Concrete Lounge Hawthorn

I played at an Open Decks session today, at Concrete Lounge on Glenferrie Road. Concrete Lounge is a very nice, stylish bar lounge. They have some comfy sofas near a fairly large window facing Glenferrie Road and a reasonably large dance floor. The main bar area is a rectangle (similar to Candy Bar) with the DJ booth in a corner and a pool area at the back, separated from the main bar. What's different about Concrete Lounge is that on Tuesdays, they show the O.C. live, projected onto on a large screen hanging from the roof! The rest of their week is quite full-on too, and on Sundays they give some newcomers a go on the decks, with their Open Decks session.

Their DJ set up is; two Technics 1200s, two CDJ 100s, a Denon mixer and what seemed to be a couple of JBL 12" Horn Speakers. This was the first time I had played on a Denon mixer, so it was a bit of an experience. For one thing, the eq's didn't have same sensitivity as the Numarks / Rane / DJMs, so I found it difficult to get the mixes right. E.g. I couldn't properly overlap the vocals of one track with the bass and treble of another track because I couldn't always get the vocals isolated from the track. Also, there was a button next to cue called eq or something similar, that can be used to switch the eq's on or off. I have never seen such an option in any other mixer so I had the eq's accidentally switched off for a while, and was wondering why the eq's weren't working that well! It took me a while to get the hang of it all.

The two blokes running the Open Decks night were very friendly and helpful, and one of them took down my contact details after my set in case they wanted me to play their in the future. He wanted a demo too, but unfortunately I didn't have a copy with me, and I told him I'd drop one off in the next couple of days. I'm hoping to do another Open Decks session sometime soon -- much more interesting than practicing at home in an empty room!