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What You Should Look Out For When Hiring A DJ - Price Isn't Everything

What Did The DJ Just Say?

I think we’ve all been to events where the DJ makes an announcement and you can’t hear a word that they are saying. It’s reminiscent of the drive thru at your favorite fast food restaurant. Why is this? If your DJ is using a cheap $20 wired microphone or an inferior wireless microphone, that could be the cause. They could also have their speakers setup on the ground v. on stands or they could have them directed away from your guests. At After Hours, we utilize only quality Sennheiser wireless microphones. (These are the same microphones used by Sting and Matchbox 20.) With our Premier packages, we utilize both multiple speaker setups and wireless remote speakers so that everyone can hear what is being said.

I Stepped Outside And Missed The Cake Cutting

Have you ever been to a wedding and stepped outside for a quick breath of fresh air and missed something important? At After Hours, we will make sure this does not happen. With our Premier service, we can remotely broadcast music and announcements to your outdoor area or lobby so that all your guests will always hear what is happening. Before any major event, we will make sure that you and your fiancé as well as your parents and photographer (etc.) are ready and aware of what they need to do.

The Music Was So Loud, No One Could Talk

There are too many DJs that do not know enough about acoustics—they bring one pair of speakers and then have to crank them up to ear piercing levels to fill the banquet room with adequate sound. After Hour’s Premier wedding packages always come with an adequately sized sound system to cover the room without being so loud that no one can communicate. Using our remote speaker technology, we can broadcast to the back of larger rooms and provide low-level sound reinforcement as necessary so that you are surrounded by the music, without resorting to covering your ears as you pass onto the dance floor.

Need More Information? Check Out A Leading Expert In The Field

Procrastination

Procrastinating and wedding planning do not go hand in hand. The lead time on certain things (like your dress, or booking your banquet facility) can be upwards of a year or more. The longer you wait to make a decision could jeopardize the success of your wedding day. The banquet facility that you had your heart set on might be booked on the date you wanted or the church and the banquet facility do not have the same Saturday available in September. The wedding industry is a huge supply and demand conglomerate.

Think about it - there are only so many Saturday night's available in the prime wedding season between May - Oct. It only reasons that the best DJs, Photographers and Banquet facilities would be booked up quickly for those key dates. Book your key vendors before they are no longer available.

No Electricity?

Don’t have electricity at the location where your wedding ceremony will be held? Need a microphone and music? We can help. With our “Far Outlet” we can power a high quality PA system for your ceremony off of this Marine Battery for hours. Call us to check availability for your wedding ceremony. We can also utilize this in case of power failure at your event.

We Were Cutting The Cake And Realized Our Photographer Wasn’t In The Room And My Mom Was Missing Too!

Aside from playing music and making announcements, your After Hours DJ will also act as your Master of Ceremonies to help maintain the proper flow during the reception. We will coordinate the behind the scenes details with your photographer and make sure they and key relatives are in place before anything takes place. We will also work with the rest of your professionals (Videographer, Banquet Staff) during your event to ensure everything runs smoothly.

So while you may be thinking of hiring a DJ just for the music, at After Hours, we also act as your personal wedding planner at your reception. Your DJ should want to know exactly what you envision for your wedding. One couple may want a low-key elegant event, while the next may want a high energy party atmosphere. If your DJ wants to tell you how your event will run instead of the other way around, then they are not the right choice. At After Hours, every wedding is unique and we treat them as such. We will provide you with helpful hints stemming from our long history as wedding DJs that you may not have thought of. After all, we are the wedding experts and we want to share with you some of the things we’ve seen that work or help you avoid certain things that slow a party down.

Lighting At Your Wedding

The facility that you are having your wedding at is beautiful. The thing is - once it gets dark, it takes on a whole other look. It's kind of dark and not really romantic. White holiday lights on the fake trees just don't cut it. What can you do? Candle light is great, but it only goes so far in setting the mode.

Dance floor lighting is one way to bring a new feel to a facility, but if you're not into making your wedding look like a night club, then maybe a more theatrical feel to the lighting is in order. How about some simple color changers or slowly rotating white lights? What about a custom gobo that creates an evening sky on the ceiling? All these things are possible.

A lighting scheme is a great way to liven up the venue. With 8 or 16 color changers, we can slowly transition from one color to another or set different tones for specific events at your wedding. When it's time for dinner, a soft blue shade can illuminate the walls and columns. When it's time for cake cutting, the room all of a sudden becomes pink. When it's dancing time, the lights start flickering and a deep purple fills the room. This is possible through the magic of LED driven lighting effects.

My Computer Crashed… Now What?

The advent of computer based DJ has been revolutionary in the DJ industry. Our laptop computers have over 13,000 songs on them. But with technology, comes responsibility. In the wedding industry, there is no second chance. If your computer crashes, you have to have a backup plan. All of our Premier Wedding DJs utilize computers, but at the same time carry a complete music library on CD as well. In conjunction, the two technologies work as great backup for one another. We will always carry multiple copies of all your key songs both on computer and CD. We’ve watched entry level computer DJs crash during a couple’s first dance. 5 minutes later, the couple and their guests were still waiting for the computer to reboot.

The Meal Took So Long To Come Out Of The Kitchen, We Only Had An Hour To Dance

There are many area banquet facilities that seem to take forever to get the meal out to the guests. What can you do? At After Hours DJ, we will try to guide you to make the most of your time. We might suggest that you do cake or parent dances between courses. Another big trend is to actually have dancing between courses. Your After Hours DJ can work your crowd between meal service and fill the down time to give you more dance time. We will work with you to arrange the formalities of your reception in a natural order to maintain maximum energy on the dance floor and to keep your guests from getting bored with slow meal service.

I Love 50 Cent, But How Can It Be Played With My Grandmother In The Room?

All of our music is radio edited for professional DJ use. They are all clean, radio edits. We do not illegally download our music—it is delivered to us weekly on CD through the same music service that distributes music to most radio stations.