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Dance Clubs

Owned by Nathan Wailes
Last updated: Mar 30, 2019
12 min read

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  • I love the sense of overwhelming awe I feel when I hear really deep, powerful bass come into a song, like the same sense of awe when I heard a lion roar in-person. I want to take that to its logical conclusion, and be able to shake the entire dancefloor like if there was an earthquake happening. At the moment I'm thinking it could be done with hydraulics.
  • There should be some procedure for gradually introducing new songs / types of music into a new region. For example, if some really good country music song comes out, there should be some gradual wa
  • There should be multiple rooms with different energy-levels, and people who are new should have some way of starting out at the low-energy rooms and then gradually working their way up to the high-energy rooms.
    • This will also help people warm up.
  • You should list rules for men and women to follow if they want to try to get intimate. This is the way things used to be done. The man makes a gesture, the woman has to respond in a certain way, and then it goes to the next level, there's a certain amount of time the guy has to wait before he can try again, and he can do XYZ in the interim to make it more likely he'll succeed next time, etc.
  • I want it to be a game where everyone has accelerometers on disposable coveralls hooked up to lights they're wearing, and there's a big board where it shows the collective energy level of everyone in the room, and when the energy level reaches certain thresholds they unlock certain cool things.
  • I want to limit it to 1 hour a night at first. Just 1 Magic Tape.


Problems with the U St Music Hall:

  • the #1 problem is too much variation in the quality of the DJs. IMO they might be better off just playing sets from The Magician every night.
  • (continued) - The DJs one night played very repetitive, non melodic house. There was no melody, all of the music was going on in the lower ranges. No mid or high-range aspects to the music. [Later:] After going another night I realized what was missing: a piano and human voice. I'm not saying all good house needs to have that, but those two instruments can really brighten up a song.
  • very simple lighting system: they only have two pairs of 4 lights, one pair is red and the other pair is blue
  • the lights turn on and off, but they don't do it in sync to the music
  • the bar is right next to the dance floor and has lights, so it's really distracting for people trying to dance and might make people on the dance floor feel uncomfortable.
  • no smoke machine
  • the DJs do annoying things that make it harder to dance, like cutting the sound, or constantly talking on the mic in a way that interrupts the music
  • there's nothing fun to do while waiting for the place to fill up. People just stand around. They should be teaching people how to dance in ways that use more of the floor. There should be a video screen demonstrating a dance move for people to practice.
  • Once the place fills up a lot of people (>50%) still don't dance. I think it's because 1) the music isn't great, and 2) people don't know what to do with their bodies.
  • They don't have great control over the sound. It gets too loud.
  • People are out on the dancefloor with cups of alcohol when it's packed, which is just a recipe for a mess. And then when someone spills something they shine a big light in the middle of the dancefloor and everyone has to move so a janitor can clean up the mess. It's not ideal.
  • People are taking pictures and video


There is clearly something wrong with the way they are doing things, because:

  • the club has never been packed when I've been there on Friday and Saturday nights. Maybe it gets packed when they have a well-known performer.
  • of the people who are there, a small percentage are actually dancing. One night there were probably 100-150 people there and only ~15 dancing.
  • With the non-melodic DJ, I noticed that people immediately got excited when he started to play something even a little more melodic.


Ideas:

  • Invite local people who are into dancing to dance on platforms, like those guys you often see breakdancing in public.
  • I want people to have such powerful experiences that they may start crying, like really good classical music.
  • It would be cool to have an Arduino hooked up to LEDs all over your clothing and have it light up in time to the music.
  • Do something with that crowdsourced music video, where people's mouse cursors were used in the music video. Maybe use people's dancing to control the lights?
  • I think having new people control the visualizations instead of dancing may be a great way to ease them into the experience.
  • Maybe have sections of the floor where people's stomps control lights/visualizations? Kind of like DDR?

Misc

Anonymizing clothing

Sunglasses

Fog / Smoke

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_machine

How To Make 5 Easy Fog Effects
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0oX3r31EBE
- This is a very helpful video, this guy really knows his stuff

Food and drinks to offer

Food

  • Maybe serve ice cream or green peas to get people in a good mood?

Drinks

  • If you don't serve alcohol you can have the whole community come out, the way it used to work in the village dances.
    • This could help with virality...
    • Maybe just have weeknights with no alcohol?

Fun Policies

  • If you show up in a costume, you get a discount / free entry. I think having people in silly outfits will help everyone relax.
  • Have secret policies, like how In & Out has secret menu items.

