It can be easy to forget what happens on the other side of the curtain. As you’re planning your wedding, there are a few things your wedding DJ would like for you to know. It’s not that we don’t want to be accommodating; sometimes things are outside our control.
Set Up and Tear Down Takes Time
Chances are that you want the DJ playing music until the bride and groom have officially departed. You probably want music playing when people arrive for the reception, too. In order for those things to take place, you need to allow time for the DJ to set up and tear down the equipment. This means communicating with the venue that you’ll need a little more than the amount of time the actual reception takes.
Location, Location, Location
As you discuss the layout of your reception with the venue, do your best to place the DJ booth near the dance floor. This makes it easier for guests to make requests and for the DJ to keep the pulse of the crowd’s involvement. It also helps with some of the logistics associated with speakers and wireless microphones, especially if you want toasts or speeches given on those microphones.
A Variety of Factors Affect Dance Participation
We try to place music from the genres you select and music that’s pleasing to the crowd, but that doesn’t always mean everybody will rush the dance floor. For more about what we’ve seen affect crowd participation, see our previous post entitled “Why Aren’t People Dancing?”
Sometimes Last Minute Changes Just Aren’t Possible
If you feel like you’re our only customer the week of your wedding, then we’ve done our job of providing great customer service. However, there’s a good chance we have multiple events scheduled that week, or even that day. That’s one of the benefits of working with an entertainment company instead of just one individual. That being said, it takes us time to prepare for your event.
Based on the songs you’ve told us you want played for the special dances and the genres and songs you’ve told us you would like to have played, we create a playlist before the day of the reception. We do that because each song has to be run through a database program in order to play on our DJ controllers. When clients ask for last minute changes the day of the event, it’s not always possible because it takes more than dragging a title from iTunes to a playlist. Last minute song changes usually mean we have to recreate the entire playlist, a long a tedious process.
Additionally, because we schedule multiple events, we don’t always have all of our equipment available at the last minute. For example, when we initially spoke, you may have said you didn’t want the Gig Bar Lighting Unit or fog machine or that the photo booth was just too much. We took your word for it, so when somebody else booked us later and requested the photo booth, we let them have it. To keep your costs down, we limit the pieces of specialized equipment we keep in our inventory.
We want to make your day a day to remember, and we want to provide the best service possible. Please keep these things in mind when you book so that we’ll be able to meet (and hopefully exceed) your expectations.
