For those of you who don’t know DVJing it’s DJing but instead of using just Music you play DVD’s so the video’s of the tracks appear on screens & walls. The concept is incredible however it’s a lot more stressful than solely focusing on the music as if your playing commercial music the video’s are designed for MTV and can be as short as 2mins instead of the usuall 3/4. This is a major hassle with dance music where normally you’d have 6/8 mins of a track for the outro. The way you get around this is with lots of loops and using the “Hot Keys” – ocasionall in pre programmed forward direction to skip the middle of the song (the talky bit) rather than the way they are usually used to go back to a point in a track.

So why hasn’t DVJing taken off better than it has? Well there is several key points.

1. Buying the VJ tracks is expensive and a very niche market. You can’t get all the tracks you want… Some tracks will never had a video made so you’ll have to make your own graphics for it.

2. It’s an expensive set up for the Club 21 has Six decks in the DJ box. 2DVJ, 2CD and 2 Vinyl. Pionner players – DVJ-X1 RETOURE RRP at 3999Euro, really you can buy them ex vat for 2200Euro, Still pricy since you need at least two decks and three would be preferable. And then the Plasma’s and projectors you’ll need to surround the club. In this case 14 40” plasma’s and 3 projectors.

3. There’s no good skimping on DJ’s when you have the gear, an amature will definately go off like a fart in Mass! Why? Well some video’s have a break down where the music stops for the story line to take over. Remember video’s are mini movies designed primarily for MTV.

4. Do people in clubs really want to have to compete with the hot girls in music video’s for attention? Is it anti-social?

I had the pleasure of playing the launch of Club21 in 2005, Ireland’s only DVJ capable club and then was resident there for the first year of its existance. Since then i’ve moved on but occasionally do a guest slot i’d say about once every month or two.

Check out this Video of DJ Yoda made by Pioneer as a demo of the equipment.