Remember When DJing Used To Mean Something?

David Guetta is one of the world’s most popular DJs. He ranked # 7 last year in MixMag’s Top 100 DJ poll (down from 2 the year before). He’s #2 after Calvin Harris in Forbes list of top earning DJs, bringing in an estimated $30 million in 2014. When it comes to actually doing the Disc Jockeying, though, he seems to be a little rusty….

In a recent interview, he complained about having to go through his USB sticks for his Coachella set choosing each track to play individually, rather than just relying on a pre-set playlist.

Guetta’s got the high-profile hook-ups, too. On the first weekend, the Black Eyed Peas made a cameo to debut a comeback track and close it out with “I Gotta Feeling.” Meanwhile, on weekend two, Beyoncé watched from the sidelines, while Nicki Minaj sauntered out for “Hey Mama” in a tartan skirt, Run DMC singlet and a crown made of feathers.

Not everything went smoothly behind-the-scenes, though, as the DJ recounts. “Something crazy happened to me on the [first weekend],” he says. “I’m using Rekordbox and Pioneer to play, and before I saved my playlist to my SD card, my computer crashed. So I just had to put all my music in a random order on USB sticks at the last minute, doing it really old school, scrolling to look for the records I wanted to play next.”

He goes even further, revealing that he got his manager to download “I Gotta Feeling” for him off iTunes and he just played that as part of his set, with Fergie “live” on stage – lip-synching, perhaps?

The Black Eyed Peas’ surprise appearance also threw a curveball. “When Fergie decided to come last minute, it was like, OK, but I don’t have ‘I Gotta Feeling,’ because I don’t play it any more. I called my stage manager to go download ‘I Gotta Feeling’ on iTunes so I could play it. It was just completely crazy, but I loved it. And actually the set went amazing, and in a way the stress adds to the adrenaline.”

I thought this story must have been from Wunderground Music, but sadly, it’s an interview he did with Beatport, where he had the #7 track last year. Put it down in the truth is stranger than fiction category.

In the fiction is truer than truth category, Wunderground reports on the new art of miss-mixing, DJs making deliberate mistakes in sets to show they are not just pressing a sync button…something I really believe some of them do.

The latest craze, known as miss-mixing, is proving very popular amongst digital DJs as a way of highlighting that they are actually manually mixing tracks rather than using the sync button.

Michael Briscoe, also know as DJ Whopper, spoke about miss-mixing with Wunderground, “Flawless mixing is now a thing of the past, especially for any up and coming digital DJs. You just can’t afford to mix without mistakes these days or you’ll be labelled as a ‘sync button DJ.’”

“I learned how to mix on vinyl years ago so naturally I’m pretty tight when it comes to matching beats,” continued the resident DJ. “I swapped to digital format a couple of years ago because it’s convenient, now I spend more time practicing making mistakes than I do practicing actual mixing. [Source: Wunderground Music]

Now THIS is some old-skool DJing:

This DJ explains Why Old School DJs Are Complaining, And You Should Too