There are two things that bond the stylistically diverse and geographically scattered group of internationally traveling djs: 1) we don’t get enough sleep, and 2) we all want more of it. The problem is, our jobs are so uniquely sleep-challenged that none of the normal tips to help with getting a good night’s rest are practical or even possible to follow. Sleep truly is bliss and in this article I will share some of my personal experiences in order to help my fellow djs maximize their sleep.

First, let’s go through these 10 tips for better sleep from the Mayo Clinic:

1. Go to bed and get up at about the same time every day, even on weekends. One of the major challenges djs face in trying to get sleep is the sheer craziness of our schedules. We show up to work at midnight and are often up until well after the sun comes up (or later). We have to be “up” for the gig – not just awake, but the life of the party. The social aspect of drinking/partying and after parties are a necessary part of the job but these add their own factors which create additional pressures on our precious sleep time. Like many djs, I like “staying up” as much as I like sleep, however it is important to find a balance between these two opposites.
2. Don’t eat or drink large amounts before bedtime. If you are a dj and you drink, this one is out the window.
3. Avoid nicotine, caffeine and alcohol in the evening. Here, I am assuming “evening” means before you go to sleep but if you drink or smoke, this doesn’t make sense.
4. Exercise regularly. This, in fact, is the one tip on this list that you can follow, and I recommend you do. Exercising releases endorphins which keep your mood up and will make you more tired at the end of the day which should help when trying to fall asleep.
5. Make your bedroom cool, quiet, dark and comfortable. Does this apply to your mate’s guest bedroom in the middle of the day? Or your hotel room in Miami?
6. Sleep primarily at night. Yep, not gonna happen.
7. Choose a comfortable mattress and pillow. While when on tour I would love to always have the luxury of a Westin Heavenly Bed, it simply doesn’t work out that way.
8. Start a relaxing bedtime routine. Here are some of their suggestions: To prepare for sleep, try reading a light, entertaining book or magazine; listening to soft music; making simple preparations for the next day; a light bedtime snack, a cup of hot tea, or a glass of warm milk; hobbies such as knitting or jigsaw puzzles; listening to books on tape. Ahhh, that’s what I’ve been missing – a hobby!
9. Go to bed when you are tired and turn out the lights. Great, thanks for that info.
10. Use sleeping pills only as a last resort. Sleeping pills can be extremely helpful when trying to re-adjust your sleep schedule as well as helping to turn the party off. After a big gig I am often buzzing just from the excitement and sometimes a sleeping pill helps to wind me down. Nevertheless, any kind of sleeping pill can cause dependency so they should be taken in moderation and only when absolutely necessary. That said, I also like them for the plane on long haul flights as they help you maximize that time and be prepared for the next day.

Flying Club

Coming back from the Sonar festival in Barcelona last weekend, I was on the last flight of the day back to London Gatwick Airport and the plane was full of djs returning home after a long weekend of all day and all night parties. Many of these djs were personal friends and I spotted a few of them leaning against the window of the plane, floating off into a dreamlike state for what seemed like the first time in days. For the traveling dj, sometimes the plane is the only (and best) place to get some much needed kip, even if it is on a relatively short flight.

On long haul flights, I always try to get as much sleep as possible. Not only does this help me to be more rested for my gig, but long flights are tedious – there are only so many romantic comedies I can watch and magazines I can read. Some people fire up their laptops and create entire albums on the plane but I am not one of them…my ideal 10 hour flight would be to fall asleep just after the meal and wake up to the sound of “Flight attendants, prepare for landing.”

Here are some tips to sleep on long flights:

