DJ SURVIVAL GUIDE: DARIUS SYROSSIAN

After decades in clubs, 15 years working in record shops and countless hours behind DJ booths around the world, Darius Syrossian has learned that great DJing has very little to do with simply turning up and playing the biggest records.

Reading a room, respecting the people behind the party and knowing when to throw something completely unexpected onto the dancefloor are all part of the craft.

So we asked Darius for his rules of survival behind the decks. Seven lessons every DJ should probably know: 

Always arrive at least an hour before you play and analyse the room and the dancefloor. If it’s a festival, analyse the crowd. I believe the most important part of DJing is reading the crowd.

Soak up the energy of the dancefloor and start planning your first 30 minutes in your head, as well as how you might want to finish. Trust me, it makes a massive difference.

I never turn up five minutes before I play. If you do, you’re losing a huge opportunity to understand the room and really blow people away with your set.

No matter who plays before me, even if it’s a local DJ who isn’t very well known, I always applaud them out of respect.

I don’t stop the music because you don’t want to kill the vibe. I put a slight filter on, bring the bass down, applaud the DJ, then start my intro track. Bring everything back up and boom, go from there.

Respect matters.

About 15 minutes before I start, I go onto the dancefloor and check how everything actually sounds.

What you hear in the booth and through the monitors is nine times out of ten completely different acoustically from what people hear on the dancefloor. It might be more bass heavy down there or have much more top end.

Remember that when you’re mixing. Ultimately, your set needs to sound good for the people dancing, not just for you in the booth.

I always have a curve ball track in every set. Sometimes more than one.

I’m quite eclectic anyway and move through more genres than a lot of DJs these days. I spent 15 years working in record shops like Global Beat and Crash Records before breaking through internationally, and that exposed me to an enormous amount of music.

The art of DJing is telling a good story. If you’re a good DJ, you can make different genres work together. Sometimes I like to push that even further and play something nobody expects.

It always works a treat.

Read the crowd properly.

I always try to make eye contact with the people at the front. It helps you understand what the energy of the dancefloor actually feels like.

Energy is everything. You play your best sets when you understand the energy in the room rather than simply playing the tracks you planned beforehand.

Music is art. You wouldn’t throw away an old painting just because it’s old, would you? If anything, some become more valuable with time.

That’s why my sets are never made up entirely of new or unreleased tracks. Having spent 15 years working in record shops, I’ve built up a huge back catalogue of music.

Every few weeks I spend a couple of hours going through old records and tracks and bring some of them back into my sets.

And I don’t mean obvious classics. I mean great music that a lot of people today simply don’t know, but that you know is going to smash the dancefloor.

Make time for the promoters, the artist liaison and everyone involved in putting the party together.

Not every event is a huge superclub. A lot of parties are created by people who promote because they genuinely love music, while taking a considerable financial risk to make the night happen.

They’re paying thousands to fly you across the world. Show some courtesy. Go to the pre gig meal. Be polite to the artist liaison, who probably has one of the most stressful jobs in the building.

And always, always, make time for fans who want a picture or a quick chat.

Because without the clubbers on the dancefloor, DJs are redundant.

The dancefloor is what keeps this entire thing alive.