Congratulations, you’re engaged! What the heck is next? After, of course, you tell your whole family, friends, and complete the obligatory Facebook relationship status change, you run through your checklist:
Date: Check
Venue: Check
Guest List: Check
Photographer: Check
Cake: Check
So what is left? Oh yeah, wedding entertainment! You have 3 choices: Band, DJ and the inexpensive option of the iPod. Typically it's boiled down to DJ vs iPod in that faithful 21st century wedding day conundrum.
My suggestion is always go with the ever versatile wedding DJ. Granted, I have seen and worked in tandem with some great wedding bands, but the wedding DJ offers something that bands cannot, the original artist singing the songs that they originally performed. Also, the DJ builds a relationship with the couple and gets to know them well and learns what they envision their special day to be. The DJ really gets to know the Bride and Groom specifications on things they want and don’t want to be included in their wedding like a certain artist or genre of music, line dances, garter and bouquet tosses and in some cases even the cake cutting has been 86’d during the wedding planning stages.
As I previously mentioned, an iPod for your wedding reception allows you to know exactly what will be played at the wedding when you set up a wedding iPod playlist, and unless you set it to shuffle, you know exactly what order the songs will be played. That is all well and good until that moment comes when you need someone to introduce the wedding party and more importantly the newlyweds into the room to their first dance. I know Apple makes some great products but I don’t think that there is yet a DJ APP that will announce you into the room and make sure that the evening is progressing along properly including all important memorable moments. I also don’t think that the iPod can read the room and determine that maybe playing “Baby Got Back” isn’t the right choice when the dance floor is packed with your parents and their friends. The point is, an iPod is great for the gym and long car rides but for a wedding reception, it just does not set the right tone for the special day that you want it to be.
So why should you hire a wedding DJ? From the minute you book your DJ you should get a blank planner, this planner is essentially the timeline of your entire event. This planner, until the day of the wedding, is a living, breathing document. From the difficult decision of what your first dance will be to how you introduce your wedding party into the room, these things can change several times.
The beauty of a DJ is that up until the day of your wedding the important music can be changed. Most DJ’s want to have enough prep time to make sure they have on file all of your important songs, and with most DJ’s using digital formats it is very easy to make a last minute song change just by a simple download from iTunes or any other legal music downloading website/program. While music is fairly easy to come by, obscure songs can still be obscure. If the day before a Wedding the bride and groom decide they want to change their first dance song from the easy to find “At Last” by Etta James to say, the more difficult to find, “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You” by Michael Jackson (Acoustic Spanish Version) it’s not impossible, it just may not be something easy to come by in a downloadable format.
Updating your planner and constant communication with your DJ is key to making sure you complete that final detail in your dream wedding and is vital to the wedding process. That’s just something an iPod can’t do.
To see a glimpse at our planner that we use to capture all your memorable moments click below.
