Mackenzie Fell

How To Headline An Event – Throw Your Own #cpbus453

Hello and welcome back to my lil blog ~ a place for me to write freely about my silly and wild experiences as a DJ! It has been a whirlwind the past few years building my skills, platform and following as a musician, starting out DJing Cal Poly events in the University Union and progressing to getting booked to play music festivals and producing my own original tracks.

I would like to share some personal insight that I have gained creating this passion project and business for myself. I have learned so much about myself, music lovers and the music industry throughout my time. I have learned that I do everything for the fulfilling feeling I get when I am interacting with and influencing a crowd through live mixing. I encourage everyone to dig deep, indulge in new things, and discover that feeling within yourself. Once you find the thing that lights a fire within you, pour your heart into it and make something out of it as you please. It is much easier said than done, but it will come naturally if you really listen to yourself and allow yourself to experience new things. There are so many opportunities out there in this day and age, and I encourage everyone to harness what comes to you.

Finding that passion within myself early allowed me to build something for myself at such a young age. I started DJing when I first got to college at age 18. I took the first opportunity available to play a show – a DJing competition on Cal Poly’s campus. Even if that first opportunity doesn’t seem like what you’d always dreamed of, you must have the mentality to start off small and know it can build into something if you work hard enough.

The story of how I got involved with SubSessions is in a past blog post of mine, which I highlight encourage you to check out! Through this local opportunity I harness, I learned so many skills for throwing my own events from the planning phase to the execution. I would love to share my planning process and the steps I took to headline an event which can happen by being a large famous DJ, OR by throwing your own event!!!! 😉

This past Friday night, I threw myself a release party for my newest track, Fruit Salad in the Club! You can find my song on Spotify or Soundcloud as well as Itunes, Amazon music, and over a hundred other streaming platforms. You can also see photos from the event here taken by my friend Natalie Goldstein.

Find a venue ~ I have been working with Novo Restaurant for the past six months, so having that connection made this first part fairly simple for me. Find venues in your city that showcase local talent, and go into the venue to speak with them. These types of conversations go much better if you speak with the owner or manager in person rather than sending an email or leaving a voicemail. If you are not able to get in touch in person, the latter may provide an opportunity depending business to business.
Pick a date ~ Once you’ve found a venue, take a look at their calendar and available dates for shows. Be sure to choose one that is far enough out that you will have time to plan and market the event as it may come up faster than you think. Be sure to also think about the day of the week and if that is a day many people in your city attend shows. Some days of the week will work better place to place as residents in your town may be more encouraged to go out on specific nights depending on the structure of the local scene.
Determine your audience ~ Our world is largely shifting to a digital takeover, especially with the younger generations, so social media has been an incredible platform for marketing and communication with my audience. Recognize the demographic of your audience, and that will determine the best marketing channels for you and how to plan the look and feel of your event.
Create marketing materials ~ The best thing to create first for your event is a graphic with all necessary event information (event title, venue, date, time, age range, etc.). This way you have the opportunity to distribute physical and digital event posters without needing further explanation. An aesthetically pleasing graphic will also attract more eyes and potentially convert those interested into committed attendees. Create a vibe for the event through a theme or a mood board, and that can tell you what image or design and the colors you could have on the graphic. You may need to hire a graphic designer for this part depending on the skills you hold. In my opinion, Adobe Illustrator is one of the best platforms to create graphics on with the most functions available, but it is fairly expensive to own the program yourself. Depending on your budget, there are free programs I would also recommend for graphics such as Canva or Photoscape.
Distribute marketing content ~ The demographics of your audience will determine the marketing channels that you will best reach potential attendees at. Putting up physical printed posters at high trafficked areas in town can be very helpful in getting the word out. Your design can catch the eye of many people walking by and if it has all the necessary information, it is likely to get people to attend. Social media can also be incredibly helpful to get the word out to a large number of people. I usually make an Instagram post, an Instagram story and a Facebook post and story when I first announce the event. I will hopefully now start using Twitter too after this class. I then post a couple more times leading up to the event to remind people, get people excited, and reach those that might have missed your first post. I aim to write engaging and exciting captions to hype people up and encourage them to come out.
Spice up your event with cool decor! ~ I enjoy creating an environment at shows, and I have gained those skills from creating multiple environments for each and every SubSessions event. A stage design can be a fun thing to have as that is where most people’s eyes are fixed, on the musician, so an aesthetically pleasing stage can give the audience more to enjoy visually. Actual visuals behind the stage can be an incredible addition as well. If you or a friend or professional in town know how to create visuals, it can be fun to have something designed that showcases your artist name and gives the crowd more to look at. Building decor or creating art for the show can also be a fun thing for friends to do, even something as simple as paper flowers or fun purchased decorations.
Have FUN! ~ Seeing the entire event come together is the best part of it all. Having people come out to an event you created can be one of the most fulfilling feelings, and being able to showcase your talents to friends and new people is a powerful experience.

