Politics of Requests for Mobile DJs in Planned Sets

Seeing as how the amount of available music is large, I wouldn’t worry about it. The masterclass also teaches you to play to the women that are eager to dance.

Also my experience at a wedding is that the general rise and fall of the night can’t be steered as accurately as in a club or other mobile events. Weddings have their own pulse, a usually very diverse crowd. At the early stages the kids are often still in da house.
Nobody says you can’t have several big moments in a set. So I would take the request, decide how to move from where I was at that time to where I need to be to fit the request in (I could do something crazy in between or just play one more track and then use the mic or any other of a dozen or more options) and just play it. Keep them at high energy for a bit (3-4 tracks) and keep an eye out for the energy on the floor. If everyone is still going strong, I’ll keep it going, if people start peeling off I will start bringing it down again.

If you need one track to make your high energy part of the night work, you are making it very hard on yourself.

I find weddings are the hardest thing to pre-plan your sets for. I’ve had nights where my set got stopped 3-4 times. I’d be playing for 30-40 minutes and just had the room jumping and then the next group comes up and wants to do something for the couple. Chairs in the middle of the dance floor and her childhood friends doing an ABC. Lasts for 10 minutes, then kissing bride and groom, clearing the chairs and the gift wrapping and then I get to start alllll over again.

Frankly, I don’t prepare anything anymore for weddings, with the exception of the couples play list. I know my collection intimately and I know I can easily run multiple high energy sessions during the night.

Another thing (I figured I’d match your wall of text as I am the resident WoT specialist LOL) is that you have to take into account that certain groups in the audience will start leaving at different times, changing the dynamics and the kind of music you can get away with playing. Some popular house and even trance tracks you don’t want to play when grandpa and grandma are still in the house and the conservative aunts and uncles, but which are perfectly fine when the younger relatives and friends of the couple are the main group left towards the end of the night. By the same token, all that 80s 90s stuff that worked well earlier in the evening can get a bit long in the tooth when you are facing an average age of 27 on the floor.

I didn’t play my first wedding until I had a few years of residency behind me and had been doing the first few weddings with a colleague who had done several. Also I had gone to quite a few weddings looking at the night through DJ eyes.

The country and even area you are in play a role as well. Every place has it’s customs. I know for a fact that a US wedding is way different from a Dutch one. But even here in Holland there is a major difference between playing one in a big city like Amsterdam or way down in the south. And even in the same city it depends on the general kind of people.

To conclude: DJ-ing a wedding is not an easy task, it will take the most toll on your skill of knowing “what must come next”, tax your elasticity (flexibility doesn’t cover it) and depend heavily on experience (life and DJ). What makes it even harder is that the margin for error is thin. You don’t get do-overs at a wedding. If I bungle a corporate party, I can offer to come back another time for free and make up. But you can’t expect to have them to do the wedding over. It’s a responsibility I seriously feel when playing weddings parties. I will therefor do pretty much everything it takes to make all the guests happy. Happy guests mean a happy couple.

The Xmas party being the easiest, because people tend to get drunk faster there than at weddings (although not by much LOL).

Don’t worry about the introvert thing, traditionally most DJs were introverts who used this as a way of being in the club without having to be on the dance floor or social. Many were (are?) nerds and geeks although nowadays you could easily get the idea that it’s all a bit Milli Vanilli, allabout image, pre-recorded sets and ghost producers!