How Did You Get Your First Club Gig?
How Did You Get Your First Club Gig? Posted on: 19.03.2013 by Meaghan Machold I'm looking for some stories of how you got your first club gig. And I'm not talking about a basement of a friend, or a frat party. An actual club that payed you money to play music. How did you get in, who did you talk to, what kind of club was it?I started out as a barback at this club in Philly. I've been DJing frat parties for years in college, and our DJ at the club quit on the spot because of some issue with the owners. I told the owners I DJ, and I was booked for the next Thursday. There were about 20 people there, and it was kind of awkward, but I got paid to play music for 4 hours. Now I DJ their Saturday evening s, and have made connections with other bar owners/club managers. | |
| Valeri Holderness 19.03.2013 |
Originally Posted by Childrenatplay
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| Earlean Mundstock 19.03.2013 |
Originally Posted by SwedeDreams
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| Valeri Holderness 19.03.2013 |
Originally Posted by djmetalgear
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| Shawn Vanhaitsma 19.03.2013 |
Originally Posted by Jayvee
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| Meaghan Machold 20.03.2013 |
Originally Posted by IznremiX
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| Meaghan Machold 19.03.2013 | I'm looking for some stories of how you got your first club gig. And I'm not talking about a basement of a friend, or a frat party. An actual club that payed you money to play music. How did you get in, who did you talk to, what kind of club was it? I started out as a barback at this club in Philly. I've been DJing frat parties for years in college, and our DJ at the club quit on the spot because of some issue with the owners. I told the owners I DJ, and I was booked for the next Thursday. There were about 20 people there, and it was kind of awkward, but I got paid to play music for 4 hours. Now I DJ their Saturday evening s, and have made connections with other bar owners/club managers. |
| Ahmad Kaumeyer 20.03.2013 | The guy who owns the club of choice for me and my friends is on the same course as me at Uni. He collaborates with the Uni Music Society (which I run) and I asked him if we could hold a social on one of his quiet evening s. He said yes. Two weeks later I asked if I could play every Friday evening and I'm now a resident! (Okay it's a quiet evening and I'm second room, but you gotta start somewhere?! No house parties, no gear ...) |
| Merlyn Birchfield 20.03.2013 | Sorry, bit of a long read as I chopped it out of a blog post I wrote. I became interested in DJing at a time when my “scene of interest” was pretty much dead as a doornail, at least on a local level. Unlike many of my predecessors, I became interested in DJing because of my prior interest in production as opposed to the other way around. When I became interested in the performance side of things, I started looking for places to play… and seemed to keep finding only remnants of a scene that once existed. I missed my opportunity. Don’t get me wrong; it’s not like my town was ever a mecca for evening life. But I had at least hoped to find something. I tracked down the few events that I could find (MySpace was starting to become popular, and I used that in combination with some local message boards that were still hanging on). I started meeting and talking to people, learning a part of my city’s history that I had never been previously aware of. Once upon a time, the clubs were always packed and they didn’t all just play Top 40 radio music. There were illegal raves, and it wasn’t a struggle to get people out to them. There was apparently this inherent love for music and sense of community in the scene that I was not able to observe by the time I got to it. Now, it’s probably fair to say that some of these stories were probably rosy retrospection. (Things are never like “the good old days”.) But the more old flyers, pictures, and stories I loaded into my brain, the more I realized that it wasn’t just that. There was a scene once, and it disappeared. This was due to a number of reasons, and you might get a different answer depending on who you ask. But suffice it to say, a recurring theme seemed to be that a few main “legs” of the support structure moved away or lost interest, lines got drawn in the sand, and the scene was left for dead. I wasn’t happy to have missed the boat, and I wanted to see if I could do anything about it. There was a reasonably decent hip-hop and Top 40 scene at the time, but nothing centered around what I was interested in… which, at the time, was trance and house music. I started trying to find other like-minded individuals to see if there was some way to get something going, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to do it. Sure, MySpace was coming around, but the idea of social networking the way we believe about it today was still a bit new and weird. In the meantime, I scraped together some (very ghetto) gear and started playing house parties for my buddies to get used to the idea of mixing in front of people. I had heard of a weekly electronic music event from a few years prior that was pretty successful at a small dive bar. I went there a few times and started talking to the bartender, who also happened to be in charge of events and general management of the place. As it turned out, she was a super nice person who was involved in all sorts of local art and music stuff. She noticed that I was just as interested in helping to stimulate the local music scene as she was, and decided to let me start playing some Tuesday evening s along with a friend of mine who was around during the scene collapse. I gathered as many of my friends together as I could to support these evening s, and usually managed to have 10 or 20 people there each time. It wasn’t much, but it was something… and we were having a good time. From there, it led to more and more gigs and more involvement in the scene. |
| Valeri Holderness 19.03.2013 |
Originally Posted by Childrenatplay
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| Earlean Mundstock 19.03.2013 |
Originally Posted by SwedeDreams
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| Georgie Lukowiak 19.03.2013 | Anybody know of any clubs looking for 14 & 17 year olds to DJ at ? Because we would gladly accept the offer |
| Valeri Holderness 19.03.2013 |
Originally Posted by djmetalgear
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| Shawn Vanhaitsma 19.03.2013 |
Originally Posted by Jayvee
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| Alease Fitch 20.03.2013 | Local promoters tweeted "We are getting ready for the next edition of ZOMAAR! Who would you like to see play there?" So I replied "I'd love to see myself play there! :P" Man, I can't believe that actually worked... |
| Luciano Hyppolite 20.03.2013 | I uploaded a couple of mixes in ableton that were very well planed. A friend of mine invited me to play ay a party he held. He shared my set on the event on facebook. A promoter saw the mixtape and contacted me to play in a pretty awesome club in Buenos Aires the same evening as my friends partty xD. Right away I told my friend I wasnt playing in his party and went that saturday to play at the club. It was my first live presentation ever, even before any house party! I did not even had a laptop, I had to borrow one from my brother! Anyways, I finished up playing the closing set at 6am! crappy time but for the first time ever playing in such a respectable club it was awesome. Besides I even got payed. |
| Meaghan Machold 20.03.2013 |
Originally Posted by IznremiX
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| Valeri Holderness 20.03.2013 | I entered a dj contest someone in my city was hosting. It was 2 weeks after I became legal age so it was actually one of my first times being at a club |
| Hayden Raugh 19.03.2013 | pretty much the same as you did. i worked behind the bar at the club, i kept harping on to the managers to let me do a bit of djing, even a warm up set for the regular dj (who i knew i was better then because i realised what mixing was) one day about a hour before i set of to work i get a phone call from the manager....'korin?? ... yes? ... 'your on the rota toevening to work till close, would u mind djing till close instead?' that was it the next week they had got rid of the other dj and became their in house resident. |
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