1. Upgrade to Business Class. If you have miles or upgrade certificates with a particular airline, use them on long haul flights to upgrade. Your overall experience will be much more pleasant and many airlines have full lay-flat seats so you can really relax. In business class you are often given a little hospitality pack with an eye mask and ear plugs. Take advantage of these perks.
2. Choose the right seat. If you can’t upgrade, choose an economy seat that gives you the best opportunity to get in the most comfortable position possible. Check and see what kind of plane you will be flying on and then check out http://www.seatguru.com/ then pick the best seat for that plane. I find that windows give you something to lean against (instead of drooling on the passenger next to you). Exit rows may have more legroom but often the seats don’t recline so keep that in mind. Non-exit row bulkhead economy seats are often ideal as they have more legroom, but then you can’t have anything on the floor during takeoff and landing. Bulkhead seats are often closest to the lavatories and allow some extra room to step over the passenger next to you if you have to use one mid-flight.
3. Create your own business class experience. If upgrading isn’t possible, bring ear plugs and an eye mask to shut out the noise and light on the plane. Get some moist towelettes to refresh you throughout the flight. Buy a large bottle of water so you don’t have to ask the flight attendants when you are thirsty. Remember, the air on planes is extremely dry and it just sucks the moisture from your skin so it is important to keep well hydrated. Wear comfortable clothes (I’ve even seen people change into pajamas) and remove your shoes for the flight. Before the flight, I usually I buy a newspaper, magazines and mints and get a plastic bag. Then I put everything I need for the whole flight in that bag and keep it next to me so I never have to get up.
4. Develop a flight routine. I always plan to sleep just after the meal service. Drinking red wine with the meal (along with a lot of water) seems to help me fall asleep. If I have a sleeping pill, I take it just when the meal is served so usually it kicks in just when I’m finished eating. Before the meal service, I put my blanket on and get my pillow ready so as soon as they clear my tray, I am usually out in no time.
   On short flights, even a little bit of sleep can help you feel refreshed. Get a window seat close to the front of the plane so you can board first and start napping. Even 20 minutes of sleep can give you a boost for the rest of the day.

Heavenly Bed

As mentioned before, not every hotel or sleeping situation while on tour can be the Westin, but there are a few things you can do to while staying in hotels: keep your room cool and as dark as possible; use your eye mask and ear plugs if it’s loud or during the day; use the hotel gym or pool or go for a run if you are having trouble sleeping; request late afternoon/evening flights and get late check out or even pay for an additional half-day (a lot of hotels will do this as long as you are out before their cleaning staff leaves for the day). While staying with friends, make sure they have a separate room with a door – we’ve all been in the situation where you exhausted and are staying on their couch and then people are still partying in the room you are supposed to sleep in at noon the next day. As a general rule, if I don’t know the promoter or the situation, I require a hotel.

REMnants

When back at home, or just off for a few days while on tour, this is the best time to try to catch up on sleep. It’s tough to just slip back into a regular sleep schedule but if you can at least get 5-6 hours at night (or more if possible) and augment that with a short 45 minute nap during the afternoon (I’m a huge fan of naps), that helps a lot to keep you well rested and prepared for the next weekend. Sleep is crucial, not only to help your body recover but to help your mind filter through all the day’s (and night’s) events. Going for days with little or no sleep breaks down your immune system and severely decreases mental and physical performance. The main goal is to give yourself enough time to get into REM sleep as this helps your body and mind recover.

The first night you are back from being abroad, try as hard as you can to stay up until the time you would normally go to bed. Do not use caffeine to try to stay up and if you are exhausted then go to bed early. But, staying up until your normal time will help to get you back on schedule faster and avoid the problems with jet lag. As always, you should drink a lot of water – at least 1.5 liters per day. Try to eat at normal times and if you don’t have to go out, avoid drinking alcohol or large meals right before bed. If you have obliterated your body over the weekend, use mid-week days off to eat healthy, nutritious meals, drink loads of water, exercise, and get outside whenever possible. A 20 minute walk outside in the sun will give you valuable Vitamin D as well as create natural endorphins which will improve your mood as well as help to regulate your sleep patterns.

While it may feel like you hardly ever see your own bed, invest in a good one. As you spend close to 1/3 of your life in bed, you want this to be as comfortable as possible.

Have any other sleep tips for your fellow djs? Leave them in the comments below.

One of the things I use most in iTunes is Playlists. I use them to organize groups of music to burn the cds I use to dj (I am not a laptop dj). Using Playlists serves several purposes: when I get a lot of new music, I go through and rate the tracks and then group the best tracks in a ‘master’ group by giving it a playlist. Ratings is another feature in iTunes that I just started using in earnest in the past couple years. I only rate the tracks I will play out and those either get 4 or 5 stars – tracks below that threshold are not worthy for me to play (that is part of my job as a dj). From the master playlist, I then make smaller groups by playlist that will each fit on a cd. I always burn two copies of each cd to put in my wallet so that I can either play two copies of a track, or another track on that cd even if one is playing in the other CDJ.

As any dj will tell you, cds get scratched, left in the cd players or given away. Thus, my playlists are vital documents that keep my cd wallet organized and up to date. After a dj trip, I can look through my wallet and see which cds are missing and go back to my playlists and burn them. I use Toast to burn my cds, mainly because it supports CD TEXT which grabs the artist and title information and displays it on the cd players we use (as well as many car and home stereos). Recent versions of Toast grab all your playlists from iTunes making it much easier to organize your tracks in iTunes and then burn with Toast.

