People fill the dancefloor, swaying, jigging, shaking their booties, while the constant beat of music permeates the air. I’ve never been great at the nightclub scene as I’m not the best at getting up close and personal with a bunch of strangers, especially when their sweaty bodies are literally sliding against my own, but fortunately, ౠthere’s an alternative club scene — the virtual kind.
I attended my first 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 14 nightclub last week — more on that in a future community spotlight — and it was also my first time a𝕴ttending an event that featured a FF14 DJ. Yep, you heard that right. Well, read, I guess. If, like me, you’re not sure how that works exactly, let me fill you in. While players dance the night away, they can tune into the DJ’s setlist via the likes of Twitch, YouTube, or several other live-streaming platforms to hear custom-made sets that often feature original mixes.
I attended Apollo Nightclub and Club Resurrection’s collaborative pirate-themed event for Talk Like a Pirate Day, and taking center stage in the expansive club was the DJ — Violet Wanda, 🍃appropriately dressed in her pirate garb. Wanda’s setlist had everything you’d expect for the occasion, featuring music from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, remixes like The Devil Came Up to Boston, and original pie💮ces Wanda mixed herself.
“Essentially, you play sets to do two things in clubs - keep people dancing, and keep people drinking,” Wanda tells me. “In video games, dancing does not wear people out as it does in meatspace. So it’s slightly different, but not much. What you do is set musical trends as a DJ, you play old💃 and new songs, some DJs in-game are genre-oriented… There are a few of us who produce and DJ, but most don’t. So different DJs have different needs. Some of us do this for a living, so we really go all out. We’re trying to essentially popularize our own music as well.”
Wanda kept the party going for the pirate evening, ensuring the dancefloor was always packed. Her perfectly crafted setlist set the mood and made the club feel alive with the quick beats and banging tunes — delive🌸ring music you wouldn’t get out of a FF14 Orchestrion, that’s for sure. For any visitors who wandered into the club and were new to the whole DJ thing, the host periodically shared Wanda’s Twitch channel to ensure they could appreciate her hard work as well as her jaunty jig above the dance floor.
Eorzea isn’t the first virtual world where Wanda has performed, as she was part of a cabal of internet radio DJs called Purple Frog Radio in Star Trek Online in 2015-ꦰ16, as well as DJ’ing in City of Heroes: Homecoming before moving over to FF14 with a group of fellow DJs.
“I definitely think Final Fantasy’s community i𒀰s just more robust in general, it’s more of a snapshot or subsection of the larger world,” Wanda says. “The club community has some differences to meatspace, but it’s familiar. CoH was great during live, but Homecoming’s become pretty toxic these days. I think it is the free-to-play, unlimited account nature, the devs can’t really police things like a professional outfit would. It’s sad, the game looks a little dated, but it’s still an amazing game. I never had Roleplaying Plot Bunnies before CoH… here, my performance, and skill is recognized, whereas in CoH, people didn’t really have any⛦ clue what I was doing, just that it sounded cool.”
If my community spotlight articles have taught me anything, it’s that FF14 is the perfect place for brilliant individuals to showcase their skills and provides a seemingly unlimited canvas for artists of all kinds to perform🃏. As a result, communities and groups within FF14 have grown to high standards, such as the DJ scene, which is now overflowing with talent.
“Honestly, it's the challeng꧟e around other DJs and how crazy the scene is — RazrWirez, SWAGE, and CakeBaby from Primal are seriously good producers — and we have a couple on Crystal [Data Center] too. I feel like you have to stay changing, relevant — and that's the type of environment I like — where I am forced to grow as an artist.”
Wanda doesn’t just perform — she has also mentored others to follow in her DJ’ing footsteps, explaining that players who dabble in creating Beatsense playlists often ꧂want to learn how to DJ for real. However, Wanda is currently taking a break from teaching to focus on some big plans for her own brand and hopes to bring something new to the table for the FF14 community.
“I am opening my own club, Euphoria, on December 13th, for a birthday party, and then every Tuesday thereafter,” she explains. “The cool thing is, I have some plans that I don’t think have ever been done in the game. If we’re going to have a🥀nother lockdown, I want to support both my commu🍎nities, and it looks like we’re headed that way, so it’s really having to keep it interesting for other players so they’ll come out and listen, subscribe, tip, et cetera the entertainment.
“I can’t stress enough about how some of us support ourselves on Twitch. I do ask that everyone remember, this is all hard work, please tip your entertainers if you have it, and if you don’t have it, follow the page, go to our social media sites and like them, check out our Soundclouds and Mixclouds. Join o♌ur Discords — money can’t buy word-of-mouth support, and it’s worth just as much as any commercial promotion. But yes, big plans, big acts, big names, if I can get it off the ground. But I’ve got some really talented help.”
Wanda isn’t just a dab hand at decks in virtual space either, she began DJ’ing in the late ‘90s for alternative lifestyle communities in the real world. She then started ಌproducing her own music while in high schoℱol, with her first remix for the band Splashdown making waves when launched in the early ‘00s.
She has been composing music for over 30 years now and has di⛎fferent DJ styles depending on her mood. Sometimes she prepares a set ahead of time, and other times she just wings it.
“I have two types of remixes, ones I can perform, and others at a production/studio level,” Wanda explains. “The production remixes take a ⛦lot more time, as you are doing the same things that you do when you pr🗹oduce your own music. You even have to write some of the parts.
“Deck Remixes, or I call them QuikMixes, are essentially when I do some Controllerist stuff [changing the music as it’s playing] to remix music live, and often I’ll just g♏et an idea, and it takes me about five run-throughs, and a performance recording. Those I do one song at a time, rather than in a set, so I can then use the track later, and not do so much work in a live performance situation. Three hours is a lot to be constantly remixing music on the fly, so some of my tracks are pre-prepped, plus running FFXIV and OBS along♋side my entire rig on the same computer can be intensive, so some tracks that I use extremely CPU intensive effects on, I prepare ahead of time.”
If you want to support Wanda and catch one of her🧸 DJ sets, you can watch her on , follow her on , or join her .
