes, I get some stupid idea for what tune I will play next.. only to realise as I'm about to bring the blend in, that there is no time to find another tune and I've just picked a really clashing tune lol. I use Mixed In Key to scan but I don't ever even look at the key lol.. I guess I should start...

Another thing I'm getting irked by is from when I've had to tap mp3s for the bpm, only to forget to round off the value.. so when mixing, there will be 0.5 - 1 bpm difference between two tunes beatmatched (according to display) but will really be fine.. I have 'protect library' on so I don't bodge anything up while mixing from an accidental keystroke.. so I can't put a note on it immediately to say 'bpm slightly off' or whatever. So it happens the next time again.. lol. And REALLY hard to remember out of 70,000+ tunes.

two weeks ago.

echo effect on 57 set to on on channel 1 and I tried turing it off, but turned on flanger, had to instant double and switch the fader.

I hate the dark ass buttons on the 57

shouldnt really make a difference though huh

I take a white shiny glossy sticker (usually the leftover edge of a sticker) and using a hole-punch cut out little round perfectly sized circles and stick them on my group buttons/flex fx etc. The white is easy to see against the dark mixer, though I have a 2nd gen. '57. not sure how well they would stick to the new concave buttons on the 3rd gen.

Good tip!

I actually ordered a skin from 12inchskinz....the skin is light colored, and now it makes it sooo much easier to see the dark buttons in a club.

The sticker is a great idea...what I did is just an alternative...

no, what you did was the true solution, what I did was the alternative :)
I've wanted a skin for a while, just can't decide on a graphic...
(the stickers glow in a little uv light too)

+1 huh?

I dj for a couple of hip hop artists, and at one show, we made a point to get sidestage pretty early to suss the crowd out, curtains close i get on to turn my gear on while the host is introducing us and BAM...forgot by laptop in the green room...which is through the crowd in one of the front rooms (retarded location i know). had to sprint through the crowd grab and sprint all the way back and quickly check everything over before dropping the first track. GOT DAMN!

Current worst mistake:

forgetting to back up one of my folders before i reformatted my harddrive. 200-300 songs lost :(

^ dang

yeah, if i knew which ones they were, I could get em again no problemo. But since I have no idea. I'm gonna be left with holes in my music collection.

It was my own fault though, Cause my music was scattered all over my goddam computer

Pitch correction while mixing FTW?

I did a gig a few weeks ago. and dropped a slow song to the wrong deck... not just any slow song but the orig all my life by KC and Jojo... starts off with a cello and sounds classical...

Haha my bad... at least i didnt swear... everyone would have heard me...

So I just updated yesterday, and I was doing a gig today. Somehow I accidentally press the ~ button, and I notice I'm no longer able to load my tracks to the left or right deck using shift plus the arrows?!?!

I'm taking a shower, and then it hit me! I remember reading something about that button controlling the 3rd deck, and what do you know fixed! Too bad I couldn't figure it out during the gig, I was forced to click and drag my whole set. lol

Lol Were you using a 68 or an sl3?

sl3

I never thought about that so if you are using 3 decks theres no shortcut to load songs on each deck? Everything is drag and drop?

I believe its shift left and right for your main 2 decks, and if you press the ~ key the left deck becomes the 3rd deck.

Ohh cool!

I've had a couple of "worst mistakes" both in the clubs :-s

It was a packed dance floor at the peak hour and suddenly my laptop pc, decided cut out dead! I had no backup CDs and had people standing around for the longest 5mins of my life whilst i rebooted. Not a good look!

Another time, i wondered why i was getting no audio when i loaded up the next deck. I checked the mixer, my screen, all my connections, i even rewired the mixer assuming one of the channel had blown, but still nothing! It got to the point, in my head, where i thought my SL1 box has just broke on me. Luckily, this time i had backup CD's but it wasn't until i restarted my mac that everything started working again... and then it suddenly hit me...!

I had only gone and left the 'echo out' effect on!!!

I do that all the goddam time

+15 - i never learn!!

your first story reminded me of a time that the computer decided to stop reading my external hd... not cool!

last weekend, last song of the night, i get on the mic to anounce last call, put the mic back on the platform to my right and acidentally bump my visual moniter which does a double flip on the way down to smashing into my running external HD which in turn does its own double flip to the floor........thank god i have multiple redundencies at the house but still sad to see a good piece of equipment lost to the game

Wow... what timing too... imagine if it had happened at any other time in the night... i'd be pissed!

oh... and even if my wife read your story, she still wouldnt understand why I have more than one external HD.

