Wedding Gig Advice on Everything lmao

Honestly, if a family enters into the equation, my thinking is going to change entirely. Wedding dj business is a great way to keep doing what you love while supporting your family. I’m still in the “being broke is fine as long as I’ve got my gear/doing what I love.” If I start looking to settle down, I may have to change my life-philosophy =)

I just played a wedding on Sunday, actually. I’ll first say this so that Phil and crew don’t have to: you might consider purchasing their How-To course on being a wedding DJ. I did, and while it might not have been a revelation or anything, it was really helpful in making me feel like I had a handle on what to expect, plus some great recommendations for best practices. Definitely worth the $47, in my opinion.

Back to this weekend: I played in a band for years and we did a ton of weddings, so I knew a bit of what to expect, but I was still pretty apprehensive going in, and had enough music ready to play a full three-hour set of just soul/funk, just disco, just 80s, just 90s/00s pop, etc. Of course, I was going to mix it up, but I wanted to be prepared in case I needed more of a certain type of music. Because it’s really all about keeping folks on the dance floor. That’s really all that matters – that’s what the bride and groom are paying you for, and that’s what’s going to make her happy (and what’s going to make you happy too).

Can’t underline this enough: don’t be afraid to drop the hits. These aren’t people who’ve come to a club looking for a night of dancing and hearing hot new tracks and stuff they’ve never even heard before. They’re here for the couple, and the dancing is incidental, as far as they’re concerned. So you have to reach out to those people, get them to want to get up and be part of the party, and I found that that means giving them stuff they know. Even though I was going in 100% expecting to play well-known hits from various eras, it was still a bit of a shock to see how effective stuff like “Build Me Up Buttercup” is when it comes to getting people dancing. I would have thought that, like me, people would maybe groan a bit when that song came on, but I played it anyway, and it made the people dancing happy while getting new people up on the dance floor. Drunk people, singing along, happy, definitely a high point of the night. So don’t be afraid to drop the well-known hits. Again, it’ll keep the kids and parents dancing, and the bride and groom happy.

I found myself, in preparing for the gig, happy to toss out the window ideas of playing cool rare stuff, and concentrated more on programming familiar tracks in a way that felt new and exciting to me. I wasn’t the first DJ to drop “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” at the start of a wedding set and “Don’t Stop Believin'” at the end, but traveling through eras and moods to get there in a unique way using songs people know (mostly – not always, as I did have a few secret weapons in there) was a fun and interesting challenge. And I’m sure you could find some fun ways to mash up well-known tracks to appeal to your DJ sense.

A couple recommendations of things that I found to work, even just in this one gig:

– I would say you should move, generally, from older stuff to newer stuff. I started out with a bunch of soul/funk, moved to disco and hip-hop, and then on to 80s pop and modern pop by the end of the night. I still dropped a few things from each era at various points (the Janelle Monae’s “Tightrope” in the first hour, “I Will Survive” in the last), but you’ll find that old folks will dance early and fade and the night goes on while young folks will stay up the whole time.

– Think about playing pockets of similar tracks. If you’re playing a few hip-hop tracks and then drop “Boogie Shoes,” you’ll likely get a bunch of old folks who weren’t dancing before out on the dance floor. Going from there to a Rihanna track, though, will have them sitting down again. Better to give them a few 70s cuts in a row to keep them happy before dropping some contemporary pop and letting them go back to the bar.

Have fun!

NietzSKY, post: 35201, member: 4553 wrote: If you are going hourly, if you’re just starting weddings, anywhere from 35-50 an hour depending on competition in your area.

35-50, you must be one of those Craiglist Dj. lol
500.00 for 4 hrs to start with my basic, no lights, no tv’s. I don’t worry about competition as I don’t advertise, if they contact me is because of word of mouth and they want me to do their wedding.