No matter the genres of music you spin, at some point you’ve probably considered whether you should pre-plan your set or not. Is meticulous planning ever necessary? Should you arrive to your gig with an entire selection of tracks you will be playing lined up in an exact order of play? The answer is probably somewhere in the middle.

Every established international DJ has a few go-to tracks in their arsenal or tracks they recently discovered and can’t wait to play, while producers who tour will often have records they plan to test out on new crowds. That, however, doesn’t constitute a pre-planned set, as it’s entirely reasonable and recommended to enter any performance with some ideas in mind and a few sure-fire tools at your disposal. You should know which tracks work well with others, you should be prepared for your specific set by taking in consideration venue, line-up, genre you could be expected to play, length of your set, time of day or night, etc

By pre-planned I am referring to a set that is completely organized beforehand, with all tracks chosen and sequence laid out, requiring the DJ to simply mix in and out of them at the appropriate time. This is essentially a step short of a pre-recorded set: a set that has been completely mapped out and recorded in advance, with the DJ simply pressing play and doing no real mixing during his “live performance.”

I have heard numerous excuses over the years attempting to justify pre-planned or even pre-recorded sets, mostly to do with the need of meticulous planning in order to provide the crowd with massive synchronized A/V production. Yet, with current technology this is a lazy excuse, as you will read below when I discuss the various reasons why pre-planning a set is never ok:

You Cannot React To Your Crowd’s Responses

A DJ’s job is to take their crowd on a journey, hand-selecting tracks based on a different number of variables that change from venue to venue, crowd to crowd and set to set. Arriving to the decks with a completely pre-planned set leaves you no room to guide your audience, to change things up when the crowd isn’t reacting as you perhaps expected, and is essentially just one step short of arriving to the venue with a pre-recorded set.

A pre-planned set completely eliminates the interaction between the DJ and crowd, which defeats the point of having a DJ in the first place.

Your Set Might Clash With Whoever Played Before You

Imagine arriving to a venue with a completely pre-planned set only to find out the DJ before you played some of the tracks you were going to be playing. You cannot 100% predict what the DJ before you will be dropping, both as far as track selection and the general mood and pace of their set.

You Learn More DJing “On The Fly”

Spontaneous DJs who can truly read a room and play accordingly learn more about their craft than DJs who completely pre-plan their sets. Mixing new stuff together, playing with effects, coming up with new ideas based on crowd reaction, and watching them go crazy as a result, has to be one of the most satisfying moments a DJ can experience.

You Can Play The Latest Tune You Discovered

It happens more often than we think, but DJs these days are receiving new tunes via e-mail at lightning speed, sometimes mere minutes before a big gig. Having a pre-planned set means missing out on playing a tune that could go off with a bang in the middle of your gig.

If you’re pre-planning your set you are only limiting your performance.

You Could Be Spending Time Doing Better Things

Pre-planning a set takes time, and it’s time you could frankly be spending doing other things to forward your music career or prepare for your performance (which is different than planning it entirely beforehand).

Instead of wasting countless minutes and hours putting together a set ahead of time, use your time wisely to discover new tracks, practice your mixing, laying different tracks together, or in the studio producing, remixing, mashing or bootlegging versions of tracks you already have to provide a better experience for your fans.

What If Your Set Turns Out To Bore The Crowd?

Ok so you thought your pre-planned set was perfect for the gig ahead of you, but once you’re in the middle of it you realize the crowd isn’t really feeling it and looks bored. The truth is that when sitting at home or in a studio, a DJ has no idea of the atmosphere and crowd he will be facing once behind the decks, and might plan the wrong set as a result.

Needless to say if your set is completely pre-planned and you find out that it’s not working, it might be hard to sway off of it or it may make the experience needlessly stressful. The risk is that your gig becomes a complete bust.

What If You Pre-Planned a 2 Hour Set But You Need to Go Longer?

It happens all the time: you’re opening the room or are scheduled before an other artist and he doesn’t show up for whatever reason. What do you do then? Oftentimes a DJ with a pre-planned set may not be ready to play for an extra hour or to completely take over the decks for the remainder of the night. In fact, it’s entirely possible, and I have seen this happen with my own eyes, that he didn’t even bring enough music to get him through the remainder of his now extended performance.

It goes without saying that if the above happened, you would look unprofessional to the eyes of who booked you and those on the dance floor.

Reputation

Arguably there is nothing more embarrassing than your peers and fans finding out that you’ve been pre-planning sets and short-cutting your duty as a DJ. In the past big-name acts have been found to be pre-planning sets or even pre-recording them completely, often bringing their reputation into question.

More often than not, the need for massive audio/visual productions is the excuse used to justify pre-planned or pre-recorded sets. We have all seen it when Kaskade was outed for playing a completely pre-planned (possibly pre-recorded) set at the LA Convention Center in May 2016, when David Guetta stated that his set at Coachella was “old school” because he didn’t have a pre-planned list of tracks to play, when deadmau5 went on record saying that most big EDM DJs simply “push play” or when a YouTube clip emerged entitled “Steve Angello — How To Fake Your Fans,” showing the Swedish House Mafia DJ playing 15 minutes of a pre-recorded set from a single CD deck

The subject has been debated almost ad nauseam in the past. While the consensus is that pre-recorded sets are not acceptable under any circumstance, is it ok to pre-plan an entire set in order to provide an exact and mapped out sequence of visual production? Artists such as Armin van Buuren and Eric Prydz have in the past explained that despite running massive stage productions, it is not necessary to pre-plan a set. They have specified that the need for extensive visual production shouldn’t take the human element away from the art of DJing. Below is a video of Armin explaining his live DJ set-up and how he is able to maintain his DJ integrity without needing to pre-plan a set.

What do you think, is it ok for DJs to pre-plan their sets? Tell us with a Facebook comment or drop us a tweet!

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