Adam Dorn:
DJ Mocean Worker Keeps It Movin’
“Enter the MoWo!” earned Staff Pick and other kudos on the site. “I felt like David vs. Goliath,” says Dorn. “There was my record alongside Britney Spears in an email — and I didn’t have to spend $3 million to reach those people.” As an emerging artist, Dorn appreciates the exposure. “Apple is doing the coolest thing,” he says, “giving musicians a hand up. The second I saw my record doing well on the iTunes store, I knew I had a good one. It was the total confidence thing I needed.”
“All my DJ gigs, from the smallest bars to the Chemical Brothers, have gone off without a hitch. The technology is so tight and stable and crystal clear, I won’t play records again. There’s no reason.”
Get up and Dance
When he’s not recording, Dorn still likes to keep clubgoers on their feet. “My PowerBook is the engine for all my sampling,” he says, “and Traktor lets me do digitally what I used to do with two turntables and a mixer.” The application, he explains, “mirrors a normal DJ setup, but it does it virtually and flawlessly.”
Using Traktor, Dorn plays two songs simultaneously. “I split the output,” he says, “so one song goes through the PA system to the house and the other one goes to my headphones, where I can hear what I’m mixing before the audience does. I do beat-matching on the song in the queue and use my fader to bring it up in the house.” The preview, he says, is essential. “I can nudge the tempo up or down to make a smooth mix. Otherwise, it’s a train wreck.”
Although he’s never needed it, a second PowerBook stands by. “If anything goes wrong,” says Dorn, “I have my backup music stored on another drive. I can just point my software and run off that.”
No More Records
Today even the top names are catching the move to laptops. “I opened for the Chemical Brothers a while ago,” he says, “and you can’t get much bigger than them. At first, the people in the band were like, ‘Are you insane? Who uses a laptop?’ Then they hung around to check out my show. And there I was with my computer, going at it, and the crowd was loving it. And the band started cheering them on!”
Dorn reflects, “Musicians accept computers now. Because it’s not just the cold interface it used to be, where the computer was doing everything and it wasn’t about the music. And kids use software so much, they know what you can do with it.”
It’s a pragmatic trend, Dorn believes. “All my DJ gigs,” he says, “from the smallest bars to the Chemical Brothers, have gone off without a hitch. Nothing crashes. My sound cards are better than turntables. The technology is so tight and stable and crystal clear, I won’t play records again. There’s no reason.”
Ready with 10,000 Songs
After years as a DJ, Dorn knows that audiences are hard to predict. And his equipment can help or hurt his efforts to connect with fans. “You can take maybe 200 records to a club gig,” he says, “and if the crowd responds well, great. But sometimes a club doesn’t like your more aggressive music, or they want more percussion and less vocals, and you can’t course-correct, because you only have so much music.”
