Hello everyone. My name is DJ Steven Andrew from Long Beach, California. I just want to talk to you a bit about some live streaming that I've been doing these past 10 weeks with the whole COVID-19 situation.
I know right now the world is a little crazy, with a lot of protests and riots going on. So you know for safety, it's not the best time to be going out. But the good thing is that we have our music. So if you're a DJ, this is a great time; to practice, to mix, to put your music together and it's a great time to stream, to connect with your audience.
I DJ for my buddy and boss; Danny Sanchez who runs ilove80s.com so with clubs like New Wave Bar, Totally '80s Bar and a few others. So he actually owns four venues and he runs five venues. And one of them being the 80's Club Addiction at the Hully Gully in Downey.
So what he's been doing is organizing these awesome Zoom parties that have been extremely successful. And the reason why I say that is because it's really kept our community and scene close-knit. So we've been having a few hundred people on, every week, tuning in.
And what I like about Zoom compared to other platforms is, it has like a 'Brady Bunch type situation' if you've never been on Zoom before. So I can see people and they can see me. So I can literally see inside of their living rooms, inside of their garages wherever they're having a good time. I've seen families dancing and jumping around.
I've seen, you know, people enjoying adult beverages, they can cheer to me on the camera, they can wave you know. We can laugh, we can sing and dance together. For me, I think that's awesome because that's what keeps me engaged and I can tell what music is working and what's not. To me, that's the next best thing from DJing at a club.
But I know other formats like Instagram and Facebook, ‘it’s just comment’ so that doesn't really work too well for me because I need to be able to to see rather than just read comments which brings me to gear.
Now, if you just want to stream to Facebook or Instagram, you can do it very easily. So what I have is a Serato Numark Scratch Mixer. Now, this is a great mixer. I think Numark did an awesome job, especially for the price range. Now what you can do is just go master out with a regular RCA, two headphone jack for your PC. Now, this only works for a PC so I have an old Dell that I do that with sometimes as well.
But I also have an iPhone and I have a MacBook Pro. If you are going to use an iPhone or a MacBook Pro then you need to get a special headphone jack. It has to have these three rings on it. So just to give you a side by side comparison, just regular RCA versus the three-ring headphone jack.
Now the reason why this works is that that extra ring acts as an input, like a microphone so the music will be able to -- Like right now, I have an iPhone, I can just plug it right in and I can start screaming stereo quality music or I can pop it into an iPad or I could pop it into my MacBook Pro. So those are two different options that you have right there.
Now you can do it from a DJ mixer, you could also do it from a mini DJ controller. So I also have this great Pioneer mini DJ controller, so the same thing. I have RCA out to the headphone jack like what I just showed you.
Now, what I think the best option is, is an audio interface. So my next purchase is going to be an audio interface. Luckily, my buddy DJ Warmer let me borrow his. So an audio interface looks like this, now it's a little different. So an audio interface is typically XLR. So out of the DJ Mixer, instead of going through the master out, you would do XLR, XLR inside of the audio interface.
Now you're not using any RCAs with this. So what it has in the back is a USB cord, like the same kind of cord that you would connect to run Serato software. You would go inside Zoom and then you would select the audio interface as your audio source. And the reason why that is, it's clean. Because I've had issues when I did it because I've been doing this for 10 weeks and I've had you know some learning experiences.
Sometimes with an RCA if you turn it or it gets messed up or looses, it can sound staticky or it can affect the sound quality. But once you're in there with the USB then you know you're pretty solid and golden. So I recommend that's the way to go but it all depends on what you're doing. But I know for our parties, I mean, we've gone from you know eight in the evening until eight in the morning so you want to make sure it sounds good.
Which brings me to my next point too about what are you using, if you're using Facebook, are you using Instagram, is it TikTok? Now as DJs you all know if you try to live stream that there are copyright issues. So you can be on there, you can be like really into anything and booted off because of these copyright issues. That is another reason I personally like Zoom because with Zoom there are zero copyright issues.
So I just wanted to pass along some knowledge and it's a learning experience. You guys can get frustrated at first but you can do it. Just going out practicing, doing it, I learned a lot from my buddy; Brian Sebastian. So shout out to DJ Brian Sebastian.
And so I can learn it, you guys could learn it, okay. So hopefully you pick something up from this and stay safe out there. Be careful, stay creative and I hope to hear some DJ mixes from you guys. Peace out.
