Soundsations wedding in Sherwood Park

It's a little late, but here are the photos from the last wedding I took pictures at. This one was out in Sherwood Park Alberta at the OLPH church. This one was a really fun dance. I've done a few other weddings and a fundraising event since this one which I didn't take photos at.

I've got two more weddings and a a few other events yet to do in October, so I'm keeping busy right up to the Christmas party season.

Edmonton Wedding DJ Soundsations at the Royal Mayfair and the Palace

Here is a video from one of the weddings your Edmonton wedding DJ Soundsations performed at last weekend. On Friday I was at the Royal Mayfair golf club and Saturday I was at the Palace banquet facility.

My camera flash was low on batteries on Friday and I forgot the extra batteries so no photos from that night. Both parties were a great success though. There was probably more dancing at the Friday wedding, but Saturday went pretty well too.

One difficulty at the Palace was that they had me set up right in front of the big drop down projection screen. They did have a slide show presentation, so I had to try to set equipment up so that it didn't block everyone's view of the screen. That's actually impossible to do, so that is something to keep in mind when planning things. I think the banquet facility should know better but it's kind of out of my control.

Two more weddings coming up this Friday and Saturday so stay tuned.

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.

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.

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