Everything I've learned About Reading a Room
And the girl in Berlin who proved I didn't know enough
A girl walks up to my booth in Berlin and asks me why I haven’t played Kesha yet.
I think she’s joking.
I’m forty minutes into a set at a club I’m trying to become a resident at. A cool club. The kind of place that exists on the cutting edge of whatever the rest of the world is about to discover.
Berlin is where trends start. Everyone knows this. You don’t play cheesy pop in Berlin. Or so I thought. You play house. You play techno. You play the stuff that gives this city its global reputation as the mecca of electronic music.
So I’d shown up with a house set. Underground vibes. The kind of set that gets you respect from the managers and a polite head-nod from the room.
And now this girl is standing in front of me asking for Kesha.
I scan my USB. I have exactly one Kesha song on there. I don’t even remember loading it. I press play. I’m half-waiting for the crowd to look at me like I’ve lost my mind.
The room erupts.
Not a polite cheer. An actual, full-body, hands-in-the-air eruption. Which, if you’ve ever been to Berlin, you know doesn’t happen often. Berliners don’t dance the way North Americans do. They move differently. Cooler. More restrained.
This was not restrained.
I finished the set. Walked off the stage. And immediately went home and started building a 250-song playlist of all-time hits from 2005 to 2015.
The music I’d essentially put to bed in North America. The music I grew up on. The stuff I’d stopped playing years ago because I thought it was beneath a serious Berlin DJ set.
I’ve played at that club twice a month since 2024.
This post is about how I build a DJ set.
But really, it’s about what that Berlin moment taught me.
Everything I thought I knew about reading a room could be wrong in a city I’d never played. And the only way to fix it was to start over. With humility. With preparation. With a lot more Flo Rida than my ego was comfortable with.
I’ve been DJing for sixteen years. I’ve played the Olympics, the FIFA World Cup Final, NFL and NBA games, clubs in cities on five continents.
Reading a room is the skill I’ve built my career on. I’m still trying to get better at it. But if you asked me what I’m certain about after sixteen years, it’s this.
Here’s how I do it.
Look. Listen. Do the Hours.
There’s no shortcut. There’s no secret playlist. There’s no “DJ hack” that replaces the hours. I’ve spent years finding the right songs for the right moments. Record pools. SoundCloud. Edits I make myself. If I hear something in someone else’s set that hits me, I reach out directly or dig until I find it.
I’m always consuming, listening, and on the hunt for more.
That’s the whole thing. Everyone wants a tactic. The tactic is: care a lot and look for as long as you have to. If you’re not happy behind the decks, the dance floor will know.
The Prep
When I get booked for a nightclub or lounge, the first thing I do is scout.
I’ll go to the venue on a different night to see the vibe. If I can’t do that, I ask another DJ who’s played there. But the most underrated move, the one almost nobody does, is to talk to the staff.
The bartenders. The coat check. The sound engineer. The managers.
I ask them what they like. What songs got the biggest reaction last weekend. What the crowd is into right now. What songs they’re tired of hearing.
I do this for two reasons. One, they know things I don’t know. They see the room every night. They have data I can’t access. Two, I want them on my team. If you want an aligned energy of success, you need to get it right with the patrons and the staff. I’ve built long relationships with venues because the staff feels seen. That’s a huge reason I get invited back.
Most DJs overlook the people pouring drinks and running sound. Don’t.
The Sports Prep (Or: Why I Spend Two Months Building a Three-Hour Set)
The Olympics and FIFA are different.
When I get booked for a major global event, I spend two months. Eight-hour days. Every day. Building the set.
Here’s how I break it down.
The doors open three hours before kickoff. I split that window into three one-hour sections.
Hour one: Chill. 70 to 120 BPM. Low-tempo house. Pop. Rap. This section is mostly for the venue staff, if we’re being honest. The crowd is trickling in. People are getting seated. Finding food. The music is supposed to feel like a backdrop, not a headliner.
Hour two: Mid-tempo. 90 to 125 BPM. Pop. Afrobeat. Latin. The energy lifts. The room is filling. People start to pay attention.