When I got back from Miami about ten days ago, I could tell something was amiss with the external drive that stores my entire iTunes library. Even if nothing was wrong, the drive would run out of space in a matter of weeks and it is always good practice to leave approximately 1/3 empty space on any drive for maximum performance. Now, I was getting the dreaded Mac beach ball every time I wanted to play a track. It would eventually play, but I just knew this drive’s days were numbered. It was important that I got everything off this drive and moved it to a new drive before it completely died. First, I did the usual checks in Disk Utility and the drive started to unmount itself before Disk Utility could finish any repairs. This is never a good sign. When the drive would stay mounted long enough to complete a repair, Disk Utility would say the drive was OK, but I knew this just wasn’t the case.

I went out and bought a new larger drive and tried to go the normal route of changing the location of my iTunes library folder to the new drive, then checking the ‘Consolidate my iTunes music’ box in iTunes > Preferences > Library > Organize Library… This should copy all of the music on the current drive (the one that was failing) to the new drive, all the while keeping the folder structure, playlists and ratings. So, I hit ‘OK’ and went about my business as I knew copying over 485GB of music would take up most of the day. It would copy for a couple hours, then just stop with a warning that my ‘Device has been improperly removed’. Basically, the drive was unmounting itself. Not good.

Using an old trick I learned from some audio email groups I belonged to, I put the failing drive in the freezer for a while which sometimes can help a troubled drive (especially if it tends to overheat). I took it out, and started the copying process all over again. The drive would be really responsive right out of the icebox, but as soon as the drive would heat up, the same thing would happen. I quickly realized that I would never be able to copy all the files this way. Then, I remembered that I had backed up my iTunes library not too long ago (it happened to be October). So, I dragged my current iTunes Library file, as well as my iTunes Music Library.xml file which should be stored in Users/~me/Music/iTunes/ to the desktop. Then, I opened up iTunes and it was like it had never been opened – completely blank but with fresh library files. Next, I went to Add to Library… and added all the music I backed up in October. This took 9 hours. With this, I could see exactly where the old library had left off, and what I needed to copy from the old drive. I could see exactly which track was the last track I had copied when I organized my iTunes library by ‘Date Modified’ (check this box in View Options).

Luckily, using the freezer trick, the old drive would mount and work for a short period. I dragged the newer iTunes library files to a safe place and copied back my old ones. Then, I launched iTunes again and grabbed all the tracks I had added since the October backup – 1210 tracks/54GB. I tried to copy these to a third drive so I could then add them to my new library on my new drive. But, I was running into the same problem as before as the drive would unmount as soon as it was getting hot. Using the freezer, I could copy about 75-100 tracks at a time so this is what I did. All in all, to copy 1200 tracks took about 3 days as after each group I would have to unmount the drive and put it back in the freezer for about 30 minutes. Finally, I had copied all of the tracks.

From here, I dragged my old iTunes library files back to the desktop, copied over the newer files and added all of the 1210 tracks to my new library. With my old drive unmounted, I could now name my new drive the same name as the old drive. This is important, because now I could use the older iTunes Library file to keep all of my playlists and ratings! Since my new drive was the same name and folder structure as the old drive, all of the playlists would point to the right place!

The obvious lesson from this is to have your library backed up often. Yet, with huge libraries, this is not always easy (or possible). Still, there are a few features that Apple could implement in iTunes that could save a lot of time if the same thing happens to someone else (or me again for that matter): 1) add the ability to archive all or selected playlists. Now, you can only export/import one at a time. Thus, if your drive dies, but you have the music backed up, you can have the playlists stored somewhere else and recover them. 2) With this, there should be a preference to update the playlist files to tell where the tracks are stored. 3) add the ability to archive your entire iTunes library (similar to the ‘Archive Mailbox’ feature in Mail). Using compression, I’m sure one’s whole iTunes library, playlists, ratings, iPhone apps, etc. could be shrunk down considerably. I would totally back this up once a week if I could get it down to say 50% of the size.

Still, with iTunes (and peoples digital music collections approaching a decade), perhaps it is time for a ‘Pro’ music app á la Aperture that is built to handle large libraries, have easier support for multiple drives and even have basic editing features. Until then, I’ll just be happy I saved 6 years of playlists.