Set List:
- David Guetta & Kaz James – Blast Off
- Skrillex & The Doors – Breaking a Sweat
- Steve Aoki Feat Rivers Cuomo – Earthquake People (remix)
- Zedd – Spectrum
- 2NE1 – Come Back Home
- Bottle Popping Transition Mix
- Calvin Haris Ft Tinie Tempah – Drinking from the bottle
- Linkin Park – What I’ve Done (Remix)
- Lil Jon – Turn Down For What (Transition Remix)
- CL – Solo
Before going into the competition as a whole, I’ll firstly go over my entry set. This was a fun little mix, my usual inclusion of rock based EDM remixes but this time adding in a couple of transitions to show a wider range of music variety. I especially like the Spectrum/Come Back Home mash up I ended up doing. I didn’t really showcase too many skills in this mix thou. I was more focused on just getting it out of the way so I could concentrate on other things. But overall it was a step up on my years previous mix and had some nice transitions and remixes working together.
So moving on to the second year of competition. Now that we knew what to expect, you would think the DJs entering would be better prepared to cater their sets towards the competition and crowd but with only 2 of us backing up from the previous year, the remaining 5 DJs were new to the competition and it seemed like many of them did not do their homework.
For me personally, I now knew what the competition was and how it was run. This year was the first time we really started questioning not only the merit of the competition but also how it was run. I knew that if I was to win, I needed to tailor my set to not only to an edm crowd but to also cater it to a festival crowd, less about skills and more about showman ship. However that didn’t mean that I wouldn’t add key DJ skills into my set as well. Still, was this really a DJ competition anymore? (Or was it even one in the first place)
Click on the link here to see my write up from that year and breaking down the DJ’s sets and my final thoughts on the comp. It is interesting how I was still trying to be diplomatic ish about it even after the result but looking back, I could have gone in a lot harsher on the judges, the format and even the other DJ’s entering. Knowing what I now know, I most certainly would have been much more critical of the judges and format especially. Again having Pandol in charge and only having a producer EDM DJ as a second judge (this was the same with the first comp as well) they are hardly well enough equipped as judges to fairly judge across all skills and genres. Add into this the bias surrounding one judge and that we now know he has the final say regardless of how the other judge grades the DJ’s and we see a very big problem. Any chance of this competition having any integrity or merit among the DJ community especially the expat DJ community was already fading after the first competition. After the second competition, it was all but gone.
As for the format, I will cover that more in the third part since the issues of format and music were very apparent by then.
akadjblaze 