What I Actually Do Between Gigs

The set is the visible part. Two, three hours on a Friday night — the music, the lights, the room doing what a room is supposed to do when everything is working. That's what gets posted. That's what people see.

What happens the other 160 hours of the week is what actually determines whether those sets are any good.

The Crate Is Never Finished

I spend more time finding music than most people would guess. Not just new releases — though that's part of it — but the right version of a song, the right edit, the track that bridges two genres without feeling like a hard stop. A lot of DJing is architecture. You're building something in real time, and your materials are only as good as what you've actually put in the crate.

I'll hear something in a restaurant, at a coffee shop, in the background of a video, and I'm immediately thinking about where it fits. That's not a professional habit — it's just how the brain works once music starts mattering to you at a certain level. Everything becomes potential material.

The Prep That Looks Like Not Preparing

One of the things I got from journalism training that shows up directly in DJing is the idea of preparation that enables improvisation. The best live broadcasters aren't winging it — they've done enough prep work that they can respond to what's actually happening without losing the thread.

That's open-format DJing. I'm not showing up with a locked playlist. But I'm also not showing up unprepared. I know the venue, I know the typical crowd, I know what's worked before and what hasn't, and I've got enough material loaded and organized that when the room tells me what it wants, I can respond in about four seconds.

The sets that feel effortless are the ones with the most work underneath them.

The Outreach, the Pitching, the Business Side

Nobody who books a DJ thinks about what goes into getting booked. That's fine — that's not their job. But there's a whole lane of this work that looks nothing like music: the pitch decks, the follow-up emails, the conversations with venue managers, the insurance paperwork, the contracts, the invoicing.

Running a DJ business in Scottsdale means running an actual business. That part doesn't end after the set. It starts back up Monday morning.

I actually don't mind it. The media background helps — I know how to tell a story about what I do, I know how to communicate professionally, and I know how to build a case for why the investment makes sense. The DJ part and the business part aren't separate things. They feed each other.

Why Any of This Matters

I'm not posting this to make the job sound harder than it is. I'm posting it because there's a version of this industry where the visible part is all there is — show up, play, leave, repeat. And that version exists. You can do this job that way.

But the DJs who are still doing it five years from now, who have built something real in a competitive market, who have venues that call them back and clients that refer them — they're not the ones who show up to the gig and go home.

They're the ones who treat the in-between like it counts.

Because it does.