The first time I DJed for a Contra Dance ¹ was at Inman Park’s famous Trolley Barn. At the time I was DJing in the way other social dances are normally DJed: I had a laptop, I played a song, everyone danced. No fancy mixing, or effects: the most technical thing I did was loop 32 bar sections of music to stretch it out until the caller was ready to end the dance.

This time around, returning to the Trolley Barn, I wanted to see if my DJ skills had improved and try live mixing for the first time. Since I’ve never heard of anyone else DJing a traditional contra dance ² I didn’t have a good idea of what I was doing but I worked with the caller, my friend Valerie Young, to plan a set that I thought the dancers would like. The set comprised mostly high energy contra dance bands who play traditional songs in less traditional ways: think the Gaslight Tinkers , Great Bear , and ContraForce . My goal is to be able to tell the caller, “just treat me like a band” so that I can play a medley of two or more songs (as the band would traditionally do), they can request a tempo, energy level or vibe, and signal me when they’d like to end the dance and I’ll get ready to wrap up the mix with a nice ending. I don’t think I quite achieved that goal with this set, but it was close and the dancers had a blast either way, even if occasionally some of them ended up out on the ends when the dance wrapped up due to me not being able to give the caller as many times through as she wanted and still make the ending sound clean.

Prep

I prepped the individual music in this set basically the same way I did last time: in Mixxx I marked each time through the dance (contra has a very specific form) with color-coded loops or hot cues depending on if they looped cleanly or not, and named the mix-in and mix-out points when I decided what song to pair them with.

I try to come up with enough mixes to fill the night, plus a few more that are both high and low energy to have in my back pocket in case the caller is just feeling a certain way that night. This way I hopefully always have something that I’ve practiced which works well for each dance in terms of where bouncy or smooth sections of the song fall. That said, I didn’t do a good job of matching songs to dances in every case this night (I would have liked songs with a harder hit on a few of the petronellas), but overall it worked well.

The Set

The night started out with the dance “ Jefferson’s Sixpence ” by Ann Fallon to which I played a mix of Gaslight Avenue and Reel du Nord , both by The Gaslight Tinkers. This went okay except that I let the track run a bit far before the caller was ready to stop and had to loop the same section a couple of times to make the mix keep working smoothly, which I felt got a bit boring after a handful of times through the dance. The dancers didn’t seem to notice or mind though and were enthusiastic about the start to the evening.

Please excuse the clipping on the recordings, one of the unfortunate problems with the evening (that we’ll come to later) is that the gain on the main board was up way too high and I didn’t have control over that, so it was clipping most of the night. More on that in the retrospective at the end of this post.

Gaslight Avenue / Reel du Nord by the Gaslight Tinkers, DJ mix

The second song was a more traditional contra song, a mix of Highland by Wake Up Robin and Fleur de Mandragore by the Free Raisins to the dance “ Made Up Tonight ” by Erik Hoffman. Due to some technical difficulties with the sound pulled from the main board I didn’t wind up with a recording of this one (or most of the following songs), so let’s just pretend the mix went perfectly and everyone had a good time.

Next the caller picked “Trip to Elsan” by Joe Surdyk and Eric Schreiber. For this I branched out a bit, mixing the (more or less) traditional contra song, Basketball by Countercurrent with FIDDLE DISCO! by Elias Alexander . I had one minor issue with the mix towards the end of FIDDLE DISCO! , a loop that wasn’t really clean but was necessary for the number of times through the dance the caller wanted, but the dancers didn’t seem to notice and they went wild for the modern beats that the tune introduces! This was also the first time I had to re-mix a tune a bit on the fly besides just transitioning between two tunes since FIDDLE DISCO! is crooked and won’t work for contra dancing without (minor) adjustments.

Basketball / FIDDLE DISCO! by Countercurrent and Elias Alexander, DJ Mix

The Tuesday night Trolley Barn dance is rather short, so we took a waltz break at this point. I played Here Comes Sunshine by George Paul at the callers request, and Les Yeux Noirs by Burçin since I knew that a number of people from the local Lindy Hop scene were in the crowd. The switch to swing made those dancers happy, even if it confused the waltzers.

Back in the main dance I did a mix of Lafferty’s and Camel Hump by Wild Asparagus to one of my personal favorite contra dances: Tika Tika Timing by Dean Snipes.

Afterwards came what I thought was going to be the second to last song of the evening (we’d been running dances a bit long and were short on time) so I pulled out the show stopper: a medley of Griffin Road and Trip to Moscow , both by Kingfisher , but I added a little contra joke by mixing Rasputin by Boney M in with Trip to Moscow , purely based on the name (but the combo also just worked really well). This one really brought the house down!

I didn’t get a recording of this one, sadly with all the times through, but here was the backup recording I made in advance in case my laptop died during the show or something. The transition sounds like I had a buffer underflow (or just bad timing) on this one, and the mixing is a bit iffy in places, but trust me, it was better live!

Griffin Road / Trip to Moscow / Rasputin by Kingfisher and Boney M, DJ mix

At this point one of the organizers said she was having such a good enough time that she offered to let us run a bit over so we added “Vivian’s Catwalk” by Valerie herself to a mix of Muscles / Ride the Wheel by Buddy System and Garbage in A by Great Bear. This went well, except that I had layered the percussion from Garbage in A into Ride the Wheel so that when the transition happened it would have some continuity. Except that I somehow wound up off the beat and had to absolutely scramble to beat match; it sounded terrible, but somehow it didn’t throw Valerie off and once I finally got it beat matched we were still right on time.

For the final tune of the evening Valerie picked “ Frock’s Rockin Frolick ” by Will Mentor which works great as either a high or low energy dance depending on the caller. To compliment this I brought the energy down a bit with a mix of Brand by Potent Brew and El Bourbon Grande by ContraForce which brought the energy right back up to the high point by its rather loud ending!

Finally we closed the evening down with Ootpik Waltz by Wild Asparagus.

Stuff I Learned

• Either ask to do sound yourself, or don’t be afraid to ask the sound person if something sounds wrong (I didn’t want to be rude, so I didn’t ask, but they didn’t realize it was clipping all night and I’m sure they would have fixed it had I mentioned it!),
• I meant to both record my set on my laptop (no caller) but also record the main outputs from the board with a portable recorder (with caller), and ended up with only a few of the songs actually recorded. You have to actually remember to start recording…
• Prep endings better, if there are no clean loops near the end of the song, prepare a different ending or get better at covering the bad loop with effects or something. I had a few times where the caller asked for “3 more times” or “2 more times” and I had to say “uhhh, how does 1 or 3 sound?” or something along those lines. This was fine with my friend Valerie, but isn’t going to make you any other callers favorite band to work with.
• The jog wheels on the Traktor Kontrol S4 MK3 aren’t big enough. Do I do anything that technically means I need bigger jog wheels? No. Would I feel better about having them? Yes. Unfortunately the only controller that meets all my requirements and has bigger job wheels is the Rane Performer, and that’s way out of my price range (and will likely remain so forever), so maybe this is a “learn to get over it” type situation.
• Don’t just assume the waltz breaks don’t matter, they’re still part of your set and should be selected with care (the tempo was way too fast too, gotta pay more attention to the waltzes in general).

Other Links

• The event on MusicBrainz
• Some (non-live) practice recordings are available on Balfolk.social