(sorry for multiple posts...)

She would just say well you need to be careful and everything will be ok....

To that I would say, I can't make sure other people are careful...

FML

It wouldnt have been a total meltdown, i keep all my audio and all video on external so if i have an external fail durrring a gig my internal is still there to get me through the night

the truly shitty part is when you realise that now you have to drop another $200 + on a new HD, there goes the weekends profit

my mind has just been blown... i had no clue... guess thats what i get when i dont read the instructions...

That just happened to me this past weekend! Dead silence for 5 secs! I realized I had hit the temp cue hotkey, while thinking I was in search mode. Played the track again from the start, but quickly transitioned it out.

I was doing an outdoor festival durring mardis gras on someone elses equipment, typically i have my laptop out in front of me and a midi controller for easy cues, well with this setup there were no midi and the laptop was waaaay off to the side and the tables were on rickiy cases and kinda angled so the record movment was iffy, so i throw on the 1st song and im nervous as all shit because its not the normal club crowd plus alot of djs i wanted to impress. So the 1st track is getting toward the end ive cued up the next track and ran it through like 100 times to make sure it soudns right and is matched up PERFECTLY, it gets to the point where its time to mix, i reach over to the keyboard, put my hand on the hotkey (6) im lookin at the crowd monitering responce, hit the hot key to cue the next track..........hit the wrong button and hit the cue point on the pLAYING track......epic fail

That has happened to me here and there. Situations where I'm nervous, I tend to give myself 5 - 10 secs to affirm myself which is deck currently playing. My eyes and brain coordination don't work well under pressure! lol

at my gig this weekend, i set up to close to a wall like a moron, 3 times though the night my fat ass stomach switched the fader over to the other side mid song, i had one of those wtf looks then looked down in shame... haha

So writing the above just enraged me again, time to vent, this was the worst gig I have ever done this weekend, well the first three hours of it… first off they requested a bunch of older country and I cant stand the stuff, and each song is no longer then 2 minutes… it’s a 50th wedding anniversary at a huge restaurant with 120 people. It starts at 5, I get there at 4. I walk in to the main room and I'm like where am I suppose to set up? The hostess goes and grabs the manager. 5 minutes later the manager wonders over, shes like oh your over here, and we walk outside! to the patio and then she points in the corner… I'm like wait, I'm outside? Shes like yeah, I told the lady that but she didn’t listen, this is where we have all the DJ’s set up… so I'm like all right, its 104 out, but its in the shade, whatever… I'm glad I brought a ton of old vinyl’s with me… so then I have to take a long pointless ass path around the building to wheel my stuff in.. awesome(don’t forget its 104 out) so by the time I get everything over to start setting up its 4:35 and I start hurrying, being the moron that I am, I was excited to see a plug right next to where I was putting my sub, so Instead of plugging the sub into a surge protector(like I ALWAYS do) I plugged the sub straight into the wall, then I turned it on, nothing, so I plugged the surge protector that had all my other gear on it into the plug next to it, nothing… so I figured it was on a switch. I continued getting everything else ready to go then around 4:50 I went to try to turn it on. Found the manager and shes like, no that’s always on, so I plugged in everything though another plug and was like nothing…. But I saw the outdoor lights they had was plugged in a plug on the other wall so I swapped plugs and still nothing… had that stomach drop feeling… So I disconnect the one surge protector and plug in a new one and my gear to the new plug, it all works except the Sub/Speakers(b52 Matrix 2000), so I check the fuse and its blown. Since I left all my lighting gear at home (the bag with the extra fuse too) I had to run to radio shack… this was 515 at this point, they don’t have the fuse, so FYI, carry about 15 extra fuses with you…, so they sent me to some other store that was of course closed… so I went back to the restaurant and wrapped the fuse in foil and shoved the bitch back in there, I figured if it would surge again it would trip the breaker. Ok, sounds working, then I lightly brush against my speaker stand and the bolt that holds on the mother fucking leg snaps off ( I have had these stands for 10 years and have done 100’s of gigs with them) and I barely catch the speaker before it slams on the ground and somehow bruised the shit out of one of my ribs in the process. So its 545 by this point, the lady hiring me didn’t care since I was moved outside and wasn’t needed for any of the announcements(thank god), I'm soaked in sweat, pissed off, blew my fav surge protector, have a foil wrapped fuse in my expensive ass matrix 2000, bruised rib, set up to close to a wall, the power remote for my starball stops working, computer is about to overheat, I’m starving and thirsty as hell since I was at the horse track all morning before drinking enjoying derby day … its 6 now, I chug a redbull and start mixing, slowly the night gets better as I played zero country and everyone was having a blast. Its about 9:30 and I start getting dizzy and sloppy with the mixing, I dropped I don’t know how many song onto the playing track, then I remember I haven’t had anything to drink or eat all day, so after a bunch of trips to the bar and hydrated it turned out to be a pretty good night.

