Miles Maeda Madness!!

What a night!! I had planned to leave early but couldn't -- he just kept me going. There was some awesome variety in his set (deep, techy, jazzy, 'summery', 'hip-hoppy', 'jackin'...) and he even somehow managed to keep the dancefloor going with "Greenskeepers -- On The Line (Farina Remix)", which until last night I had thought would only do well as a chill-out track!

It was good to hear some of the popular stuff too (e.g. the Hodges track with Collette vocals). He even threw in some good remixes that I enjoyed ('Funky Rhythm', 'Pump up the jam'). Most importantly, it was good to see that Miles is such a down-to-earth and friendly guy -- he was walking around chatting to random people in the crowd!

The event was not overcrowded and there was a big fan that helped us keep going and going and going on the dancefloor. The venue (Tramp off Highlander Lane in the city -- very hidden and very "underground") and the sound system were fantastic. The crowd was friendly and just there to have a good time.

I've attached a 5 min video below, but you can only see Miles mixing (the crowd was recorded but it's too dark in the video).

An intimate gig at the Social Bar and Cafe

I had a very interesting time at the Social Bar and Cafe, located at the RMIT Village Old Melbourne (RMIT student accomodation).

It was a private function for around 60 foreign exchange students (although more than 100 turned up in the end!), and I had to take my own equipment and speakers. I hired two Behringer B300 speakers for $70, from DGENR8, which was the cheapest place I could find to get the type of speakers I wanted, and I took the rest of the equipment from home (2 x technics, Numark CDN-36 dual CD player and Numark DM3050 mixer). The speakers were unbelievably heavy, but were powerful enough for the 100 or so people. Since the speakers were so heavy, I didn't bother lifting them up to slide them onto the speaker stands -- I had enough trouble taking them out of the car! Leaving the speakers on the ground turned out OK though, as many of the people were at a much lower area of the bar, than the speakers.


While setting up, I needed to borrow a table from the bar to place all the equipment on, and I decided to go with one big round table, rather than two small round tables. It turned out to be a very bad move, as I ended up with barely enough space for the equipment! Instead of bugging the bar staff again, I decided to place everything strategically on the single round table, so that I could at least use the turntables and the mixer. So unfortunately I didn't end up using the CD players (but then again, I have much more fun when I play 100% Vinyl anyway!).

When the bar started getting crowded, people were surrounding the round table, and it felt more like I was a part of the crowd than the DJ. It was nice though, just the way I liked it. I was able to feel the energy of the crowd and judge what music they wanted. Although generally you get more requests when you're very close to the crowd, than when you're separated from them, I didn't get many requests, luckily. The requests I did get were mainly for 'Latin' music, which I didn't have with me. The other requests were for commercial house, which I played for about 30 mins, until people started going back to a more relaxed state, which allowed me to get back to some US house.

A (under 4 min) video of the gig is shown below. My butt is in the way for most of it though!

RMIT Orientation (Brunswick) Video

There were heaps of people there today (around 150 at peak time I think), and plenty of food, stalls, entertainment, and even a couple of speeches. I played the first set (11am-12pm), but I only played for about 40 mins as we got delayed by about 20 minutes. After that two brothers played the guitar and sang some popular alternative/pop songs for an hour, after which I played for another hour, and finally another guitarist finished it off with a solo performance.

I played some house as usual. Mostly vocal stuff and a few house remixes of popular tunes. At one point I was searching for a 'happy' Kaskade remix ("Gonna make it") which I thought people would enjoy, but unfortunately I had left at home. In the end, no one danced, but I wasn't expecting anyone to either at Orientation! There was quite a crowd towards the end of my first set, but not a lot of people hung around after lunch, which was when I started my second set.

They had a good DJ setup (RCF 300A speakers pumping out 360 Watts RMS, DJM 300, 2xTechnics and two foldbacks). I was told that they'll be hiring two subwoofers for the city orientation, to be used along with the speakers, as a crowd of around 500 is expected!