Thank you for listening to my experiences and the advice I have formulated from it all! I hope this can provide you with some ideas and inspiration for event planning and showcasing a passion project of yours.

Follow Felly Fell on SoundCloud and Spotify to keep up on the latest mixes and tracks I’ve been producing! Check out my Felly Fell Instagram and Facebook pages to get the latest updates on my upcoming shows and content from past events!

Felly Fell’s Mixing Style

I have always been very passionate about music from a young age – I grew up with parents who followed the Dead and Pink Floyd with a strong passion for live music. Their favorite famous albums played throughout our house, allowing me to catch onto the rhythms and the hype around it all. When I was only fifteen, I convinced my parents to let me attend a music festival with a friend’s family, and there I fell in love with electronic music. The energy of the crowd, the big production with lights and visuals, and the power behind the sounds brought me a new passion. I started following different DJ’s from the larger sub genres – trap, EDM, and deep-house – and paying attention to their different styles. I attended any DJ set I could, but not many living in the small town of Santa Barbara with little success finding shows I could get into at my young age. As I got older, I got into more of the underground electronic artists listening to sub genres such as house, techno and breakbeat.

I had always seen bigger name DJ’s play on a large scale production, so the thought of someone like me DJing was very foreign to me. It wasn’t until I got to Cal Poly that I saw a friend of a friend DJing a house party – and the crowd was loving it. I felt the same energy levels and excitement as I did at shows. At that moment I realized that if he could do it, I could do it.

A month later, I bought myself a mixing board and started teaching myself how to DJ. I learned by watching videos on YouTube and watching other DJ’s mix. I experimented with the sounds that I had been listening to for years. I felt a rush of passion when I would mix two songs I knew very well together, listening to how they could compliment each other.

I have now been mixing for nearly four years and feel very confident in my mixing skills. I pay much attention to my beat matching to be sure songs sound good mixed together. I beat match completely by ear in headphones, making sure the two songs are exactly on the same beat before I bring a new song into the mix. When bringing in a song, I am sure to keep the bass down on the new song so it doesn’t overpower the mix. I keep the mids and the highs at a quarter up so they are not overpowering but can be heard. I slowly bring the volume in so that the new addition is very subtle. I then equally turn the highs on the old song down while I turn the highs on the new song up so not to have a change in volume – the new song fills in what I take away on the current song playing. Once I equally turn up and down the highs and mids so that the new song’s pieces are turned up completely, I focus on switching the bass-lines. I usually make this a quick transition, turning off the bass of the old song at the 3rd beat in a four count and bring in the new song’s lows at the 4th beat. I make most transitions end at the end of a four count so that every change in the music is in beats of four.

I choose the music I play based off of the crowd at the event, catering my tracks to the vibe of the people while still playing tracks that I enjoy and want to share. I keep my tracks authentic to what I want to bring to the event while still catering to what that crowd would enjoy. For instance, if I am playing to an older crowd that doesn’t predominantly listen to electronic music, I choose to play disco because it is something they may recognize while still having those electronic bass-lines and consistent rhythms that I enjoy working with. If I am playing to a crowd that likes electronic, but less of the underground electronic music, I will play house and disco to ease them into the electronic side. If I am playing a show in Berlin, I will play techno as it is the techno capital of the world and what most people want to dance to there. I believe that this separates me as a DJ because I make a lot of my decisions based off of the crowd, because if the crowd is dancing and having a good time, I have more fun! I really enjoy curating a vibe, and DJing allows me to take control of the movements of the crowd and determine the vibe at every moment. My music can cater to many different types of people so that I can be booked for a multitude of events.