Hour three: Send it. 125 to 150 BPM. Big electronic records, remixes, all-time singalong hits. This is where the crowd starts to move and you build the energy all the way to kickoff. By the time the event starts, the room has been lifted without anyone realizing it’s been lifted.
That’s the architecture.
But the architecture is nothing without the songs.
I have five thousand songs on my USB at any given time. All organized into specific playlists by moment. “-1 to kickoff” is my high-energy playlist. “Post match” is the “let everyone enjoy themselves but also please leave the venue” playlist. I have transition playlists for when I need to jump from 125 BPM down to 70 in a single track. Those are organized by genre so I can match the vibe we’re curating.
All of it is tagged by key for clean mixing.
When I’m building for a sports event, I also try to get ahold of team services to find out what the fans and players are listening to. I’ll run searches for the top 50 songs of the last 20 years in the country I’m playing in. I over-prepare. Every single time.
That’s what gives me the confidence to get up in front of 25 to 90,000 people and do the thing.
Building a Grayson Repp Set
A proper show under my own name is a completely different process.
I start a month out. I think of it like coaching a team.
The initial playlist is 75 songs. I pick them like I’m drafting a roster. Big personalities. Role players. Utility pieces. Then over the course of the month, I cut it down. 75 becomes 50. 50 becomes 30.
For a 60-minute set, you’re looking at 25 to 30 tracks.
Every single one of them is a special edit I’ve made myself. Seamless transitions. Cue points set in Rekordbox. I hate the sync button. I want the set to feel human, not algorithmic.
The structure I care about most is the opening. Tracks two, three, and four are the most important in the set. They set the mood for everything that follows. Big intro, then the real setup, then you put the hammer down for the rest of the night.
I love big singalong moments. I love unexpected bootlegs. I love mixing in humor, tracks people don’t expect. That’s where Santa Cruz came from, by the way. Playing “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas on a bass music tour wasn’t a random joke. It came out of this exact process. Months of preparation that earned me the right to take a swing.
Once the set is played, I archive it. Review what worked. Review what could’ve been better.
Then I start over.
Reading the Room
This is the part people ask me about most. It’s also the hardest to teach.
Before I walk into any room or stadium, I do my best to have a strong understanding of the culture in that space. I take the time to prepare for anything I can learn about the crowd beforehand.
And once I’m in the booth, reading the room is about paying attention to all the little details.
I watch how people are moving. I’m highly aware when people aren’t dancing. I look at facial expressions. I notice phones out. I notice tired faces. I notice when the energy needs to come down, not just when it needs to go up.
This is an important one. You can’t crush a crowd for hours and hours straight. At some point people need to go to the bathroom. They need a drink. They need a breather. That’s when I bring the energy down. It’s also when I remember that these venues are businesses trying to make money. If nobody goes to the bar because the DJ won’t let them leave the dance floor, the venue loses. I take that seriously.
Reading the room is reading everything. Not just the dance floor.
The Gig That Made Me Who I Am
In my early twenties, I somehow landed a residency at Pierre’s Champagne Lounge in Vancouver.
This was the spot. The who’s-who of the city. The Canucks partied there. I DJ’d for Justin Bieber and his friends there. Drake rolled through often.
At the time, the place was all about rap music.
And I had a problem.
I loved rap music. I listened to it constantly. But I’d never DJ’d rap music. I was an electronic DJ. That’s what I told myself. My tracks had long intros and outros that made mixing relatively simple. Rap didn’t have that. Cold intros. Cold outros. Sometimes starting with just a vocal. How do you even mix that?
The answer I’d been telling myself was: you don’t. That’s not my lane.
So I walked into Pierre’s as an electronic DJ in a rap room.
I walked out as something else entirely.
My good friend, Johnny Jover, who’s still like a brother to me, changed the whole thing in one conversation. He told me about record pools. Explained they had DJ-ready edits of every rap song I could want. Proper intros. Proper outros. All mixable.
I signed up the following day.
