Soundsations in Viking Alberta

Last Saturdays wedding wiped me out. It took me a day and a half to recover from the late night of DJ work in Viking. I only played music until 1:00 AM, but with pack up time and an hour and twenty minute drive back to Edmonton, it was 3:30 AM by the time I got home. Then the equipment had to be unloaded from the vehicle as it's not too secure if left in the van overnight.

I guess I'm getting older because I was dead tired on Sunday. Anyways the wedding dance was another successful Soundsations production. The biggest challenge from the DJ's point of view was that the groom and some of his friends were really into heavier classic rock (think Rush, Ozzy Osbourne etc.) that isn't so great for filling a dance floor. Of course I made sure I played a bit of their music every now and then. It got funny looks from some other factions of the crowd, so I made sure I announced that this was a special request from the groom. Nobody really danced during these selections, but sometimes that's alright and it keeps the rock fans happy. Luckily the groom was very nice and understood that I needed to DJ to the entire crowd to make the dance a success. I even ended up getting a tip from him at the end of the night which is always appreciated.

I'm taking a break this coming long weekend and I'm off to Washington DC. Hopefully I will have a photo or two of the U.S. capital to post on my next blog.

Working with a wedding coordinator

I DJ'ed another Soundsations wedding last night at the Red tail Landing Golf club near the Edmonton international airport. It was a real barn-burner The dance floor was kept busy all night. There were no real lulls in the action, which is unusual. I don't think it's necessarily that I did any better of a job as the DJ than normal. It was just a really great crowd that was ready to tear up the dance floor. The couple had hired a wedding coordinator, so as the DJ I needed to work with her.

Most wedding coordinators I've worked with do a great job and last night was no exception. Everything ran extremely smoothly and relatively on time. I do find however that wedding coordinators will either have the attitude that they are there to work with you, or you are there to work for them. Obviously I don't have any issues with the first type. I understand though that there are lots of fly by night, unprofessional and inexperienced DJ outfits out there and this undoubtedly has shaped the way some coordinators have come to deal with the DJ's they work with.

I have lost count of how many weddings I've done. I would estimate at least 40 per year for the last 15 years. Definitely far more than most wedding coordinators in the business. Of course they don't know this and it would sound boastful to tell them. All I'm trying to say is that it's nice when you are treated as a professional and there is an attitude of working together to provide the clients with the best experience possible.

I said I would post some photos of my new lighting effect, so here are some. It did stop spinning about 3 hours in to the dance. So if does that again next weekend it's going back.

A new DJ lighting effect

Last week I purchased a new lighting effect to take with me to my DJ gigs. It is a simple LED device from American DJ that pretty much simulates the mirror ball effect. I tried it out last weekend at a wedding dance (through my DJ company Soundsations). It works very nicely and saves me some set-up and tear-down time. When you DJ every single weekend (sometimes twice on a weekend) saving a few minutes is very welcome.

It puts out 34 spots of LED light and spins them around the room and can be run all night. Its much smaller than a mirror ball and less fragile. The bonus to me is I only have to set it up on its own whereas the mirror ball required setting up the ball and the pin spot at some distance from the ball (I actually usually used two pin spots) meaning lots of extension cords and duct tape.

Ill try to get some photos of it in action at this upcoming weekend's wedding to post.

Another great dance with a few challenges.

Last night I played DJ again through my mobile DJ company Soundsations at the River Cree hotel in Edmonton. It turned out to be a fantastic dance with lots of action on the dance floor until 1:30am.

The bride and groom had hired a wedding coordinator who did a great job of having everything organized and kept things running pretty smoothly and on time. The only snag was that the couple had rented a screen and projector from me for a slide show and there was absolutely no space left in the room to set it up.

I had to have the banquet staff rearrange tables to make room which is not that easy for them once they have everything set up already. This led to another challenge in that where the projector ended up in the room was quite far away from my DJ console. This made running an audio cable to the presenters laptop difficult.

Of course everything got worked out in the end and all went well. This does reinforce for myself the need to let customers know that they need to make sure their venue knows the set-up requirements for their event. Also customers need to know audio to be patched through the DJ sound board should not be 100 ft. away from the board. I always mention these points, but sometime to no avail.