After much hard work, my mixing skills have been recognized. I have been given the opportunity to play shows in downtown Santa Barbara and San Francisco as well as at music festivals! I look forward to exploring where this musical journey will take me.

SubSessions: SLO Arts and Music Collective

Recently I have been feeling inspired by many of my surroundings, but a platform that inspires me unlike anything ever before is SubSessions. SubSessions is an Arts and Music Collective based out of San Luis Obispo. It is a platform for local artists, musicians and creatives to share their passions and talents with others. It is a growing community of like-minded individuals who come together to celebrate life and all of its art forms. It is a group of driven, talented and inspiring people aiming to cultivate connection through music and art.

I became involved with SubSessions in the Fall of 2017 when the Collective asked me to DJ one of their first events. The event was called Bass Attack out at Old Port Inn at the tip of Avila Pier. Bass Attack featured local DJ’s such as Neurotic, Lifegrid, Kridder and myself, Felly Fell, with a beautiful stage and decor built by SubSessions members. I was honored to be invited to perform and share my music with the intimate following they had at the time. Since I was 15 years old, I have been attending music festivals for the love of live music and people, and I was always intrigued by the production of the events. I ended up teaching myself how to DJ starting when I was 17, inspired by the musicians I saw performing at festivals, but there was a part of me that wanted to have a part in creating the events I performed at. When I met the SubSessions crew the night of Bass Attack, I decided this was an opportunity for me to get involved with a group of like-minded individuals throwing events for the love of music, art and community. I knew that this would be a place for me to gain inspiration from a wide array of people and different art forms.

A few months later, in January of 2018, the founders of SubSessions hosted a meeting for any and all creatives in San Luis Obispo who had any interest in creating something with a larger group of like-minded individuals. This meeting was the turning point in the roots of SubSessions, forming the beginnings of its seriousness. Wes Berger, one of the founding members and our Creative Director, announced to a room full of new and familiar faces that we were going to throw a music festival together and call it Life’s A Peach. Mixes emotions filled the room with feelings of excitement, doubt, nervousness, and hope.

After months of planning, logistics, plan A’s, plan B’s, idea creation and dedication, Life’s A Peach came together successfully in a beautiful way. The festival was on a friend’s property up in Atascadero on a beautiful flat farm surrounded by trees and rolling green hills. A crew of about 40 individuals build three stages – The Peach Pit, a live stage with bands, rappers and singers, The Mineshaft, an electronic stage with DJ’s, and Hydrology, a wellness stage with yoga and workshops by day and acoustic music by night. Murals and art installations spotted the property while vendors sold their original creations. Life’s A Peach was a 24 hour long event with camping on the property, and about 400 people came out to enjoy the livelihood! It was the most empowering, heart-warming and inspiring feeling to see so many faces, old and new, trust us to come out to a remote property for an event unheard of before for the love of music, art, people and a good time.

Since the beauty of Life’s A Peach in Spring of 2018, SubSessions has flourished into a successful Arts and Music Collective running the underground music scene on the California Central Coast! We have thrown three more music festivals after Life’s A Peach – Stoke The World 2019 and Nightlife Savings in 2018 and 2019 with our largest crowd being over 1,000 people. Between these bigger festivals, we throw smaller evening events at venues in Downtown San Luis Obispo highlighting local bands, DJ’s and artists and aiming to create a sense of community around it all.

Inspired by everyone involved in and around this crew, I have worked hard to create a local music and art scene with SubSessions because I see a need for it since our community keeps growing. The individuals in this group are some of the most inspiring and uniquely talented people I have ever met. They inspire me to continue on this path I am on currently in life, making me feel confident I am going in the right direction. They inspire me to want to express myself creatively through music and event curating. I am now one of the Directors of SubSessions, working closely with venue owners to book our evening events at local spots as well as pre-planning logistics for our festivals and stage managing on-site. Every event feels like a new beginning as we see the people in our crowds having the time of their lives and more and more people wanting to get involved every day. I plan to stay in SLO after I graduate to continue Directing SubSessions and building it from the ground up. This group holds a special and large part of my heart and keeps me inspired every day.