Performance Art

Due to my attendance at too many suburban weddings, I was under the impression that the DJ had the easiest job in the world. Sit behind a rack of electronic components and a couple of big JBL's and hit the play buttons on a couple of CD players all night long. Sounds easy, and that probably IS easy, but I found out just how much work and talent is required to be a real DJ at the high school graduation party I shot on Friday night.

The guy they hired, who goes by the stage name "DJ Nobel Hayze" was amazing. A very outgoing and personable guy, he had a special knack for blending two tracks together, fading back and forth between them, adding special filters and scratches on the fly, and creating a masterpiece of dance magic in real time. He was doing nothing less that mixing two songs at the same time, in real time. Kind of like a record producer who only gets one shot to make the song perfect.

There was not a CD in sight of course. The whole performance was accomplished using a MacBook Pro, a big hard drive, two old-school Technics turntables, and some various electronic filters with sliders. The software running on the Mac allows him to change the speed of a track to match up the beat with the second rack. He's always listening to one track in the headphones while the main track plays over the dance PA system. He can then cross fade at will.

The result is quite incredibly cool, and nothing I could describe here... but imagine, if you can, "Boom Boom Pow" by the Black Eyed Peas, hot rodded up with tone-altering filters, and cross blended with, say a tweaked techno version of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of The Moon". And it all just works, the "song" that comes out of the PA speakers is just amazing to behold.

He had every girl and boy in the room dancing from the first note to the last over three hours, without a single break in the music. I hope they paid him a lot of money.