How to Get Started

  • create a scale model of your gym using wood and have LEDs and music so you can show it to the people at CrossFit
  • Just throw a house party like Alison did. Don't have it run all night so the neighbors don't get too pissed (even though that's the eventual goal, like in BA / Ibiza).
  • Maybe limit the dance parties to an hour so that people can still go do other things on U St
  • Have an office where you have everyone using folding chairs and folding tables, so you can just fold everything up at night and throw parties.

Processing visualization

  • as an initial test you can just have a 2D visualization (like what you can do with Processing), and then for the room you can just duplicate that area in vertical strips around the room.
    • do it with Justice's Planisphere

Videogame / VR version

  • add crowd cheering sounds. Also the game should react to the player's involvement: the more the player goes wild (jumping up and down, shouting), the more wild the game should get (louder, more sounds, more shouting from the crowd, etc.).

Lights

Misc ideas

  • The lights that sync to a particular instrument can (should?) gradually change over time to avoid boredom, even within the same song, in the same way that people vary the dance move that they use for a particular part of the music, because to always use the same dance move to match the same idea in the music would be less interesting than having multiple different visual interpretations of the musical idea / sound.


One thing that hadn't occurred to me at first was that if you have too many lights you will lose that part of the mystique of dance clubs which arises from the fact that you can't see that well (esp. other people's faces). So it may be desirable to test the light shows to see how much they increase the ambient light level in the room. Better yet, you could probably calculate what the total ambient light would be if you know the brightness of each light and how many of them are on at a given time. And then you could control that total-ambient light

Professional Light Shows

  • 2010 - Chromeo @ House of Blues
    • The lights are not precise enough.
  • The Magician @ I Love Techno 2012
    • The lights are attached to motors and move around to the music, but 1) the timing is off, and 2) the motors aren't able to move the lights as quickly as the individual notes of the music change, so it doesn't match well.
  • 2012.08.25 - The Magician playing "Happiness" at Feest in het Park
    • This video shows better lighting than the previous one but I still don't think it's anywhere near where it could be. The lights don't match the intensity of the music as closely as they should: there's a section in the middle where it's more quiet, building tension, but the lights are still flashing really rapidly. I think that should've been a time to turn the lights down really low or even turn most of them off, so that when the full blast of all the lights comes on later it'll be more impressive.



Notes I took, probably while watching YouTube videos:
- Wham city lights is a great example of giving the audience a way to participate
- Avicii laser show 2011 is greate but also a good example of people recording with their smart phones instead of dancing
- Critical mass is a great example of letting people create something amazing by working together (I think that could be applied to lights if people could control certain lights)
- Kvant 2014 laser show is AWESOME and IMO a vision of videogames of the future; the only thing it's missing is true detection of where the body is

Ceiling / Wall Lighting

Madrix
Quote:
Rodriguez used 15 StellaScapes E16-II controllers and 220 StellaGreen Strings in this luminous spectacular that boasts some 56,100 LEDs. Each individual LED is capable of producing 16.7 million colors by mixing 256 levels of brightness and 256 levels of red, green and blue. The setup was programmed to music using MADRIX Ultimate on a custom-built Core i5-760 computer running at 2.8GHz with 8GB of RAM.

"I'm by no means an expert or formally trained in anything. All my knowledge is self-taught or gleaned from reading and listening to others," Damion Rodriguez, the display's creator, told Wired via e-mail.

The designs and patterns of his spectacle are extraordinarily varied. "Some are basic EQs, and some are plasma color washes with custom palettes masked onto another effect, 35 layers deep," Rodriguez says. "The roof is sometimes a marquee with a text ticker scrolling across, with another swirling helix effect that color-fades to the music on the megatree. I'm still adding new effects every day, tweaking existing ones. Currently, I have a bank of 82 combined effects for my patch."

Rodriguez notes that the lights in this display are so intensely bright that most cameras are unable to accurately capture their dynamic range -- instead, cameras capture just a bunch of blown-out white dots. Rodriguez used a Canon 5D Mark II for this YouTube footage, and still, he says, there's "tons of texture and detail in the effects on the roof that just looks like white points of light."

The entire show lasts for 81 minutes, and runs nightly from dusk until 10 p.m. With such a long, bright show -- set to music, no less -- I asked Rodriguez if the neighbors put up a fuss.
Example Setups
On-Person Lighting


    • It's really, really cool, but the delay between the acceleration and the light changes makes it less than ideal for dancing, where the timing is very important.
Shoe Lights
Floor lighting
Misc lighting
  • IMPORTANT - You need to have the lights "dance" in a nonrepetitive way even when the music they are synced to is repetitive. In other words, don't just have a stationary light blinking on and off in time to the instrument it's synced to, because it will quickly get boring to look at. Changes in pitch should be depicted with changes in color, and changes in loudness should be depicted by changes in brightness.
  • IMPORTANT - Don't overuse the lighting! Too many light shows have the lights on full blast at all times. You need to hold back so that the bright parts will have an impact when the music gets really wild.
    • You can copy a lot of the techniques that the music is using. For example, what music will often do is have two different ideas and then combine them at the end of the song. Similarly, 
Quote:
Built with red, green, and blue channels, and independently addressable controllers, WS2812 LEDs are colorful and fun devices to build with. It's a cinch to work with a few of these LEDs, but larger projects that involve matrices or many rows of strips can be challenging to get things looking exactly as planned. That's where Fadecandy comes in -- it's a USB_based controller that helps ease programming so you can focus more on creative aspects.