But the real shift wasn’t the tools. It was realizing that the label I’d put on myself, “electronic DJ”, was the thing actually holding me back. Not the cold intros. Not the tempo. The story I’d told myself about what kind of DJ I was.
The moment I threw that story out, entire rooms opened up. Genres I’d written off became parts of my arsenal. And the craft I started building at Pierre’s, the ability to play whatever the room wanted regardless of what I thought I was, is the same craft that eventually got me the FIFA World Cup Final.
If I’d stayed an electronic DJ, I never would’ve become the DJ I am now.
The gigs that feel like mismatches are sometimes the ones that make you.
The Tools
For the gear nerds, here’s the exact setup.
When I started DJing, I asked myself what my idols were using. Swedish House Mafia. Avicii. All of them played on Pioneer CDJs and a DJM mixer. So that’s what I bought. I spent the rest of my student loan on Pioneer CDJ 850s and a DJM 900NXS mixer. Cream of the crop in 2011.
I still use the same setup today.
Two to four CDJs. The mixer. My tracks on a USB, analyzed from Rekordbox.
I’ve never used a laptop to DJ. I think it’s boring. I think it’s a little fake. I love hearing the transition before I see it. I love reading the waveforms with my ears, not my eyes.
Here’s my advice to every new DJ. Learn with your ears first, not your eyes. It’s the difference between driving a manual car and an automatic. If you’re staring at your laptop looking for songs, you can’t interact with the crowd. You can’t feel the room. You can’t do the job.
Mixed In Key.
Every single track I play goes through Mixed In Key. It analyzes the harmonic key of the song and tags it for me so I know which tracks mix together cleanly. This is the thing that makes a set sound seamless instead of just beat-matched.
Two tracks can be the exact same BPM and still clash if they’re in incompatible keys. You’ve heard it before. That weird, muddy moment in someone’s set where the transition just feels off. That’s a key clash. Mixed In Key solved that for me years ago and I’ve never built a set without it since.
Record pools.
This is where I find the music almost nobody else is playing.
Direct Music Service (DMS) essentially has every hit ever, updated daily. Mixable edits of rap, pop, Latin, you name it. Proper intros. Proper outros. Pre-cut versions built for DJs. I found a huge portion of my stadium anthem catalog for FIFA here. I swear by it as the base level for finding new and old music built for DJs.
Live DJ Service (LDS) is way more niche. Curated by a legend, BENZI. It’s a gold mine for edits played by the biggest DJs on earth along with unknown music from all electronic genres. It’s my go-to for proper Grayson Repp sets. That’s where I find the stuff nobody else is playing yet.
That’s the whole stack. Sixteen years in and I’ve barely changed it.
Why I Can Play Anywhere
Here’s the honest version.
Most DJs get pigeonholed into one or two sounds. One lane. One vibe. That becomes their whole career. I knew early on it would bore me to death.
But the real reason I became an open-format DJ wasn’t because I chose it. It was forced on me as a constraint.
If I’d only played house music or only played rap, I couldn’t have paid my rent. I would’ve been booked one night a week, maybe two. Not enough. I needed to work four to six nights a week to survive off DJing alone. So I set out to be great at everything. Not good. Great. Because if I could play any room, I could work any night.
That constraint, the one I resented at the time, is the reason I can do what I do now.
A stadium of 90,000 people is the most diverse crowd on earth. Every age. Every background. Every taste. You can’t play one genre to that room. You have to play everything. You have to know what hits a 55-year-old dad and what hits a 19-year-old fan in the same song.
Sixteen years of open format in nightclubs taught me exactly that.
The constraint became the craft.
The girl asking for Kesha in Berlin taught me something I keep relearning at every level of this job.
You don’t get to decide what a room wants. You get to listen.
The preparation is how you earn the right to be in the room. The listening is how you stay there.
Berlin still wants pop hits from 2008. Santa Cruz wanted the Black Eyed Peas on a bass music tour. A stadium in Qatar wanted something else entirely. Every room is a new room.
The only skill that works across all of them is the willingness to look, listen, and work a little harder than the next person.
Sixteen years in and I’m still doing it.
That’s the whole job.