Questlove’s 6 Tips For Crafting a Narrative Through a DJ Set

Ahmir Khalib Thompson, known professionally as Questlove or ?uestlove, is a Grammy award-winning musical tastemaker supreme, one of the world’s most beloved DJs, and a leading authority on the soul, funk, hip-hop, and R&B genres.

• Early life: The son of doo-wop crooner Lee Andrews and singer and dancer Jacqui Thompson, Questlove made his music debut at Radio City Music Hall at 12. At the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts, Questlove joined forces with classmate Tariq Trotter (who performs as Black Thought) to form the hip-hop band the Roots, known for their fusion of jazz, hip-hop, and vintage soul.
• The Roots: The Roots’s fourth album, Things Fall Apart, propelled by the single “You Got Me,” was certified platinum and landed a coveted spot on Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” list. Around this time, The Roots became a fixture on television, with memorable performances on Dave Chappelle’s classic sketch-comedy series Chappelle’s Show to the late-night talk-show circuit. In 2009, The Roots joined Late Night With Jimmy Fallon as the house band, with Questlove as the bandleader and frontman. When the comedian signed on to host The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon five years later, Questlove was named the show’s musical director.
• Other successes: Questlove’s eclectic career includes more than just performance—for instance, he was an executive producer for the original Broadway cast recording of Hamilton. He’s made tracks for many revered artists, including Al Green, John Legend, Erykah Badu, and Jay-Z, and hosts a weekly iHeartRadio podcast, Questlove Supreme. Questlove has also flexed his acting chops on television and the big screen in Pixar’s Soul (2020), Parks and Recreation, and Saturday Night Live. He currently teaches music courses at New York University.

When selecting songs for an audience, it’s important to build a narrative rather than just playing music you like or think is trendy. These are Questlove’s six steps on how to craft the right flow for your DJ set:

1. 1. Know your songs inside out. Before a song lands in your set or on your playlist, you should be intimately familiar with it—artist, era, genre, duration, key changes, the bpm, where it speeds up or slows down, where it peaks. School yourself on new discoveries. This sort of thing takes commitment. If you really love music, though, it’s the best type of homework.
2. 2. Create a constellation of accompanying tracks. When you’re determined to include a specific song in your set, zero in on a handful of complementary tracks. It might be a shared mood, era, key, or, even better, tempo. This allows for more natural transitions, so you don’t need to use software to alter songs and make them work. For example, if you want to shift from one tempo to a faster one, look for a song that picks up its pace midway through or late in its running time so it blends seamlessly into your next cut.
3. 3. Have a formula. Once you’ve kicked off your playlist, you’ll need a plan to keep listeners hooked. Again, you don’t want a string of hits—that’s a surefire way to tire out your audience. One of Questlove’s methods is to play three mega hits, followed by two songs that aren’t hits to bring the mood down a bit, and then come back with three more hits. By the end of the night, he’ll tease the audience a bit more, alternating between a hit and a non-hit to keep partygoers from leaving. If you want to keep your audience hooked, Questlove has a pro tip: “The one genre of music that is the absolute, most bulletproof? Dancehall reggae.”
4. 4. Plan backward—and tell a good story. According to Questlove, people will mostly remember the first 10 minutes and the last 20 minutes of your set. For that reason, determine your “closing statement” first and then work backward. Save your heavy hitters—Michael Jackson, Beyoncé, or the song of the moment—for the last hour. Imagine your set in classic dramatic structure. For the rising action, Questlove genre-hops but keeps it danceable, playing big-band jazz and old-school songs followed by hip-hop tracks that sample them. For the climax of his set, Questlove will aim high: “I will figure out a way to infuse the popular song of the moment without compromising my artistic integrity,” he says. Look for funky edits of the hits to shake things up, but stay uptempo, since the audience will be loosened up and ready to move. In the falling action, Questlove plays the “hit-and-quit game”—a song or two that folks love followed by a less familiar track, and repeat. When you’ve reached the end of your set, treat yourself and play whatever you want.
5. 5. Show you’ve got the range. For almost every set he does, Questlove tries to connect the dots between 1930 and 2021—and beyond. “You gotta find clever ways to mix and match,” he says. An inspired set or playlist spans genres and decades without presenting its tracks in chronological order. It should be a riveting, edifying, unpredictable crash course in music history.
6. 6. Surprise your audience—and make them feel smart. One of Questlove’s tricks is to play a song that might not be familiar to a younger crowd but that a slightly older crowd will recognize. Then he’ll transition into a modern song that sampled it, or he’ll do the opposite. “When I make my audience feel smarter, they like me better as a DJ,” Questlove says. “Sometimes you gotta let people in on the fun, and there’s nothing more fun than the discovery of ‘Oh, I know that song! That’s where that comes from?’”

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