Miss Saigon: How to DJ, Right?

“It’s like being a maestro,” says veteran mix-master Miss Saigon (Flash, Aug/Sep ‘08) about her DJ craft. “You ever seen those Bugs Bunny cartoons where he’s being a maestro? He’s got his hand up in the air, like, Do-do-do-do-do. That’s what we are.” Spinning tracks for Eve and Pras on tour, Saigon can rock a party of any size–from private dinners for Russian billionaires to 50,000-person venues in Africa. Here, she breaks down the how-to of moving a crowd.

1. “Know your craft. You have to know the instruments that you’re playing with, so verse yourself well in Serato or whatever program you’re using, and practice, practice, practice, practice until you get it down so you don’t have any glitches.”
2. “Know what sounds good together, and know what doesn’t sound good together. But that might be different for somebody else. So for me, I have like a skeleton structure of what I’m gonna play at a party, of how I’m gonna do it.”
3. “Whether it’s one hour or five hours, you have to have a flow to it. If you’re just erratic, people will look at you and be pissed off, and its not a good look.”
4. “Your blends, your mixes, your scratches—master that.”
5. “Read the crowd. That’s a gift that I’ve been given. That’s one of my most important gifts, reading a crowd and knowing and feeding off of that. Definitely plug in. You gotta plug in to that crowd, and me personally, I’m more of a slave to the crowd. You can’t let them fall off.”