Recording live played sets is an essential part of DJ’ing for various purposes. They are called ” DJ Sets” or “DJ Mix Sets”.
A DJ benefits from his or her recorded sets in two major ways.
First, as a DJ, by listening to your own performance, you can easily judge yourself and see if you need to improve your skills or the way you mix or your selection of music is right or wrong. Believe me, during live performance, there is no way you can find out any of these.
So, if you haven’t done yet, start recording your sets. It’s easy using your DJ software since most full versions have the recording option available.
Next step.. What do we do with our “recorded DJ sets” ?
I strongly recommend keeping your recording time not exceeding 70 mins so you can write it on CD if needed.
There are many music sharing services like SoundCloud, Mixcloud, Play.fm and Mixcrate which you can upload your musical work and share it with millions.
Also Facebook is a great way to publicize your mix sets and let others listen. Don’t forget, a DJ set is always your most effective business card.
Converting a recorded mix session into a video and uploading on YouTube would also get a lot of attention. Use a program like Windows Movie Maker which is free and edit your music videos easily.
As I mentioned at the beginning, recording your DJ sets will help you improve your DJ’ing and promote yourself online to turn it into a succesful career.
Before wrapping up this post, some technical advise. Make sure recording and sound quality (encoding level ) is high. I personally prefer 256 or 320 kbps encoding level and saving as wav format for my DJ mix sets as it is lossless. Sound is important for good music !