Music – Take #1618

March 3, 2006

Sometimes I harp on about too much familiar music being played and not hearing enough new material at Club Salsa. More often than not, I suspect I am just being an ass and don’t really know what I really like. At least some of the times, it’s great to hear the old familiar standbys. In fact, it’s probably easy to argue that old standbys are great most of the time. While new material (in form of either genuinely new music as well as rediscovered old music) should be incorporated all the time, it is probably better to do this gradually rather than to try to shock by playing nothing but new and unfamiliar music. Who knows what the ideal number of new music is though? One professional London DJ suggested 30% as the upper limit for playing new music on a given night. Frankly, it would be very difficult to fill a set of something like 3-5 hour set with 30% new music because this would entail getting a steady and fast inflow of new music as well as digesting the music to determine if it would work well for Salsa dancers. And just what is meant by 30% new? New for the DJ or new for the audience? If the DJ do not know the audience well, how would he or she even know how to determine if something is new or not? I have been acquiring fair number of Salsa CDs over past several months, and finding good songs is a lot of work. In the case of old new music, the percentage of usable Salsa songs is often very low – sometimes I would go through an entire CD and not be sure there’s anything I could use. In the case of new music, the songs sometimes all sound the same and it takes a long time to decide if one song is really better than others. Sometimes it would take dozens of hearings to make me think that a song sounds really good. Of course, this may mean that other people may also need to hear the song dozens of times or more to decide that they like it too! So what does a DJ to do? Keep playing the song over and over again while hoping that it will catch on eventually? Playing a DJ is an easy job, but there are many things one can do to do a terrible job at it. Avoiding things like not intruding on the song (e.g. by fusing songs together, not ending songs properly or looping or fusing or other unnecessary tricks) might be easy (especially if the skill for doing such is not there to begin with), but successful song selection is more difficult and certainly not as simple as playing whatever it is that I like. And it’s certainly much easier to criticize as a listener and to think that I can do a better job.

I’m about 95% back – maybe more. Complete recovery would probably take one more week.

I arrived shortly after 10 PM. I kept my expectations low. I guess I must have been in a better mood or at got myself into a better mood because I had a pretty good time. Of course, I almost always have a decent time even in the worst of days. I’m not saying I’m going to do my utmost to come back on Fridays every week, but I think it’ll be really pleasant to visit now and then.

There was another Birthday dance. I stayed out of this one too.

Random thought of the day. It’s sometimes very surprising and pleasant when people seemingly are being nice to me for no apparent reason. Sometimes I ask myself what did I do to deserve it?

Disclaimer. I’m guessing that contents of this post are not especially objectionable. But who knows? I apologize in advance for any offence taken. I might as well apologize in advance for future posts, which probably won’t seem as rosy. I’m sure my viewpoints about music will keep evolving also.