Handicapping your DJ

I thought I would post a few thoughts regarding the advantages and the disadvantages of brides and groom creating their own play lists for the DJ. I'm thinking about this because I did a Soundsations (my mobile DJ company) wedding dance in Edmonton a few weeks ago where the couple had provided me with a list of about 20 songs that they definitely had to have played and about 10 songs or so that they didn't want.
Normally when I meet with a couple at booking time I tell them that, of course you are welcome to put together a list of must play and do not play music. After all, It's your big day and you're the customer. I usually also say though, I can only play so many songs during a four hour or so dance, so if your list of must plays is huge, I have no flexibility to play other guests requests. Also, if what you have listed isn't working, I don't have as much flexibility to try and read the crowd and play to them. It could be that you don't care if the dance floor is busy, as long as you're hearing the music you like, but that isn't usually the case.
I also warn couples that chances are someone will request the very songs you've asked not to hear. These may also very well be the exact songs that would get the dance floor busy, even though you might cringe when you hear it.
An experienced DJ that has performed hundreds of dances knows what the average mixed aged crowd will respond to. They will also be able to adjust what they are playing based on requests and a little trial and error. Dictating a huge must play list to the DJ severely handicaps the DJ's ability to do this. It is also quite awkward for the DJ to have to tell guests "I'm sorry, the bride and groom don't want to hear that song.".
In the end of course, the customer is always right. but if close to a 500 weddings worth of experience is worth anything, my advice would be that if you have music you definitely have to hear at your dance, give the DJ a list of no more than 10 songs or so. Also keep your do not play list to a couple of songs at most, or even better, tell the DJ only to play them if requested.

Well, I guess a year and half is a long enough break from blogging. I should get back to it. So here we go.
I've continued to be busy with my DJ company Soundsations. I've lost count but I've worked either a wedding or some other type of function pretty much every weekend since my last blog. Of course I've taken a few weeks off. We took the family to Hawaii, and a few other smaller vacations.
I have also spent some time updating the Soundsations website. It is now a flash based site so it looks a little fancier, but I still tried to keep it simple. I also updated the music library which is now approaching 500 pages.
Anyways, I have to run now, but I will be posting regularly now (I mean it this time!).

Wedding Slide Shows

In the last few years just about every wedding reception includes a slide show at some point. Slide shows can be a very entertaining and memorable part of a wedding reception, but I find that more than half the time there are annoying technical glitches that pop up when trying to present the slide show at the reception.

As the DJ I am always involved in the slide show at least from the audio side of things and sometimes to a greater extent. Having seen many technical challenges with wedding slide shows I thought I would list some things I've learned that are good to keep in mind.

- Most slide shows are created using PowerPoint (as opposed to more professional software such as Adobe Premiere etc.). When you insert pictures, audio and video into PowerPoint projects and then run the slid show from the project, PowerPoint looks for all the files wherever you have told it to find them. If any of those files get moved, renamed or deleted by accident, PowerPoint will not be able to find them and your slideshow will not work as expected. Not many people seem to know this, but you can save a PowerPoint project as a PowerPoint presentation (.pps). Just look in the Save As options in PowerPoint. With this option, all the files you have included in your slide show will be compiled into a single file which will run as a presentation on its own. Now when you are ready to show the presentation you don't even have to open PowerPoint. Just click on the .pps file and the slide show runs.

- Another thing often not considered is where to project the presentation from. I can't tell you the number of times I've arrived to a venue to set up and someone comes running up to ask me if they can run the sound for their slide show through my DJ system. The only problem is the projector and laptop are on the other side of the room 150 feet away from my console. I can handle about 50 feet away maximum. So, if you want to run audio for your presentation through the DJ's system you need to think through where you're going to be set up. It's probably best to get a hold of the DJ and coordinate this before the day of the reception.

- If you are running the presentation off your laptop, be sure to deactivate your screensaver and set your computer not to go to sleep. I've seen more than a few presentations end early because the presenter's computer went to sleep and they couldn't wake it up without entering their password.

- PowerPoint doesn't give you the option to fade out an audio track or mix into the next audio track. When you have included frequent changes in music in your PowerPoint presentation, it can get quite annoying to hear one song abruptly ending a third of the way through and another song starting. I would recommend using a third party software such as Sony Sound Forge Audio Studio) or shareware (such as WavePad by NCH Swift Sound) to make fades and other edits to the sound file.

- A great alternative to using PowerPoint is to use Windows Movie Maker that comes free with XP and Vista. This allows you to do just about anything you could do in PowerPoint, plus you can cross fade audio tracks for nice smooth song transitions. It is very easy to use too.

- Wedding slide shows ususaly include lots of scanned photos of the bride and groom growing up. It is a good idea to crop all of your scanned photos to the aspect ratio they will be projected at. I have seen many presentations with all the photos at a 3:4 ratio, then run from a laptop set to a widescreen ratio. This results in distorted or stretched out images.

Anyway... These are a few tips that come to mind from what I have seen in my work as a mobile wedding DJ in the Edmonton, Alberta market. I also produce alot of presentations for my clients through my company Soundsations ( http://www.soundsationsmusic.com/ ). To check out a few samples see:

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-5742049913549686282

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=5634730623818632937