But man, I was so angry and needed to vent to someone who gives a damn… my wife could have cared less when I tried to tell her…

wow, I've had a few bad luck mobile gigs too -but that sounds hellish...
glad it at least worked out toward the end.

^^ that sounds like the worst day ever. Nice job on the foil, though.

Note to self: carry foil.

and extra fuses...
(a little mobile first aid kit) w/ extra emergency stuff...
we should start a new thread about mobile (mis)adventures lol

Hmmm, my weekend gig didn't go as SMOOTH as I would have liked, but I managed.

First off, I had the night off, and my laptop was acting crazy the last few times, so I decided to back it up, and do a fresh Windows install. While the backup was going, I went out to get a Mother's day gift.

While I'm out, I get a call to come DJ, as the other guy that was scheduled, was having car problems.

Ok, now I'm hurrying to get the gift, and figured I'd use my stepdaughter's Dell 10v (MiniPC) to DJ. I knew it was going to be a slow night, so why not?

I come home, and load Serato onto the Mini, click it to run, and now it doesn't meet the minimum Resolution requirements, so Serato won't start...

So, I'm like, OK, I'll just bring it anyway, and just run Windows Media Player when I need a digital song, as I usually bring 2 small crates of vinyl anyway...

So, I get there, the Valet let me cop a spot in front for FREE, so that was cool, and set up. I have both laptops with me, and boot the main one, and it's freezing, so no go. I boot the little one, and find a jack to run from the headphone out of the laptop to the mixer, and start jocking regular vinyl.

I get away with this for about an hour, and realize I need some jawns from the laptop, so Windows Media Player it was...

The funny thing is that there was no MIXING at this point, just BOOM, slam in the next song (with a microsecond of blank space), and they thought that was normal...

smh...

Anyway, I happen to boot up the other laptop JUST for sh*ts and giggles, and IT WORKS, so I was able to rock the last hour with Serato.

Only needed to DJ 2 hours, as there is a band on before me...

So, needless to say, I'm rebuilding the laptop right now...

I have never owned an iPod, but I might have to get something like it...

ok so, i swing by guitar center to get some new fuses, the guy just laughs and is like sorry man, we don;t sell fuses here... how do they sell everything needed for a dj BUT NOT SELL THE FUSES FOR THERE OWN SHIT... the guy recommended ace hardware as apparently that have a random huge collection of fuses... but come on........

^^^ or radio shack

they don't have it, apparently its an odd size...

that's what she said...

heyyy ooooo

So. I've been Djing at this small nightclub for the past 3 weeks. I've doubled the turnout. The understanding at first was 150 a night, split as I see fit between me and one other DJs (yes. I know its crap, but the place is just starting and HAD) a really small turnout.

Well. I get my paycheck. and guess what i find. MINIMUM WADGE for the past 3 weeks. To top it off. He didn't even pay me for my setup time. (Which if we are talking MINIMUM WADGE) IS ILEGAL.

and to TOP everything off. He isn't answering my calls. Which means I'm gonna have to roll up there with some of my crew this friday and get it sorted out.

Needless to say. I'm not happy at all. I don't DJ for 8.50 an hour. fucking BS man!

is that a 3 week old wadge of lettuce or cheese?

Really need contracts and nightly pay for new gigs, even if they give you a check. That way you don't get screwed like this.

i had a little mishap with my new beats by dre pro...........so i was djaying at a bar about 100 people or so during peak hours and i had my pros on with volume pretty high (so high that when both cups on i couldnt hear anything outside not even the club speakers) and i switch over to another track but the volume was down on the mixer all while i am looking for another song, the promoter comes over and taps me on the shoulder when i take off my pros nothing but silence i played it off by jumping on the mic and talking nonsense

LMFAO!!!!!!!!!!

my biggest mistake was waiting sooo long to use the damn software. I jumped ship from the other side.

