[PREV - TRANSITIONS]    [TOP]

PROGRAMMED

                                      October 13, 1994

Improvisation is a necessity, not a virtue.
                                                 (Typo of the week:
                                                 Impovertised Music)
I always make an attempt at planing my
radio show out in great detail.

A technique I worked out a long time ago                    NELSON
for figuring out sequences of events, is the
use of post-it notes as records in a paper
database which can be arranged on another
sheet of paper.

When I'm interested in a cut, I write
it up on a post-it note, and archive
it in a looseleaf notebook.  I flip
through this notebook, arranging the
post-its into sets of music I think
will work, and the sets can then
later be arranged into a show.

Everything is pre-planned, but it remains
flexible.  If I get a request I really
like, if I can't find a record I want to
play, if I spend too much time on the air
talking, or if I just have a better idea,
the post-its can be rapidly re-arranged.
A shorter set can be substituted for a
longer set.  A set can be split up,
another cut added...

I get some other advantages out of this
system: I'm freed from the time it
would take to write down what I'm
playing as I play it.  And since I know
what I'm going to play, in theory all
of my records can be pulled before the
show starts so I shouldn't need to look
for things during the show.  Also, I
only need to pull and refile precisely
the records that are going to be
played: (more improvisational DJs often
start their shows with more music than
they can possibly use).

Someday there will be computers good
enough that I can throw away the post-it
note system and do this electronically.  I'd
certainly like to.  It would be great to have
my own database of interesting music with
my own keywords that I could search on.
With the current state of software though,
even if I had a workstation in the control         And now there is!
room I think I'd have trouble doing this           At least there's
without using paper.                               a terminal... so I'm
                                                   going to have to try
                                                   using emacs for this.

                                                   Some DJs have 
                                                   experimented with
                                                   typing up 
                                                   their playlists
                                                   during their show,
                                                   directly into
                                                   web page format.
                                                   
                                                       (And these days, 
                                                       circa 2003, most 
                                                       of them type them 
                                                       up straight into 
                                                       the newly web-enabled 
                                                       Zookeeper database.)


--------
[NEXT - NECESSITY]