Your Local DJ

Be the DJ for an A-List Celebrities’ Birthday - CHECK!

Everyone has their goals in their career. Some might want to be the employee of the month, some want to make it to C.E.O of a big company, some want to be the head writer for a big newspaper. As a DJ I have different goals, and as go by my life crossing them off my list, I keep adding new ones to them, that way, I can keep myself focused. I have DJ’ed a few celebrity events. Last year I played for Carlos Arroyo’s birthday where all type of celebrities came in from Carmelo Anthony to Benicio del Toro. I was able to remove the “DJ a celebrities birthday” off my list. I didn’t want to stop there so I added a harder goal to “DJ for an A-List Celebrities’ Birthday”. 

Some things in life you have to go get by yourself, others just fall into your lap. This one fell into my lap. During the week I got a call asking me if I was free to DJ on Friday, December 9th  2011. I have had a residency for friday nights at Club Brava for almost a year now, and declined. The person later called me a few days later to tell me it was to be the DJ for Britney Spears’ 30th Birthday. I immediately started to look for a replacement for Brava (Thank you DJ Ment), and took the gig. 

While I was pretty excited and wanted to share it with friends, I had to keep it pretty quiet although a few friends eventually put the pieces together. Friday came and I call to verify at what time I’m supposed to arrive at the venue, they tell me it might be cancelled. I call back the replacement DJ I found for Brava and try to get my job back for that night, only to find out a couple of hours later that the party was still going to happen. 

I show up to the venue and get it going. They all danced and Ms. Spears seemed to be having a good time alongside her friends family and crew members. A lot of people have asked me if I talked to her, I didn’t. While I did have a break and she was more than approachable I felt this is her time to relax and be herself and not have to be forced into pictures and interacting with people she didn’t know, so, I just let her be. 

..and there it is, I could say it, I DJ’ed for one of the biggest celebrities right now, and can say Ms. Spears is even better looking in person, this girl gets too much of a bad rep and actually seems like a great person. 

At the event I met a couple of the dancers and later that night bumped into some of them at Club Brava where I kept talking to most of them and even befriended a few crew members. I took them to a couple of local hangouts and took them zip-lining, it wasn’t until today that the remaining few left. Overall, they all seemed to really like Puerto Rico. 

I don’t know how I will top off this experience yet, but I’ll try to find a way to keep growing. 

EDIT - I actually just found an article that mentioned me and took a picture. 

http://www.entertainmentaffair.com/2011/12/britney-spears-celebrates-birthday-end-of-tour-in-puerto-rico/

11/17 - 11/20

Here are the gigs for this weekend.

Thursday, November 17th 2011

Bijou (Soft Opening) at Club Brava

Friday, November 18th 2011

Intuition at Club Brava

Saturday, November 19th 2011

Aphrodisia at The Rose

DJ Garcia - Top 5 (November)

Here’s a list of the top five song I enjoy playing the most right now. Click on the title to stream the song.

1. Calvin Harris ft. Rihanna - We Found Love

2. David Guetta ft. Usher - Without You (DJLM & DJ Garcia Remix)

3. Avicii vs Flo Rida - Levels The Good Feeling (DJEU Edit)

4. J. Cole - Work Out

5. Drake - Headlines

Hey, Where Have You Been?

Lately this blog has looked more a page for promotion on my music, than a blog with my thoughts and stories regarding my line of work. Truth is, between how busy I have kept the past few weeks, I didn’t seem to find anything interesting to write about. As I had a break to think today, There has been a couple of things that I do want to make public. 

First, I can officially call myself a producer, and I’m very proud of the first track I have worked on. A few weeks ago, I had some ideas for a couple of edits and decided to meet up with my good friend and colleague DJLM to make these ideas a reality. He’s been producing now for a while, and I have always had it as an on and off thing (more off than on, I would say). We decided to work on some of these edits for the past few weeks. Once David Guetta and Usher’s song; “Without You”, started to play on the radio, I knew it would reach the billboard Top 10 and it would be requested in a club, but it still needed more of a club feeling. 

I called DJLM up one day and shared this idea. He liked it, and told me to find an acapella for it so we could work on it the next day. Bad part is, there are no acapella’s to this song other than some DIY (Do It Yourself). I found one that wasn’t half bad and decided to work with it. We spent a few days working on it, and on the first day I was already veri excited of what this song could be. Most producers get a remix out in 4-6 hours, we were so analytical of everything, it took us 4-6 sessions, but it was worth it. I have never been more proud of a song I have worked on from scratch, and the song isn’t doing half bad either. Today it’s the 2 week anniversary since we first posted it and it already has over 2,500 plays on Soundcloud.com (adding up my account plays with DJLM’s account plays). If you haven’t heard it yet, you could check it out here; http://soundcloud.com/djgarciapr/david-guetta-usher-without-you-remix

So, I have been rather busy with producing, and the gigs in Puerto Rico haven’t stopped. There was one gig I was already confirmed for and was very sad when it got cancelled. As a huge fan of the NBA, I had been offered to DJ during the game at an exhibition game with NBA All Stars, such as Kobe Bryant, Kevin Durant, and Dwyane Wade. I could fill stadiums with thousands of people wanting to see me, open up for the #1 DJ in the world, be the #1 DJ in the world, and that gig would still rank the highest, why? Because Im probably the biggest basketball buff you will every meet.

