middle school

On Friday the Dynamic DJ crew headed out to STM to DJ the third dance of the year, the St. Patrick’s Day dance. We arrived and were greeted by a slew of enthusiastic students and staff. We arrived around 6:30PM and were all set up ready to go at 7:00 which was the time the dance started. The event was mostly populated by 6th & 7th graders. There was a very low turn out of 8th graders at this event. We were told that the 8th graders currently think they’re “too cool for school” because they are graduating this year.

The dance really got started at around 7:30 when mostly everyone who was coming was there. This was when we really started to play the jams.

New equipment

This is actually the first event that we used our new equipment which included 2 new full range PA cabinets (Behringer Eurolive B215A) and a new whopping 18″ subwoofer cabinet (Behringer Eurolive B1800X Pro). They worked absolutely great! We love them! They filled the gym with crystal clear sound which was absolutely amazing. The students seemed to enjoy the new equipment as well. We used our standard lighting tree which consists of two dance effect lights and two DMX intelligent lights.

Requests

We got many requests for a whole array of different songs. Most requests were for the Top 40 hits that are out now. We enjoy receiving requests as they give us a chance us to play what the audience wants to hear. At the same time, we use our best judgment as to whether each song is appropriate for the event.

Conclusion

Overall, we believe that everyone had a great time at the event including the students, staff, and parent chaperones. This is the last dance we will be doing at STM this year. Next year we will probably be asked back which is a great honor for us and especially for me because this is the middle school that I graduated from.

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!”