I dont know if its technically a mistake... Just dropping a grip on the 68 feels like a the darkside of being a gear whore has now taken over.
Saw the mixer in my dream last night... Fader moving back and forth, lights flashing with a low raspy noice... I am your father. I love new gear so much I hate it.
So technically speaking.... I love to hate you serato and rane.
Man this damn mixer better get me laid.

make sure you lube up the "booth-out" really well...
-and the headphone jack if the 68 swings that way...

www.google.com

You mean I have to spend even more money on lube. Shit never ends.

gross!

(no homo)
-hopefully you give your new mixer a girl's name...

Straight up back seat betty.

maybe the gear is the real whore...

Definately putting that bitch out on the weekends and working her.
Make that $.

Oh, and they reccomend CAIG is the suggested favorite...

Don't get any of that flavored stuff.....

Quote:
Quote:
Not buying it sooner and

Loading music on in with CD's

I remember CD after CD as i was ripping them onto the computer... that really sucked

When I first got started, I couldnt figure out why I couldnt change the pitch after a while...I looked on the screen, and lo and behold I was in INT mode...Dumb azz I know

+1 Buying it sooner

My new residency has a 57 in the booth, I have pioneer mixers and I'm not very familiar with how the 57 works yet...

Anyways

I'm doing my set and as I hit the cue fader my thumb hits the little toggle switch thingy, and It started the song from the beginning.

Not a good look

^ I wish that feature could be turned off. Who uses it if they have cue points set up?

Very easy to turn it off. Go the panel and custom-assign the joy sticks and other buttons on the 57 to do whatever you want. It's awesome.

Pressed que 4 instead of 5 while the song was at its peak and sent it all the way to the end.. thats always fun

Correction: used que 5 instead of pressing que 6

So track on right deck was playin and almost at the peak drop. Was going to move the headphone que over to the rightside but stupid me hit the right joystick which sent the track tp the beggining. -1 for dumb mistakes.

when that happens hit "ctrl z" t undo

Oh duh. Thanks!

Don't know how it happened, but I was scrolling thru my library and somehow I managed to accidentally drag a song to the deck that was playing (trackpad fail)

^^^ ctrl Z when that happens

This happened to me once or twice. The MacBook trackpad is very sensitive to water (and sweaty fingers), it becomes a bit inacurate.

Yeah sometimes I catch a snag too, but this was the first time it dragged to a deck.. It sucked royally.

One guy in the crowd gave me the gas face, and all I could do was laugh and shrug my shoulders. Luckily the song that played was "Dynamite" and the crowd got all crazy.

It really would've sucked if some Tom Jones or something would've played. lol

Here's a lesson I learned the hard way...

Put your iphone on airplane mode if you're gonna use it while changing over!

hahahaha! i imagine it started ringing while playing live? must have been interesting lol

Haha yep. It was my friend waiting in line calling for me to get him in.

Was primetime as well. When I heard the phone on the speakers I was like FML

lol! ^^^ You can't make this stuff up...

Still getting used to the SL4.
I mixed up ins and outs on the card, and could not understand why I had no signal. Got in a cab, fetched my Sixty Eight from home for backup, then returned to the club only to discover my dumbass error... LOL..

I warned about using Airplane mode when doing switchovers... search the forum, I told you so!! lol

baller?

edit***** that was for warp Note with the sl4 n 68

justnoize, Im not really a baller, just a LOT easier for playing 2 or even 3 laptops back-to-back. piggybacking 3 different SL boxes in a config of both SL1 & SL3 can get quite chaotic after a few drinks ;)

Also, when doing mobiles, plugging straight into the mixer saves a little on setup time. The 68 is no way a "backup mixer", its my main workhorse. however, its not always practical to always set up my own in a pre-installed booth.

About ballin', played a pretty nice setup sunday, no back to back that night, solo support for a band...
-> www.facebook.com

wait... i know what airplane mode is... but what's going on with hearing it on speakers?

when someone calls your phone, it stops the music and starts ringing in the speakers... takes one time to learn... i learned my mistake once a year or so ago..

Wow! is it because of how close you are to the mixer/DJ equpt? it would suck if everyone's iPhone did that at a gig

lol. no - he had the iphone plugged into the mixer playing a song to changeover...

ohhhhhh... that makes more sense... i was trying to figure that out... that would be embarassing. I've been to gigs where there was cell phones and stuff that caused issues, but nothing that bad. I DJ'd downtown at an outside gig. i was next to 3 TV stations, that caused all kinds of issues with mics.

