I have been planning on recording a new set for quite some time now. I’ve gone through the normal preparation procedures of picking tracks and trying to find ones that fit well together. Basically what I am doing is trying to find a way to make the set sound the way I like sets to sound. A good set however is not made by the DJ for himself but for all the people he plans to introduce the set to. This got me thinking.
If you are in a hurry or a bit too much ADHD, you can jump over the babble to the “real” content of this post.
I know pretty well what makes a set good, or better, spectacular, in my opinion, but I realized that I really do not know that well what other people hold in high regard. During the years practicing the art of mixing, I have been pondering this issue quite much, but to date, have not found any decent logic behind it.
Don’t get me wrong here, I am sure there is logic to be found. It’s just that to my understanding people seem to judge DJ sets in many different ways and my way seems not to be the most common one. I have quite tight criteria which the set has to fulfill in order for me to like it. These are mainly: decent beat mixing, no harsh key clashes, decent track selection and an all-around good flow and structure. I have noticed that most of the time DJs here seem to only concentrate in the beat mixing and track selection, which is quite a shame as, at least in my opinion, those do not really help the least bit, if the set fails miserably in the other areas. My understanding is also that the crowd seems to follow these preferences, which is quite understandable as they are the most obvious ways to judge a set.
So having said all that, I am challenging you to post your favorite sets to the comments section below. I would also love to know why you like the set(s) you posted. What makes the sets so good, what makes them stand out? To make it interesting and to give you some motivation to post stuff, I will reward one lucky participant with a brand new Concussion T-shirt (hope that person is size L, because I have one of those already “in stock” 
)! Dig deep into your archives, take a pen and a piece of paper and start ranking!
3 Comments
I’ve always thought that a good DJ set is like a journey. Not necessarily like a journey from point A to B, but rather like a journey inside your mind. DJ set should provide the listener a setting to experience a wide spectrum of emotions – in other words, you can’t get higher if you’ve never been low.
For this reason my all time favorite Concussion set is Autumn Breeze because it does exactly this and even manages to create a wistful sense of separation when the aural journey finally reaches its end. Naturally the technical side matters, but only up to a point – the technical side IMHO goes more into the “needs to be good enough so you won’t notice it” bin in my book, at the end of the day it’s all about the chemistry the tracks create by becoming more than the sum of its parts.
PS: funny coincidence, my T-shirt size is L
Thanks for the comment and the kind words! Nice that the first set mentioned here is one of my creations.
Journey is a really good word to what I tried to describe with a good flow and structure. I also just recently learned that most people find it really tiring if there are none of these highs and lows in the set that you mentioned but rather its just 110% full throttle.
I’d still like to point out that I am not only looking for comments about my or our sets, but more broadly about all the sets ever made by anyone. The only criteria is that it is really, really good.
Had to remove the Disqus commenting system from the site as it had some problems with Facebook. Hope this new system works better. Might add a Facebook commenting system here at some point, but lets see.