Boom Tsjak

My music career is going very well lately. I have six gigs in the next two months. I had four gigs in the last five weeks. I am like a real touring DJ! A dream come true. I remember the days of practicing on my CDJ-1000s and my DJM-800 in the living room of my smallish house in West New York, New Jersey. One time when I was playing, a couple of Mormons came up to the front door and peered in the window to see what was going on. I let them in, and we had a house party.

DJing is fun. And I am good at it, after 18 years of doing this. And it is nice to finally get some recognition. When it’s good, it’s really good. Had a gig about two months ago where I had girls in the booth whispering in my ear that they loved my music, and dudes in the front Shazamming all my tracks and coming up empty-handed. When the lights went on at 3:30am, the place was still full. I’m sure I have some musician readers who have performed in some capacity, maybe even in front of a large crowd, and the feeling is so good that everyone wants to do it, which drives wages to zero. Not all gigs are amazing, but I have fun playing to an empty room sometimes. I like my own music!

But the real magic doesn’t happen until you start producing. Producing music is hard. Producing music is one of those things that looks easy but is actually hard.

I made a go at it in 2019. Teamed up with my pal Mike and we produced a track called Interstellar. Certainly not good enough to get accepted by a label, but it was a good start! You can check it out here. I did write a pretty good hook. But one thing I did not realize is that 99% of producers in the electronic music world use Ableton. We used Logic to produce Interstellar. To be honest, I would rather use Logic—it is a bit more intuitive than the fiendishly complex German software. But if you are ever going to collaborate with people, you will need to use Ableton. I have a pretty strong background in musical theory, so that isn’t the problem—the fiendishly complex German software is the problem. I’m a 52-year-old Gen Xer, and if you weren’t raised on this stuff, then it’s thousands of hours of work to master it. As you know, I have a few other jobs, so I don’t have thousands of hours at my disposal.

So my thinking on this is that I would get around to producing music when I retire. I would convert the office into a music studio, with racks of modular synths, and basically spend my retirement making bleeps and bloops. I am 52. Maybe I retire when I am 65. That is a long time to wait, so that was a pretty dumb idea. I think if I waited until age 65 to produce music, I would regret it. So I am going to start very soon. Since I a dummy with the computer, I am going to get some private tutoring. That is the plan. I am very much looking forward to it.

After being a major consumer of this music for the last 40 years, I have a pretty good ear. I know what sounds good. I know what works on the dancefloor. But there are times when I am listening to a track (particularly something by Andrew Bayer) where I’m like, how in the hell did they do that? And sometimes it’s the simple stuff: it’s a massive kick, a thumping bassline, perfect hats, a terrific ride cymbal. I think when most people listen to music, to the extent that they think about it, it is all about how it makes them feel. They like a song—ask them why? They can’t describe it. It just feels good. I get that feeling with music, too, but for me, it’s much more analytical. I’m actively listening to all the component parts. I do like ride cymbals. I love tambourines and shakers. I love eighth note basslines. For the Gen Alpha teenage producers, it is all about the drops. Now, I like a good drop, but Level 99 is when you can pull off the same emotional impact without a pornographic dubstep drop. There is a track I loved from 16 years ago—“To The Six” by Boom Jinx and Andrew Bayer, and the whole thing is just a masterclass in production—especially the drop. Tough to play that track out, because the breakdown is too long, but those guys are really the best of the best in the progressive world. My goal is to get there someday.

This probably sounds like a bunch of nonsense to you. You have probably never heard of Andrew Bayer, and Andrew Bayer is a lot more mainstream than most of the stuff I listen to. In your spare time, check out Kasper Koman. He recently put out a 4-track EP on Anjunadeep (my favorite of the four is “Organist”), but I was following him long before Anjunadeep picked him up. Just a technical wizard, and a musical genius. I watched a YouTube video of him DJing a party in India to a bunch of Indian dudes. No girls, just dudes. In a very tiny club. He’s a tall nerdy guy with glasses. Come to think of it, most of these producers are nerdy guys with glasses. Now, if you were to pull up the DJMag list of Top 100 DJs, these are some very fancy, handsome, airbrushed people. And the vast majority of that stuff is music for stupid people. When you start going underground, deep underground, when your taste evolves to the point that the 60 cents of royalties that you are paying to the artist is probably 25% of what he is going to receive, then you are a dance music aficionado. When you are pulling stuff up on YouTube with 89 plays. The record label Balance just put on a festival in Croatia with all my favorite artists. I’d go, but my passport expired and I’ve been too lazy to renew it. I’m sure you have never heard of Maze 28. Young guy, he’s great, and he’ll get even better over time. That’s basically my new goal: produce great tracks, get signed to labels, and then tour all over the world. While managing money and writing newsletters and books, of course. Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll just hang it up and do music full-time.

Except, I am 52. There’s a long on-ramp to this, and optimistically, it will take me a few years to get good, so maybe it will happen when I am 55. Now, there are 55-year-old DJs out there, but they usually don’t start when they are 55. The art form isn’t that old. I think Carl Cox is 60, Digweed is close, and you have a lot of underground legacy DJs who are in their mid-to-late 50s at this point. Believe it or not, staying up late has never bothered me—it is from the military training, sir. Years of sleep deprivation in the Coast Guard and grad school has prepared me for this moment. I can pull an all-nighter (or two) and bounce back pretty quickly. It’s a competitive advantage. Most of my contemporaries are going to bed at nine, and I haven’t even gone out yet. I will say that the daytime gigs are much more humane, and going from the club in Vegas straight to the airport is not a lot of fun. But I am motivated, like a German Shepherd. I will do anything for the music.

Some people do this for the wrong reasons. The money is actually the least worst of all the reasons. If you can make a lot of money doing this, go for it. You shouldn’t do it for the fame (you shouldn’t do anything for the fame). You shouldn’t do it for the women. You shouldn’t live your music career with Saturnalian excess, generally speaking. The drugs do not make you a more interesting person. Some DJs just want to get laid all the time. I am starting to look like Wilford Brimley, so that is not going to happen to me. I think James Hype does pretty well in that department, literally the only DJ that spends time in the weight room. You might recall my short story collection Night Moves. Well, the title story is about a DJ/producer in Miami who has a fling with the mom next door. There’s a lot of music inside baseball in that story (and it’s also very funny).

Usually when I post in WGGTB, I am talking about some moral or philosophical issue that I’ve been thinking about and turning over in my head. This is a blog post in the literal definition of the word—just writing about my life. But I have been thinking a lot about my future, lately. You get to be this age, and you start dwelling on your mortality, and if you can picture yourself on your deathbed, thinking of all the things you wish you’d done, well, that is where I am right now. Jeff Bezos said that if he didn’t start Amazon, he would have regretted it for the rest of his life. This is tiddlywinks compared to starting Amazon—it is a matter of sitting down in front of the complicated German software and figuring it out. Once I get my novel finished, I’ll start—probably in the spring. And then I’m going to be annoying as fuck, because I’ll be asking you to click on private SoundCloud tracks to listen to my projects.

Ain’t life grand?