Warm-up

The warm-up is the opening set: the floor is still filling and the night has barely started. Its job is not to impress anyone, it is to leave the floor ready for whoever comes next.

It is the most misread slot there is, and the mistake has one shape: opening high. A warm-up that opens at full intensity burns a whole night's headroom in forty minutes — the next DJ has nowhere to climb — and it does not even work, because a floor with twenty people on it does not respond like a full one.

A good warm-up is measured by what it hands over, not by what it sounded like: a floor with people on it, calibrated, and energy headroom the next DJ can use. It is work that goes unnoticed when it is done well and is very noticeable when it is not.

In EnergyCurve this is not marketing copy: when you mark a set as an opening slot, the engine judges it against the energy range for that context rather than a peak time one. The same set can be right for one slot and wrong for the other, and showing that is the point — a score that ignores context only rewards the loudest set, which is not the best set.