^^^-almost a near Spinal Tap moment (kind of like picking up air-traffic control over your wireless system)

speaking of, has anyone had any issues with using the older mic frequency's? everytime i go into GC they try to sell me new mic's saying that mine will pick up the local police...

thats funny, but possible... I have not had any issues, but that's not to say that one day my mics will be worthless. If yours isnt currently picking up any issues, keep using it. have a corded as a back up and you'll be fine.

isnt that what my backup headphones are for?????

if you want to be ghetto... the back up headphones should back up your headphones... i have a mic to back up my mack up mic.

i guess my back up headphones are to back up my back up, back up mic

yeah, i need to get a back up mic....

You will soon realize that when you have a back up shit works fine... Its the shit you dont have a backup for that effs up all the time. Soon enough you will be bringing two full setups to the spot. I have yet to pull out the back up hd, laptop, connection for iphone, headphones etc. But I will be damned the day I dont bring an extra needle the damn thing breaks. Never fails.

i hear ya there, i have two wireless mic's but its run off the same receiver... if that goes down then im effed

+1

a mic to back up my back up mic lol.... that's a lot of redundancy there :)

It's like hot pockets hot pockets hot pockets... now they're just messing with us...

I been pimpin since been pimpin since been pimpin'..

youtu.be

Damn, sounds like yall are carrying too much shit around. The only things I have for backup is an iPod and a couple of premixed CDs

Your screwed. What happens when one of your cables goes out?

+1 better safe then sorry. I carry doubles of everything.

Oops yeah, forgot to mention a couple of RCAs and control CDs. But apart from that nothing, there's no way I'm carrying an extra laptop / headphones. My MBP and HD25s have NEVER failed me. Quality > Quantity

i always carry extras of every cable, extra headphones, extra adapters, needles, etc. i dont bring any extra decks though.

extra cables, Ipod, couple of mixed cd's, a grip of mp3 cd's with current bangers on them. Plus I always spin with my boy (nh, nm) so I have an extra mic, laptop, hd, headphones, cdj's, mixers, etc......

Yeah Serato + MacBook pro is such a stable combination you don't have to pre-empt all that much, I just go to radioshack and buy RCA cables in bulk and download the control signal, bring iPod with a few 20 min mixes (for backup and changeovers) and your set. If for any reason you crash, just wack on the iPod and restart, if your headphones go, man up and watch waveforms all night lol.

I bring a clone of myself too, you never know what's gon happen.

Watchwww.youtube.com

+1

played a peaktime set , crowds all jumping hooked my SL3 , press play on the CDJs when suddenly my tunes were at breakneck speed eventthough the pitch was almost at zero , plugging , unplugging and more still nothings changing , 20 seconds left on the left deck , use pioneers wide to adjust the bpm , play my left cdj's its all normal ????

after 2 hours of normal left deck and mixing wide with the right finish my set , eject the timecode cd's just to reallize that i use a copied TRAKTOR timecode on my right deck , same brand of cd-r used to copy T_T

:O ad it works?

*and

yeah it works , kinda a neat trick if you want to mix 126 bpm soul house into 190 bpm gabba hahahahahahaha

+1

Narrowing down my playlist to 500-1000 songs for a particular night of music has been paramount to keeping my sanity. I hadn't done a teen night in a while, so imagine typing in the search "CLEAN" and getting back like 8000 songs to play from. After 4 weeks, I went into history, dragged all 4 nights into a TEEN NIGHT folder, and bam, now I got my list.

I wish I'd done that. I don't really keep the clean/dirty tags on my music because it's EXTREMELY rare i'll ever have to play a night of clean music.
Figured I'd just build a playlist on the fly when I had to....big mistake.

Edits of tracks that have dirty samples in them, even if the actual track is clean. Forgetting about 1-2 lines from a track that aren't clean. Between all that my transform switches get a regular workout if I'm doing anything like that.
Usually it's not so bad because the kids know what I cut out and find it funny that I'm cutting it anyway.

So that's what happened to my cardboard box...
ignatz.brinkster.net

Hahahah that actually made me lol

I have 3x externals with same files in case!! 2x for shows, one for home..

