Photo 1 (above): Athletes, student volunteers, parents, and teachers alike enjoyed dancing at the party tent!

Today we DJed the Durham County Special Olympics, which was hosted by the Durham Academy Upper School. It was an awesome day to hold the event; the weather was beautiful! There was not a cloud in the sky and temperatures were in the high 70s to low 80s.

We arrived at 7:40 and drove down onto the field where we were going to set up. There were a number of Durham County/City employees and volunteers already there setting up. They were assembling everything from Durham Parks & Recreation’s portable amphitheater to tents for different areas. Students from Durham Academy were volunteers at this event, and just as we arrived the Field Ops team started to put up signs corresponding to the schools that were coming and put together many of the events on the field.

Our setup

Our set-up was very relaxed as we arrived a bit early and were able to drive right up next to the area we would be DJing. We put a table under a tent and unloaded our two powered Behringer monitor speakers and our subwoofer. We connected a 15″ LCD monitor into Dustin’s laptop because since it has a TFT LCD display it was not bright enough to see outside.

Many people were quite interested in the equipment we used and about our business in general. We enjoyed explaining how the speakers work and how we got started as school & event DJs.

Photo 2 (above): Nick and Dustin selecting a song to play after setting up their equipment.

Dancing!

The school set up a small stage platform (raised about 6 inches off the ground) in front of our tent for people to dance on. This worked well; though afterwards we realized it would have been better (more stable) to set the platforms directly on the ground.

The athletes and student volunteers were at our dance area throughout the day and we could see were definitely enjoying breaking it down to our music. We played a wide range of popular music, starting out with some pop rock and a lot of techno (Calabria by Enur) and then got into classic (In da club by 50 Cent) and more modern (Soulja Boy) hip hop hits. We played a bunch of icebreaker-type songs (Macarena), a song from High School Musical, La Vida Loca, Go DJ (we seem to always play that), and a Spice Girls song. So clearly, there was a range of music represented.

Overall, I felt we did a good job with the music selection, really keeping a pumped up vibe for most of the time people were dancing.