I’ve had some fun gigs also, Halloween weekend I played an event for NUVO at the Condado Plaza Hotel here in Puerto Rico, and also played the launching event for the Range Rover Rouge. I’m still there at Club Brava on a weekly basis where in the past few days numerous celebrities such as, Bernie Williams, David Ortiz, Juan Manuel Lopez, Jose Juan Barea, Zuleyka Rivera, Jose Bautista and Rafael Fuscal, among others. Mostly players from the MLB. 

So, if you’re in town, you know you can find me every Friday night at Club Brava (and on a couple of Thursday’s a month). 

Goodbye Blackberry, Hello iPhone

I’m a little ashamed of this story, but I’ll tell it anyways.

If anybody has seen me walking around with a phone two weeks prior to today, you would think I took my phone out of a dumpster. My blackberry was a few phone calls away from dropping dead. It was a great phone, it took some hits to the floor a couple of times and still survived (somewhat). By now, you could only make calls on speakerphone, the back cover for the battery had been lost, scratches everywhere, battery barely lasted more than two hours on constant use. 

That phone had been with me for two years, which has to be the most a phone has lasted in my lifetime. However, I was having signal problems already and calls weren’t coming in. I had gone to Sprint to get a phone for someone else and they had informed me that they are not selling blackberry’s anymore due to problems in the software between Sprint and RIM. I was 2 months away from my contract expiring and there were rumors going around that the iPhone would be coming to Sprint. I decided to wait. 

I arrive to Sprint on the day after my contract expired and ask for an iPhone 4s. They tell me they are all in back order and wont have any for a while. I ask the person if I could get on some type of list to get a phone when it comes in, they tell me they are not taking more reservations for now. So, I take my talents to AT&T to see what they’re offering. AT&T doesn’t have an iPhone 4S either but give me the option to leave it paid for and as soon as one arrives they would call me to pick it up. I consider if I should stay with sprint with an iPhone 4 now, or wait a couple of weeks for an iPhone 4S with AT&T.

I head back to Sprint where a lady asks me if I need help with anything. I ask her why they aren’t taking any more names to purchase an iPhone 4S (at this point I really wanted the 4S, if I was going to make the purchase and agree to a new two year contract, I might as well have done it with the most recent phone, no?), she explains to me that they are accepting names but she thinks there was a 4S that was misplaced and is available to purchase.

She checks with her manager and confirms that there is one white iPhone 4S 64 GB phone available that was misplaced and placed with the white iPhone 4 16 GB model. Price tag is 399.00 + Tax, and I had gone with the intention of purchasing a 16GB model. I dont see how it is actually possible to fill up a 64 GB phone (I still share this opinion to this date). I decide to treat myself to the phone and purchase it. Two other people were waiting behind me hoping I would change my mind which I think made me want the phone a bit more. Final price tag of the phone with a cover and a screen protector runs me up to about 430.00. After a $9.00 discount for giving in my blackberry (which was about $8.99 more than I expected they would give me for it) it brought it down to about 421 dollars. 

I get home and start filling this bad boy up with everything I can. I need to somehow prove to myself that I will use every GB on this phone for something useful. I store about 1,500 songs with songs I normally would listen to daily, only to see I have barely scratched the memory inside this phone. I start to transfer my iPad apps to my iPhone. I have over 9GB on apps alone on my ipad, so I thought I might do some damage with that. Turns our, not every app I had is universal (i.e Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Word With Friends, Bill Minder, etc). It turns out in order for me to have some of these apps I also have to buy the iPhone version. To this day (about 6 days after the initial purchase), I have 1,593 songs, 3 Videos (videos recorded from the iphone), 49 pictures and 53 apps, and still have 45.4 GB available for storage. At this point I think I can record a whole music festival with this. 

I thought I would struggle with the texting (which I do a lot of). This has to be the biggest fear of a person with a Blackberry, and it turns out, I actually write faster with an iPhone and make less mistakes than with my blackberry. Siri is cool, I find it useful for playing music while Im driving and replying to texts. Still haven’t gotten used to setting calendar events and reminders. Reminders is awesome, but I wish it was a bit more effective with the GPS reminders. I have set up reminder for when I leave my house, and the reminder has gone off when I have already been driving for about 5-10 minutes. 

Battery life, now that one got me scared. I would make calls and drop about 15% on a 5 minute call. Using the phone was barely giving me 3 hours of usage. I decided to search on it to find that I wasn’t the only one. I followed a couple of tips to improve the usage (draining the battery a few times and charging to calibrate the battery correctly and removing some bugs on iOS5) and on my 6th day, I disconnected the phone at 10:30 AM, it is now 6:15 PM and I still have 33% battery left (Usage - 3 Hours 46 Minutes | Standby - 7 Hours 11 Minutes). Apparently apple has accepted this bug and already is working on an update to fix this. 

I love the camera on this phone and no longer need to carry my flip camera or any camera for the most part.

Picture taken at the Club on Saturday with no use of Flash.

I found Nemo with my iPhone!

For the most part, I love this phone, and don’t miss blackberry (sorry blackberry loyalist, I was just like you once too). I do miss BBM, sort off, and wish iMessage had a contact list of people using iMessage (Im sure Apple will come out with it sooner or later), but overall I am completely in love with this phone and find it very useful for almost anything. Would definitely recommend this phone to anybody.