5 Steps To Succeed In The Wedding Dj World
Creative professionals everywhere struggle with the challenges of
getting things finished.
Successful creative professionals beat those challenges. This is a
sentiment that should resonate with the bedroom DJ.
With the rise
of affordable music equipment there has been a flood of people trying to
get into this field and the competition is fierce. To become a successful wedding DJ you must learn the skills of
self-motivation to survive in this competitive field.
1. Show up!
To succeed,
you have to turn up. When you’re a wedding DJ, maybe doing it part time, it’s doubly important, because
nobody else is making you do it and you’re busy anyway. But if you don’t
put the hours in, the rest of it comes to nothing. Professionals do;
wannabes just think about it.
The best way is simply to plan a certain number of hour for
production into your days, weeks and months, and stick to it. Jobs have
set hours, and this is a job. If you’re physically there, ready to
start, you’ve already won half the battle. id like to add something off topic i myself have been down all the professional roads from Djing small bars to venues packed with over 3000 people. Keeping that in mind the most efficient way of getting payed and living a good live while only Djing would be that i highly suggest you stick to Djing weddings as your mane souse of dj work. Is a club going to pay you $1000 a night to dj...No never.
2. Fight resistance
Ok stop looking at the pic!! Resistance is what makes you sort through your sample library
recategorizing all of your loops and hits, instead of working on your
tune. Resistance is what makes your hand move towards
the Facebook
bookmark to check your page, instead of working on your promo or marketing.
Resistance is what makes you suddenly decide to rearrange your studio to
put the speakers in a different place, instead of working on your promo…
In short, resistance is what makes you do something else that feels
important but that actually isn’t, at the expense of doing what you’re
really meant to be doing – creating. It’s particularly insidious because
you feel like you’re working, but in fact you’re actively looking for
anything but your important creative work to do!
A simple way to trap this creeping disease is to
log exactly what you do for a few of your daily promotional sessions,
and see how much time you actually spent working on getting gigs. Once you’ve
identified the apparently urgent but really unimportant stuff, the
“instant gratification” tasks that you’ve been doing instead of the
real, painful, worthwhile job of creating, you can start doing something
about changing your habits
3. Finish what you start, then start again (for the music producer example)
How many times have you had somebody tell you excitedly about
an amazing new tune they’ve made, right up until the point that you ask
to hear it, at which point they shuffle uncomfortably, muttering
something like
“it’s not quite finished yet…” or “I need to master it
first…”. How many wannabe producers do you know who never seem to finish
anything at all?
Signed bands traditionally had little choice but to finish their
records on time, with obligation-ridden advances, studio time booked,
and record company execs breathing down their necks. Even then, there
are legendary stories of albums taking years to finish (or never getting
finished at all). If “real” bands sometimes never finish their work,
what chance do effectively self-employed producers have?
You have every chance, as long as you set yourself deadlines and stick to them –
come what may.
Tasks tend to expand to fit the available time. Deadlines are your
friend. Professionals produce, release, and move on. Wannabes
procrastinate and spend more time coming up with excuses than delivering
and getting going on the next project.
4. Accept failure as a necessary part of success
The answer is to accept that to get that success, you have to first
miss the mark. You have to produce Promo that nobody ends up liking.
Hell, you have to produce promo that even
you end up not liking!
Every time you miss the mark, treat it as training – or if you like,
as “nudging your guided missile closer to its target”. We always learn
more from our failures than our successes. Without the little “nudges”
that each almost-success gives us, we simply can’t hit our final,
successful goal.
With modern music distribution, there’s a real hidden bonus here. As
you release post after post, piling them up on Facebook and
cross-promoting them on your blog site and so on, remember this is free promotion you’re actually building up a
back catalogue. And believe me, as soon as you have one success, a
lot
of people will want to know about that back catalogue. 95% of people now days with google your company name. so remember the more stuff that's on the net. the better. So treat your
early efforts as banking stuff up for future success if you like.
5. Accept that it’s natural to lack confidence
We are each programmed to think than anyone, everyone, can do
stuff better than us. That simply because we’re involved, anything we do
is bound to fail.
Writers feel it when they face a blank page, artists with a blank
canvas. DJs feel it as they warm up a night,
scared out of their wits.
Producers feel it in Ableton Live with a new, empty project and no
ideas. All feel like they’re just not up to the task.
Let me give you an example. I have had a long, fulfilling career in being a wedding DJ. But, even when I was ten full years into DJing as a
professional, I remember realising that I’d never lost the feeling that I
wasn’t really a DJ, than I was a fraud, and that if anyone
actually came up to me while I was playing – I mean, just one person out
of a packed, happy dancefloor of hundreds – and told me so, I would
crumple and feel uncomfortable the rest of the nigh. Such was my lack of confidence. It’s
much better now, but it’s still there. And I’m very normal (I think!).
Here’s another thing: While it’s unlikely anyone will ever tell you
you’re a fraud for playing others music, also No-one will say “you’re
good enough, welcome to the club”. You have to tell yourself it’s OK,
and you have to do it daily.
How many DJ do you hear saying they can’t stand to listen to
their own mix, or read their own reviews? Do you ever wonder why that
is? It’s because they have that natural low confidence in their own
abilities. Success and money don’t cure it, either. You just have to
accept it’s part of the creative mind.
Finally…
A wonderful thing happens when you turn up, blindly believe in
yourself and push on. They say “God loves a trier”, and it’s true – when
you get going, the stars seem to move in your favor, synergies happen,
your mind – having beaten resistance – slips into creative mode, stuff
you can’t explain begins to go your way, and out of nothing – painfully,
slowly and precariously – good stuff evolves. Good luck! and remember Promo, Promo, Promo that's where you start.
We hope you take this advice into mind when booking your wedding DJ.
Please visit us at: http://www.thedjgroup.net/
