April 27, 2008

Earl and I are back from our little adventure to Ithaca, where I was the guest DJ at The Common Ground last night. We had a really good time. The dance floor was busy from 11 p.m. onwards (that always makes me happy) and I had quite a few folks compliment me on my mix of music. It was different enough from the house DJs to keep in interesting but familiar enough that the folks were still able to know what they were hearing and enjoy accordingly. I had the opportunity to meet one of the house DJs, Dr. DJ Mike, who asked about the particular version of “Apologize” by OneRepublic and Timbaland that I play (it’s the Tony Arzadon Club Remix that I heard when we were in Dublin last fall). There were a couple of other inquiries throughout the night. The Common Ground also has a computer system with every song they have in their massive CD library, and one computer on the network is available to the crowd to make requests. I didn’t use their CDs but I was able to accommodate several of the requests throughout the night that scored me points.

The crowd was an interesting and somewhat amusing blend of folks. The club is larger than what we have here in Utica. It was Leather/Levi and Bear night (I spin best at these kinds of nights) and at one end of the club most of those guys were congregated around the bar chatting, playing pool and enjoying the music. At the other end of the bar were the club bunnies, twinks and a smattering of transgendered folks that I couldn’t tell which way they were transgendering. On the other hand, perhaps they were just creatively dressed. They celebrated my end of night selection of pseudo-disco tracks (“Coming Out Of Hiding” by Pamala Stanley, “The Rumour” by Olivia Newton-John) by clogging with their high heels.

The DJ booth at The Common Ground blew me away. They have a REALLY nice setup. The DJ booth was nicer than the last radio station studio I worked at! I hadn’t expected as much high-tech equipment as they had, nor did I anticipate the amount of volume that was available at my fingertips. I was in eargasm heaven. It was also a good opportunity for me to hear how my MP3s and such from various sources compared to each other. I have a couple of tracks on the PowerBook that I have to weed out simply because they don’t sound good over a relatively powerful system. Luckily they are mostly old tracks that I dug up from somewhere on the internet years ago and can easily replace by rerecording the vinyl here in the studio at home. Earl assured me that everything sounded fine with these couple of tracks but that I was probably noticing things that others wouldn’t pay a moment’s notice to.

This morning we slept in a bit and then came home by way of the Finger Lakes, stopping for lunch and a little shopping excursion at The City (formerly known as ‘Circuit City’?). I picked up a couple of new speakers for the studio here at the house as I was obviously inspired by last night’s setup. I expect to be making more mixes to share very soon.