DJing at Wake Up Screaming

Pretty much anyone can DJ at WUS. Officially, you need to be a member of the Cambridge Rock Society, but this isn't strictly enforced, and it's cheap anyway (£4 for life). To ask for a set, ask the WUS officer, currently Nev Ball. You can email him at <wus rocksoc org uk> or via the form on this site, or ask him in person.

There are some house rules for DJs below, but the basic principle is that, if you ask, you will get a set. It may take a while, but you will get a set. Whether you get another or not depends on how well you do the first time.

WUS's remit is to play rock/alternative music that isn't otherwise found in Cambridge. We try to maintain a mixture of interesting and esoteric music people might not have heard before and things people will dance to. As such, we try to encourage DJs to play a mixture of things they think will be danceable, that people will enjoy listening to, and things they find interesting. About the only big thing we try to avoid is music that really isn't rock or that is widely played elsewhere in Cambridge (at The Calling, The Indie Thing and so on)

You can see all the past setlists on the other WUS pages, but, in general, we try to break up the night:

First Set (21:00-22:30): This is an ideal time to play interesting stuff that people won't have come across before or things which are of minority interest. Extreme metal, NWOBHM sets, power metal, 50s and 60s rock'n'roll tends to go here.

Second set (22:30-00:00): This set needs to have a commercial twist and be fairly danceable: usually given over to commercial rock, commercial/extreme metal, hair metal or somesuch genre.

Third set (00:00-01:30): The main set of the night: by now, what people want to hear is commercial music they can dance to. As such, this is more or less the MTV2 set - commercial mainstream rock and metal to keep people happy and bouncing.

Fourth set (01:30-03:00): This is a wind-down set. Considerable skill is generally required to keep people around until 3am, and this set is the usual haunt of people playing commercial power metal, 80s metal, hard rock, with a bit of nu-metal and commercial rock.

We're always on the lookout for new DJs, we're not scary, and we don't generally bite, so if you're interested, contact the WUS officer.

Facilities

The setup at the Kambar is a two-CD deck with fast-forward/rewind, single- or multiple- play, a single record deck, per-channel levels, master volume (which you shouldn't touch), a cross-fader, effects, and independant headphone monitoring (channel 1, channel 2 or both).

Lights are on a separate panel: there are four effects, each of which is on a fixed cycle of a minute or so, so you do have to keep tap-dancing around to keep the lights on. There is a strobe, but you must never use it (see the house rules).

The first time you DJ, the WUS officer or the previous DJ will take you through the process: basically, put your CD in the drive that isn't currently playing, set the levels using the headphones, leave the deck paused at the start of the song you want to play, then, when the previous song has finished, hit play, swipe the cross-fader across to your song, and repeat the whole process with the other deck.

Playing vinyl records is somewhat more involved: if you want to, and you don't already know how to make it happen, ask the WUS officer to show you.

There are facilities for storing your CDs in the cloakroom or in the DJ booth. The WUS officer will sometimes bring some general back-up CDs in case of emergency, but don't rely on this.

If you have any problems whilst DJing, just run and get the WUS officer (who will usually be on the door, hint hint!) and he'll um and ah and try to sort out your problem for you.

House rules

There are some house rules for people DJing at WUS, varying from the utterly serious (don't use the strobe), to good advice (don't rely on writing down your setlist beforehand), to elaborate in-jokes (the Black album to be called 'Derek' at all times).

Please read them, and please follow them, for your own good and for the good of others. Serious violations will cause you not to be hired again. Very serious violations will cause me to drag you out of the DJ booth and cut your set short. (To the best of my knowledge, no WUS officer has ever had to do that)

Don't use the strobe

... in fact, you usually can't, because we've disabled it, but it's quite a bad strobe, and often causes untoward reactions in people at the club, so not a good idea to use it. Don't.

No food, drink, or other people in the DJ booth

As the Kambar management don't like it. It's usually OK for people to pop their heads in to request a song, but anything more than that is frowned upon. We mean it about the food and drink - those decks are expensive and we don't want to have to pay for them to be replaced.

Try not to write too much down. Definitely don't publish your sets beforehand

When people ask to DJ, their first instinct is usually to pick out a bunch of tracks carefully beforehand, note the running times, draw up a list, and then go in and play them.

This turns out not to be such a good idea as it seems, for several reasons: the exact length of your set isn't really predictable in advance (depends on how long the previous DJ goes on for), you have requests of unpredictable length to cope with, and the DJs either side of you may not be playing what you expect, leading to disjointed transitions between sets.

The biggest problem with this approach, however, is that, no matter how hard you plan, you can't really predict what people are going to want on the night, and you can easily end up playing a set of nu metal to a bunch of ageing bikers, or a bunch of Thin Lizzy and Dire Straits to a group of sixth-formers. This is not usually popular.

So: if you are going to write your sets down in advance, be prepared to tear the setlist up at a moment's notice if it's not going to work, and (for this reason) please don't publish setlists in advance.

Play requests

Not too many of them, but we generally encourage requests from the floor, and as long as there aren't too many of them, and they're not too out of place in your set, you should try to play them.

DJs at WUS don't share CDs, in general, but if you don't have something, the WUS officer might have brought along a bunch of generally popular CDs you can look in.

Don't over- or under-run

A couple of minutes either side is fine, but any more than that and the DJ after you will either get his or her set shortened (which is bad), or have to come in early - you shouldn't depend on people being happy with either.

Leave the decks in a standard configuration

Please leave the decks with the CD players set to single-track mode, the cross-fader on, effects off, and the levels set to about the right place. There's nothing more disconcerting than starting off your favourite Led Zep track to discover it has more flange on it than even Pagey wanted.

Don't play obviously inappropriate material

This is a judgement call, and various WUS officers will be variously strict about it. The occasional weird track is quite welcome (Bette Midler and David Hasselhof, for example), but an entire set of Madonna songs would not be welcome. Likewise, just because it's possible to compose an entire set from 3 SunnO))) tracks doesn't mean you ought to do it.

The Black Album To Be Called 'Derek' At All Times

I think this one is self-evident.

No-one is ever, ever to play Nightwish's cover of 'Walking in the Air' again.

We mean it. Really. RRW still has the nightmares.