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Name: Courtney Chatmon Profession: Nightclub DJ and radio host on WHHH 96.3 FM – Indianapolis Blog: www.djlimelight.com Twitter: @djlimelight You can find some of DJ Limelight’s music here. |
We recently caught up with Evernote user and DJ, DJ Limelight, to talk about the various ways he uses Evernote to keep his musical inspirations, ideas and projects organized.
Which versions of Evernote do you use?
Which features do you found most useful?
For me, the most useful feature is the cross-platform access—it gives Evernote a huge advantage over the sea of organization tools out there. Second to that, tags are a godsend. The ability to search very specifically for my notes is central to how I use the program. I use a lot of different tags to help make my searches much more powerful.
I come up with music, blog and twitter ideas at the weirdest times. I can tag those random memories with enough detail so that I can find exactly what I’m looking for when I sit down at the computer to blog or organize my music and production ideas.
Turntables, Drops and Evernote
Music artists will often record “drops”, which are personalized shout outs to the DJ or radio station. I use Evernote to record the drops on my iPhone. I tag the drops with the artist’s name, their current popular song and where in the show I want to place the drop. I import the audio file from Evernote desktop into Logic Pro and edit it for length and background noise. Evernote helps me because I have a centralized place to keep everything. I spend much less time organizing and more time creating. With just a few clicks, I’ve recorded the drop, tagged and saved it in Evernote, all in less than a minute. It’s not fancy, but it works.
Click to hear a drop done by Robin Thicke
Organizing a radio program
Evernote is a huge help for me on the radio and for the events that I DJ. A lot of prep time goes into organizing my radio show. One Evernote use that I’ve came up with is to create a text note with all the details of that particular show, including songs played, song length, segment, and talk breaks. Each show’s note are organized by date in Evernote. This way I have a complete database of every show I do with all of the important details. This is a big deal for me because if the program director asks me what song was played at 12:22 am on a certain date, or some other detail, I can quickly search through my show notes and pull up the info. Having this personal show database matched with the ability to easily search through it, saves me from having to go through complicated radio station logs.
Planning and playlists
When I was out and about, I started writing notes to myself about my sets and songs I wanted to remember. An example: I heard a really nice dub reggae record in Negril, Jamaica that I had never heard before, so I saved a clip of the song in Evernote. When I got home, I played it for a DJ friend I knew who would recognize the artist. Before Evernote, I would have been forced to hum the song from memory. That’s never a good option.
What was the last note you added to Evernote?
A note to self: “It’s better to be creative and one-of-a-kind, than to be technically perfect”.