Here's a short (5 min) video of what happened today. It's mostly the guitarists that I've recorded, with a bit of me messing around with the eq's towards the end of the video.

House Party @ Stellar Bar

Just got back from the House Party @ Stellar Bar, so here are some pics! The deejays in the pics are Mike Jules (white stripe on black t-shirt), Luke J Sammut (with mic), Dan Sal (light blue t-shirt), Rob Wu (brownish jumper) and Byron Foxx (black jumper on white shirt). Some fine tunes, good vibes and a packed house it was!

Melbourne Intnl. Film Festival @ Hush

Hush Bar was hosting the 'afterparties' for the Melbourne International Film Festival on Saturday and Sunday. Apparently Saturday was a full-house, but lots of people turned up last night too, right after a movie at Melbourne Central. Most of them were old and mature, so they didn't mind having a chat and a couple of drinks to some groovy House music!

I was on my best behaviour of course, just in case a producer walks up to me and wants me to star in their next movie, as a small town DJ who makes it big. Suprisingly -- no such luck last night.

Quite a few of my friends turned up too in the 5 hours that I played. Here are some pics of myself and a couple of them.

Busiest HushBar Yet!

So I go over to Hush Bar for the regular Sunday Night session at 7PM, and the bar tender comes running over to me a few minutes later, and asks me if I've got any 'dancy' music. I said I don't, and that I've only got my regular Sunday night house music. Then he goes into panic mode, and asks me whether I can tell Mike to bring some 'dancy' music, but I told him that Mike won't be coming in. Then he goes into exreme-panic mode and tells me that there are three b'day parties scheduled for the night, with 350+ people! At that point I felt the need to search my crate, and to my luck, there was a dusty old CD wallet sitting inside with a lot of cheesy tunes. Suffice to say, that CD wallet saved my life.

The place started getting packed from 7.30, and by 7.45 there were already people on the dance floor. Until 9, people were dancing to (real) house, which I found quite satisfying, but after 9 I had to switch to a combination of House and cheese, and by 9.30 I was playing full on cheese. From then on, requests kept flooding in like a tsunami, and the dance floor just kept getting packed all the way until we closed at 1.45.

I think it's fair to say that last night was the most tiring gig ever -- not because I had to keep standing for 6.5 hours, but mainly because of all the requests, talking and searching through (mostly unknown) cheese that I had to do inbetween. Big ups to Boogs for playing 8 hour sets and Lounge every Saturday!!

On the positive side, I broke my personal world record for the longest set, which previously stood at 6 hours to an all new and improved 6.5 hours (yippee!). Also, last night was the first time I've played to such a large crowd (followed closely by the RMIT CS/IT Orientation a couple of years ago). Here are some pics, taken mostly from around the DJ booth.

Hotham 06!

Snow was a bit dissapointing this year at Mt. Hotham. There were only a few good dumps and there was a lot of rain that followed, which washed away a lot of the snow. By the time we went on the trip there was only about 55 cms in man-made areas.

But to make up for a bad season, I had a good time spinning some tunes at Swindlers Balcony!



Swindlers Balcony was an awesome bar/club with the most amazing balcony I've ever seen, overlooking a ski run. Although there wasn't much snow at Hotham, there was plenty of snow in the balcony. I got to play at Swindlers on both Friday night and Saturday evening -- a total of close to five hours. I got some good feedback from (I think) the manager who said my set on Friday night was appropriate and that it had a good flow. There wasn't enough people at the bar on Friday, mainly because there wasn't a lot of people at Hotham, but there was a good 75-100 people most of the time, which was a good enough class size for me to educate!



The DJ setup consisted of Ecler Nuo 3 mixer, and two technics 1200's with Ortofon concordes. That was the first time I'd used an Ecler mixer and I found the eq's very accurate (I think they were full-kill eq's where you can kill the low/mid/high range completely on turning the appropriate knob anti-clockwise).

Sunday Lounge @ Hush Bar