Are you reading this AND are you a tango DJ? My mathematical instincts tell me there’s a statistical chance of 65% that you meet both these standards. In case you do, before beginning with your tango DJ career, there was a 85% chance that you weren’t expecting just that one particular thing which would turn out to be tragically obvious later on.

Hell yeah, I refer to arriving for a gig somewhere and finding out that…. the venue’s sound equipment was bought somewhere in the 3rd century BC and that, in somewhat crude language, your audio for the night is essentially fucked, or that you have other unforeseen technical issues that are either related to your own laptop, cables, system or to whatever external technical obstacles there are left between you and what you actually arrived there to do, namely simply playing some nice music for a bunch of dancers, whose night is risking to become just as terrible as yours. And then… usually, there is some unexpected solution and you all live happily ever after.

Well, at least now you can finally comfort yourselves realising that you are not the only ones with these tales of bitter tragedy! Turns out the professional lives of those who made the music we play… were far from idyllic either. In the caption below, a still young-looking Miguel Caló is asked about ”the fear for the microphone” among artists, which seems most obvious for singers, but the famous band leader reassures us by saying not only singers suffer from it. In fact, Caló sheds some light on a whole different perspective of worry and trouble, one that most listeners are totally unware of: when a tango orchestra is playing live in a studio, everything sounds great, but how is it going to sound all distorted on the radios in people’s homes, usually under far from perfect acoustic circumstances? Well, all the musicians could do is essentially just hope for the best. Just like we tango DJs do. Life is far from perfect, after all….