Fadecandy can also make your LED pixel projects look better through interpolation, dithering, and higher resolution colors. Each Fadwecandy can support as many as 512 WS2812 LEDs, in 8 strings of 64, and you can use multiple controller boards for larger projects. It can be run from desktop computers, laptops, and even Raspberry Pis.

Non-Dancing Activities

  • It would be cool to have drums around the edges of the room where people can sit and play if they're too self-conscious or tired to dance. The drums could be noise-makers and/or hooked up to lights.
  • I'd really like to capture that amazing feeling I got when I was in the orchestra in 7th grade and we'd play a really cool song. It was a really cool sensation to be contributing to such an impressive spectacle (the song).

Personal Items to Offer to People

Earplugs

  • Have different strength earplugs available
  • Give everyone different-strength earplugs and tell them which ones to use depending on where they end up standing (eg closer to the speakers, use stronger earplugs)
  • http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-17952110



Footwear

  • Women who show up in heels won't be able to dance. It'll be important to have something available for them to wear.
  • Maybe offer shoe rentals like at a bowling alley?

Coveralls

Rules of the Dance Floor

  • no conversations
  • no photography
  • wear sunglasses
  • recommended: close your eyes and focus on the music
  • bouncers: no using your flashlights unless it's an emergency

Spacing people out

Maybe have tape on the ground that marks out boxes where people should stand?

Temperature

  • What's the ideal temperature? I think it being cool may actually be a bad thing; I think people may be more inclined to move around if it's warm. The trick is being able to maintain the ideal temperature as the place fills up.
  • 2014.09.01 - I was just folding laundry in my warm laundry room and definitely felt more like moving around. So I think a temp around 80 might be ideal.

The Music

Allow people to rank their music preferences before they go in, and have that determine the music that's played

  • I often wish the venue would play a particular song that I really like, but they never do...

Have the music increase or decrease in intensity as more people enter or leave the room

  • I hate having an empty room blasting super-intense music. It's just jarring.

Have the music increase or decrease in intensity to correspond to the intensity of the music

  • One thing I've noticed while blasting music with 1776's speakers is that after a while you get desensitized to the volume. It might be better to keep the volume a little lower during the majority of the music and then increase it for a bit when a really intense part of the song comes along.

Use silence to build anticipation

  • Example: AH waiting 30 seconds before speaking
  • Maybe require silence in the audience; have mics hooked up to the visual display, so it displays the sound people are making, and it says something like "SILENCE" or some other way to convey that people need to be quiet for a period of time before the music will start.
  • This idea of having simple ways for the audience to interact with the music is related to the idea of dances that people would learn in the old days: it was a series of simple steps that people would learn to string together. It was the videogame of those days.

Start with a Magic Tape that has a strong opening song

  • Contenders:
  • MT 22 (1st song is great, 2nd song isn't as strong. Nevermind! It has a weak opening segment that flips into a sick hook.)
  • I listed MT 44 as one of the best, from listening to it now it doesn't have a super-strong opening song. At ~8:00 it starts a song I really like, before that it's OK. This might make a good second MT to use in a night. It has a REALLY good song start at ~35:50.

Use good songs

Misc music ideas

The Speakers

Big Speakers ("Loudspeakers")

Small / Portable Speakers

Video Displays

Video Displays

While in Spain I saw an amazing EDM show out in the street that used a projector and a big screen that had interesting video clips to go with the music. It was awesome.

Idea: Use SI clips to the music. I was listening to YACT's Second Summer while looking at SI clips and it fit perfectly.

Portable Projectors

Videos of People Dancing

Cool Processing Sketches

  • If you use Processing visualizations, the framerate is important. A low framerate looks bad.
  • Lightning Rod
  • Skin Light
  • firefly flight
  • Processing's "Mixture Grid" example sketch; I could see someone controlling that to the music and getting into it as a way of easing them into dancing.
  • Processing's "Video" sketches are pretty interesting, because they may be the way for me to simulate video within Processing. There are also some interesting effects that might make it another way for people to "dance" by using video.

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