dustin yuengling

Photo 1 (above): our DJ setup outside for a HS back-to-school dance.

Photo 2 (above): our effect lights inside in a small auditorium for a middle school dance.

Two minutes after I got off the phone with Dustin last night, he called me back, excited and half-yelling:

“Nick, get the van! We’re DJing tonight at my school– they don’t have a DJ!”

I grabbed a nice shirt, threw on my shoes, yelled to my brother to jump in the car, and drove the van over to Dustin’s house. He had already started bringing the equipment downstairs from his bedroom and had most of it in his living room.

“Just throw it in the van, it doesn’t matter where it goes. It’s almost 6:30, and the dance starts at 7:00!”

We arrived at Dustin’s school 15-20 minutes later. As we pulled in, a swarm of students and parents enveloped our van, cheering with appreciation that we were able to make it on such short notice. Dustin hung out the window, yelling, “Okay everyone, everything goes in, just put it by the stage.”

Everyone brought the equipment in fairly quickly, and I parked the van while Dustin and my brother started to set up. When I ran in, I saw that they had the speaker stands and the light stand set up. I started setting up the console, and it was not long before we had all our equipment set up.

At 7:10, we started the music, which was welcomed by cheering from the crowd. It was time to get the dance started; less than 10 minutes late was not bad at all.

Here are some observations:

• There were a lot of requests. Seriously, every 2 minutes someone would walk over and request a song. This was perfectly fine, but in many cases we would tell people, “We already have that song in the playlist, and it’s coming up in 15 minutes.”
• The dance was 2 and a half hours, which is just about as long as most of the dances we do, but the time seemed to pass really quickly.
• We still had the equipment and the playlist ready from last weekend’s dance at my school. The music was already fairly organized, so we just had to adapt the music selection to the middle school audience.

As we were packing up, Dustin and I were talking to the dance’s organizer. She told us that when she realized that she didn’t have a DJ, she was thinking through her possibilities and thought of sending her husband to bring her stereo from home, but someone suggested that she call us instead. She later wrote in an email to us:

“It says a lot about you that you were willing to react so quickly to help the school and your fellow students.”

Dustin replied, “Hopefully all the students had as great a time as we did!”

This past weekend, Dustin and I disc jockeyed a high school dance. Here are my observations and reflections regarding the dance:

• There were not many people there until about 1 hour into the dance, which was probably due to the fact that many people arrived late after going out to dinner.
• We are gradually getting more organized. I had to drive back to Dustin’s house because we left the screws for the component rack and the lightstand on his bed. As a result of this, we decided (in the future) to keep our wires, cables, and small components (light hardware, mics, power strips, screws, etc.) in a medium-sized Rubbermaid bin.
• We did well setting up, especially considering that Dustin had an injured shoulder and was unable to lift anything. I brought my brother to help us set up.
• The tech room in the auditorium was locked and we were unable to find a key, so we didn’t get to use the disco ball. This was not a problem, as our lights worked very well.
• As far as music, we learned that you never know what people are going to request and what you will end up playing, so you need all your music on CDs. There were several songs that people wanted us to play, but they were on the laptop! People requested salsa, spanish songs, 60s rock songs, and others. We had the songs, but we couldn’t play them. In any case, next time we’ll bring blank CDs.

Before we DJ our next event, we will probably need to rethink our speaker configuration. We usually use our 2 15″ speakers on 1 amplifier, and our 4 10″ speakers “daisy-linked” on the other. This weekend, we tried giving each 15″ speaker its own amplifier, and not using the 10-inchers. This did not work too well, as we were pushing the big speakers on power (ok, well Dustin says we were fine) and the quality was not as good as it could have been. Before our next dance I will talk about this in detail.