I managed to save a LOT of files using Stellar Phoenix.. like, 100%, with tiny bit of corruption or something like that, file and folder and tags intact. Some had some audio errors, but seriously like 500 out of 100,000 tunes or something

Oh I know, I'm just saying I think it pays to take the time to find when Serato has put .1 % on the bpm and make it flat, when it is meant to be flat.. I like to work off the screen for the first few seconds of a beatmix, rather than audio, so I like to rely on accurate bpm to start.. I can obviously correct soon after but I just like the speed and fluidity of knowing exactly what bpms I'm working with, down to 0.1%





ROFL I try to stay away from effects for reasons like this :P apart from nice outboard/hardware send effects I know well



I'm still yelling at my friends that prefer Traktor :P



I really don't trust my keyboard and trackpad sensitivity on laptop.. I would love to get a hub to run my USB keyboard & mouse through it, since only 3x USB ports (1x SL3, 1x HDD, 1x other).. but there's not normally enough space to fit a laptop stand in for me, little alone a keyboard, mouse and pad.. but this greatly reduces errors in this regard I have found.


ROFLMAO - ditch Apple ftw!




ROFL YES I DO



definintely this is the biggest lesson for all users to learn. I've been sticking to this for the past year and reaping huge rewards.

+1

me too... I get that moment of panic, look at the time left on the playing track, start frantically checking cables, realize what happened, feel like a dumbass, throw on the next track and laugh at my own stupidity lol

Wedding yesterday - I was doing sound for both the ceremony and the reception.

So the groom requested a wireless label mic which i had to rent. At the ceremony, everything's good to go - speaker's set up in the back cause the couple didn't want speakers at the front, it's pouring rain, but we're all under a tent. Do a quick sound check, mic is working. School the wedding representative on how to mute it and such and everything is good to go. Ceremony starts, music playing, 200 people there, bride gets up to the podium aaaaannnndd - nothing from the mic. I run up, grab the thing and it somehow won't connect. Change the batteries, still won't connect. Meanwhile the rep is starting the vows which is alright cause she knows how to project but I know as soon as the couple start talking, they're going to need a mic. I end up, in the space of 3 minutes, pulling out my 100 foot cables, trying to untangle it, connecting additional cables to get a mic from the back of the tent right up to the front without trying to curse too much. While I'm doing it I'm getting soaked from the spilloff from the tent, run all the way back to the sound board - bailing on the wet grass while I'm at it - and get things going again. That sucked.

Fortunately, the couple didn't really seem to mind and took it all in stride. Helped that I also killed it at the reception...

NICE SAVE!

we all need roadie servants :)

@ dj_soo - just curious, did you eventually figure out why the rented lapel mic wasn't working?

--------- like he told the groom to mute and unmute..hehe must of been muted..hehe. and forgot to check under pressure.. so the best thing is to run 100 foot corded mic. the back up mic for the back up rented mic and if that failed give the groom your headphones.hehe... Just messing,, but I am curious also in case problem arises.

If the speaker looks stressed, don't show them how to unmute, keep the mic on and just control the levels on the mixer...

upgrading to 2.31 it seems was one of my worst errors to date.

wow... why exactly?

Not necessarily a Serato fail, but I got to my spot last night and the left 1200's RCA is completely shorted out!?!?

The calibration graph thing was just fuzzed out and all over the place, the dj the night before said it was acting up on him but he neglected to tell me... Had I known I would've brought a 12 from home smh

So I had to insta double all night.

Could've been worse I suppose

Sometimes I choose to use instant doubles for sets.... i.e. too lazy to carry both turntables :)

I highly recommend you try and run a night, or at least an hour with instant doubles. it's not hard, but it's good to know it well in case a turntable or cdj dies on you.

this is a very good advice,happens to me 2 weeks ago , one cdj dies on me,the club doesnt have a spare ,and damn its pretty confusing playing with instant doubles for the first time,on the fly , in front of a packed floor, ended up using traktor internal with autsync T_T

so you changed DVS's mid set without breaking the music. How was that done

with int? you can use traktor with the keyboard if you want...

not dvs obviously,no cdj's used when im using traktor , i unplug one side of my sl2 to plug the one cdj that works to mix off cd (i played a long ass track , close serato,opens traktor (using sl2 as a soundcard) and play the rest of my set using my NI Kontrol x1 (already using it in serato) voila !

i wish thinking of doing an epic cdj bashing ala kurt cobain with the broken cdj's but : 1.the clubs gonna fine my ass,2.ill probably get beat up by the bouncers if i do that

I was forced to use instant doubles. Got to my gig and one of my turntables wouldnt power up. instant doubles saved my life. All dj's should try it you never know what can happen at a gig.

to me, instant doubles is kind of like using a double-bass pedal for the kick drum... it works fine once you adjust to it - and saves space in cramped stage enviornments - but it just doesn't look as cool! LOL

Least favorite time using instant doubles was when I unexpectedly had a b-boy crowd on a slow night and ended up juggling/looping classic breaks on one deck.

