We may no longer have physical crates to carry around, but keeping our music organised within virtual ‘crates’ (or folders) is no less important to ensure that we can always find the right song to play at the right moment. As far as I’m aware, there’s never really been a course on how to set this up nor is there an industry standard way of handling it. Last year I met up with some DJs to see how they tackled crate management. It was fascinating to see how everyone’s mind worked.
I’ve since adopted some of their practices and tweaked some of my own. A lot of DJs thought I was the most organised one of the bunch (though I certainly didn’t feel that way), so I thought I’d use this article to share with you my own crate management practices. I’m not expecting you to follow my way of working exactly – this is definitely one of those areas where one size certainly doesn’t fit all – however hopefully you may pick up an idea or two that helps you tweak your system to make it more efficient.
So, here goes… I start by putting major ‘throwback dance hits’ in a ‘decades’ folder that would crossover between just about any party. In the ‘genre’ category I’ll name them by the decade (i.e. 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s), but my sub-crates then look like this: Early Night Vibey House EDM Late Night Hard EDM Late Night Melodic Party Tracks Party Tracks (Sing-A-Long) Radio Radio (Sing-A-Long) Transition Tracks Under rate Management This may seem like a lot of work but, because I do so many different styles of party, I need it this organised and the hard work I put into preparation pays off at events.
I can easily set the right tone by quickly finding exactly the right track for the moment with my music collection organised with this level of detail. Other ‘top tier’ crates I’ve created are A cappellas, Alternative, Albums, Booty, Brian B Stash (for obscure events and my personal listening pleasure!), Country, Ethnic Music, Holiday Music, Freestyle, Hip Hop, HNRG (which consists of EDM, Tropical House, Deep House, etc.), Instrumentals, Karaoke, Latin, Mashups, Old School, Party Bangers (which consists of throwbacks, party classics and current anthems), R&B, Reggae, Samples, Schools, Top 40, Transition Tracks, Urban, Weddings and Wordplay.
Within most of these I’ll then have sub-folders of ‘Recurrent’ and ‘Current Year’ to allow me to differentiate between perennial floor-fillers and current trends. For the Weddings folder, I sub-crate with ‘Ceremony Music’ and ‘Dinner Music’ . I then further sub-crate the Dinner Music by breaking it out by genre and decade (50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, Alternative, Big Band, Blues, Country, Christian, Hip Hop, HNRG, Indie, Instrumental, Latin, Motown, Obscure, R&B and Reggae).
Why do I do this with the wedding folder in particular? For one, I do a ton of weddings. Secondly, there’s always that one client that will ask for a ‘Big Band’ song or a ‘50s Rock Song’ and I want to be able to easily jump to an appropriate track right away. Having organised your collection, it’s then important to keep refining it.
My advice is to sort through your crates at least annually. Archive tracks or even full crates that you aren’t going to use anymore to keep your library clean. One of the DJs I met up with does this every six months. I only wish I could have the time to do it that regularly.
But waiting years to go through it is really not a good idea. Bottom line – the more organised your music collection and the more regularly you refine it, the better your sets and programming will be at events. What’s your method? How do your crates look?
I’m always on the lookout for ways to improve here, so any thoughts are more than welcome. Send me a note! By Brian Buonassissi Based in NYC, DJ Brian Buonassissi is a successful internationally-travelling DJ/MC specializing in luxury destination private events. He runs a multi-city mobile DJ/event business with offices in Southern California, Florida and New York City.
You can connect with him at . Wordplay For anyone who hasn’t come across the term before, Wordplay is where you take a certain word (or phrase) from one song and find another song that has that same word or phrase and use it as a mix point. For instance, one I use often is taking the phase “Let’s do this one more time…” from the song ‘Starships’ by Nicki Minaj and repeating that phrase a few times via loop or hot cue, chopping it down the to the words “one more time” .
Then I’ll have Daft Punk’s ‘One More Time’ cued up to that same phrase and slam it into it. This is sometimes known as ‘smart mixing’ because you’re thinking beyond just BPMs and genres, and utilizing the lyrics to make the transition.
