The DJ Booth Even while standing inside a DJ booth can be loud and obnoxious, the excitement of playing music and controlling a huge crowd sends and unexplainable feeling through your body. When I first step into a DJ booth at Club Centers, located in the heart of Rochester, New York, my nerves start going crazy and butterflies hit my stomach so fast it feels like I have to puke. Just the sight of three turntables and an eight-channel mixer in front of my face is like sending a little kid into a candy store. While standing in front of my tables, I look to my right and I see my soundboard.
This high-tech, silver plated sound machine stands about seven feet tall with about three hundred switches and knobs that control high pitches, low pitches, medium pitches and all of the digital effects. This soundboard is used when I put a shiny new record on one of the turntables. This will distort the sound quality of the song. The music sounds like a fire alarm, starting with a deep sound then rising to a high pitch screaming noise. As I look to my left, you see my beautiful blonde light girl working my light board. While the music is playing really loud, she will hit certain buttons that will make multi-colored lasers go in different directions and make many different shapes.
Also, while the music is jamming, a common light known by many people as a strobe light will flash non-stop constantly. This light makes you see people dancing like robots and distorts the vision of that person. Behind me sits all my records on a dark colored, sturdy wooden shelf. This shelf contains about six hundred records of all types of music. Some of the records are old and beat up and they look like they are from the sixties. The newer records are mainly imported from Chemical Records, which is located in Europe.
Most of these newer records barely have any English written on them. So to actually remember the name of the song, repetitive listening is they key. Now the one record that seems to catch my eye the most and seems to get the crowd going wild is Caf’e Del Mar. This LP pushes the right buttons for everyone in the club because of the breaks and loud buildups it has. After I get done spinning a record, I put it on the bottom shelf of the case so I don’t repeat the same song over again. As I come back in front of me with the turntables there, the feel of dropping one record down and then dropping a second down, matching the bass line together, beat mixing the songs together, then slowly fading the song in to make a perfect mix is unbelievable! This drives me so wild, it sends shivers down through my whole body like it’s about negative 30 degrees outside and I am standing there in shorts and a tee shirt.
And then once this happens, my head slowly pulls itself up to look at the crowd, and WOW, the whole club is jumping will wild and crazy people that just want to dance and have a great time. The feeling of getting a crowd to go nuts is unbelievable. This experience is more of an “on-the-spot” craze, where if you were there playing the music, you are controlling the minds of every person in the club.