I used a Vestax Typhoon and DJ Intro last night after I arrived to my gig and realized that the space too small for even one 1200 or an NS6.... First time firing up Intro and using a controller that small. Actually wasn't a bad set but my hands were cramped.

Couldn't even fit an NS6 in there? Damn I hate that crap. People need to learn to design DJ booths properly. Not just hollow out the broom closet, throw some lights and a power outlight back there and call it a "booth" -.-

LMAO at my own comment. Spun 4.5 hours last night using instant doubles (bad rca on tech)

Had to use it the other night due a needle breaking as well... :(

How do you fix the RCA on a 12? I've seen a video on Unscrewing the bottom panel and re-soldering. Don't know how effective it is or If the 1200 is just garbage after that. Instant doubles is nice in a tight spot.

Had a nightmare on Saturday, the club had last one deck the night before, asked me to bring one of my own, that's fine, I drop it off earlier. I get there later to setup the rest, and their other deck just wouldn't work, I'd put the needle on the record, and the vinyl scroll would activate, tried to use internal, and it went into reverse, dunno wtf was going on. Double checked all the connections, everything was right, all plugs disconnected, reconnected, everything is correct. Getting desperate, I start swapping cables everywhere, eventually I swapped the LR over on the RCA cables of their deck, they'd been plugged into the deck the wrong way.

Still don't know why the vinyl scroll would engange, if you get the cables L/R swapped, doesn't it just go into reverse? I haven't had a chance to check it at home yet.

I've had this happen too. I'm assuming the vinyl scroll control tone is a L/R flipped version of the regular tone, or something along those lines?

Trying to move the cursor with a laptop touch pad while it was left over the wave form. When I touched the stupid touch pad, it thought I clicked and caused the song to jump back to the beginning. Very embarrassing. Once I was cueing up a track and didn't realize I had the fader for that channel up. Not really serato related, but a stupid mistake regardless and embarrassing also lmao.

done that one b4... luckily never at a gig lol. now i make sure the curser is left nowhere near the waveform when i'm done cueing up a track.

Same here, but lucky I don't have that problem with my macbook pro anymore. You can't click on something by lightly touching the pad

Command Left & Right Arrow No use for draging Tracks to the deck

I don't drag the tracks to the deck, I needed the cursor to skip to a part of a song, and another time for a hot cue point

no dicers?

Pardom my ignorance, but what is a dicer?

novationmusic.com

Nope, no dicers, but now I'm definitely getting one lmao, thanks for the link!

You really got me looking at these dicers now. I assume I can use these things for effects and to control the built in sampler on serato, right?

Correct you must midi map them.

I just read a whole bunch of reviews on them. Everyone loves them except for one guy that said in order to use the NON-preset assignments, you have to hold the shift button. He then said he's returning it for the Denon DN-HC1000S. Then I looked at that and that looks awesome as well. If you had to choose between the two, which would you choose and why? I like the layout a bit better on the Denon and it's mostly gonna be used for hot cues, effects, and samples.

DN-HC1000S is a beast as well

well im currently retiring my dicers for an X1 ...... loving it since

i was thinking of retiring my dicers for that DN-HC1000S

I'm seriously looking at that DN-HC1000S. Maybe after the holidays I'll snag one. ZZounds has it for $139.99, no tax and free shipping

x1 FTW! till the A&H comes out

Dicers are cool if you just want cues and loops (efx can be mapped as well) but for overall control of SSL (think ttm57-ish) the DN-HC1000S is the way to go.

I own it, and its worth it..

not enough knobs!

DN-HC1000S = outdated, was made to work with previous versions of SL. The program out grew the hardware. There are much better controllers out now

Understood, but some folks needs for the new features via a controller isn't as important as others, u may want more knobs and buttons, where as I may just need library scrolling, cuepoints, loops...and that's it.

