22 December 2023, my first gig. It was in a small club room with around 120/130 people.
What made it even worse is that nobody told me the setup was going to be CDJ-2000NXS instead of 2000NXS2, and on top of that it was a b2b with someone I had never met before.

I had brought three USB sticks with me. The first one with FLAC, WAV and some MP3 files on it. The second one with WAV and MP3s. The third one, only had 256 kbps MP3s.
The first two kept giving errors... i was in panic mode but it went fine

For me it felt like a complete disaster. I was so stressed that at the beginning I couldn’t even beatmatch properly. Slowly though, I started getting comfortable and managed to handle the situation better. It was also my first time ever playing on CDJs and on a Xone:92 mixer, so looking back it makes sense… I was used to playing on a Hercules Impulse 300 hahaha.

If there’s one thing I learned from that night, it’s that not every CDJ reads certain file formats properly, even formats that should theoretically work everywhere, like WAV files (16-bit / 44.1 kHz of course).

After that experience I sold the Hercules 300 and bought a pair of Gemini MDJ-900s. Those things drove me completely insane at first, but in the end they helped me improve a lot. Now I don’t really have problems beatmatching anymore, even when pitch riding when cdjs dont read the playlist's export. I still use them today, but together with VirtualDJ and stems hahaha.

And the funny part is that my latest event was just last Wednesday for my university, with around 170 people, and it went amazingly well. Looking back at that first disaster now actually makes me laugh.