The controllers out now while they do more (currently) all it takes is for 1 update and they too become outdated...is that new feature that important to go get that new controller just to be 'able' to use that feature?

By no means am I knocking anyone's preference

dicers with dice tools owns! :)

So is the DN-HC1000S enough to control hot cues, effects and samples? If so, it's good enough for me lol

Hot cues, and samples out the box yes, for effects you have to load the premade xml templates or just map your own via scenes 2,3 or 4. Scene 1 is premapped for SSL (prior to the effects update) and can't be changed

I am not entirely sure what that means lol. My mixer (DJM-700) has effects built in so thats the least important of the functions

What would be an example of a superior controller? I'm not too familiar with them. Are they around the same price as the DN-HC1000S?

Just Bought Kontrol X1 Still NIB haven't even opened it yet

Realizing that the new 2.3.3 update doesn't have working FX during my gig.... I'm sitting there trying to figure out why are my ears bad.

(Not the worst but most recent)

I'm on my second HC1000 because the left side cue1 button started to malfunction.Sent it back,got a new one and now the same thing is happening again so I retired it.Since I use the DNS3700 players with hybrid mode I mapped them to control cues,loops,effects and I can pretty much map anything.

I use SL3

Last night the bass shook my cellphone onto my deck that was playing... Made this god awful noise when it knocked the tonearm.

Everybody looking at me w/ the WTF face. Probably my most embarrassing moment on the decks to date.

I learned how to DJ with just Ableton alone for this very reason

My dumb ass did the same thing at a club gig (video set) last month. Very embarassing!! but luckly the rest of my set made up for it.

I think we need to make these mistakes now and again to keep us grounded LOL!

Did that on Tuesday! FML... I could hear it well enough to think WTF, and took a guess on about where the song had been... clicked it and back in good shape... funny part is i was recording it, so listening to it back made me lol...

Yeah I effing hate that sh** with those touch pads. Thank god my mac doesn't do that.

I hate this but this can also happen outside of Serato.
Occasionally I mix with the headphones on both of my ears. I turned off the booth monitor for a second because I had people in the lounge behind me and they couldn't hear each other talking. So while mixing I was listening to the cue and the master evenly in my headphones. I accidentally turned the audio down for the track that was playing, BUT it still sounded like it was playing in my headphone because I was listening to both the cue AND the master. So it was silent for about 2 seconds till I took off my headphones because I was done mixing and noticed it was a silent club.....sweet rookie mistake lol

Omg LMAO! These are the stupid little things I fear that can happen so easily.

nice... i only use my headphones for what is not playing...

yeah lol bad habit, I should be using the booth for master and headphones for cue. But my first few residencies and when I started I did not have a booth monitor available so I had to use headphones like that.

You know you can disable it right?

Yeah I know, but I didn't even think about doing that until after it happened. I was already plannng on a mac and knew this was my last gig with that laptop.

not using serato in the first place.

hot qued the wrong deck Sh!t

been there, with only a cue in the first of a 2 efffin minutes intro... I had to just click on the waveform directly to the chorus :/

Letting the timecode CD play for 10 min and it switched into track 2 which is the selection option LOL my music was playing and I couldnt stop or control it

Rocking in ear monitors working on a nice mix using the cue(not master) monitor only to realize 15 seconds later that people were looking at me because there was no music playing out of the house. LEFT FADER DOWN! oops

worst fear of using in ear... because it has happen to me with NORMAL PHONES lol

Yup! It's like the party's in my head - and no where else.

Done that before... everyone looks at you like you're crazy cuz the music stopped and you'4e the only one in the club still dancing lol

Typing in the search bar then all of sudden your track starts over from the top and one of sample slots get triggered

Floor vibrations, if you don't feel them turn up the music

That's what I'M SAYIN', what "CLUB" are you workin' in where you don't feel the bass throughout your body?

I work entirely off of headphones, because of latency issues I've run across at venues. Also due to using poor quality headphones sometimes, I've learnt the stereo split isn't the most reliable either.. so I use 50/50 master/cue (not split channel), and make sure I see where the faders are at all times :) I actually now use both the xfaders and channel faders.. to double check I don't have stuff in or out at the wrong time :)

As for my previous comment on 2.31/2.33 - it's not much better, I stuck to 2.2 until now to try 2.41.. 2.41 seems more stable from first test but I've got to try more.

2.31/2.33 seemed to have some library/database issues, had it crashing on closing and database tag saving stuff a lot more than any other version.