Create Your Own Playlist Advise!

Knottie10687290 · February 2015

Hello,

I am getting married in July, and we are going to have a quartet of some of my friends playing until after dinner. Once dinner hits, we want to have playlists made and not make more expenses by hiring a D.J. Any suggestions from people who have done this before? How many songs have you done. How do you mix it up?

melbenso · February 2015

H and I made our own playlist instead of hiring a DJ and it went really well. I actually had a friend comment to me recently that he didn't realize we didn't have a DJ until half way through the reception.

Some advice:
1. Rent quality speakers for the occasion if you don't have any already. (Still way cheaper than a DJ.) And remember someone will have to set them up. We lucked out on this one. We checked with a friend who is a musician to see what types of speakers we should rent and he offered to bring and set up his own professional quality speaker system for us as a wedding gift (great gift!). If we had just been playing music on our ipod with our mini-speaker, the sound quality would have been terrible.

2. Set up separate playlists. (And actually make a playlist, don't rely on spotify or something.) We had one playlist for cocktail hour and dinner back ground music, a separate playlist for each spotlight dance, and a playlist for dancing music at the reception. This way, our first dance didn't run right into the father daughter dance, etc. Clearly label the playlists and have them set up in order. I think ours went A- Cocktail Hour, B - First Dance, etc.

3. Make sure there is someone who is willing to play the music for you. You will be busy and its distracting to have the bride or groom running up to the DJ table. We slipped our friend who brought the speaker equipment an ipod with the music on it when he arrived. He just hit play when he got up to the cocktail hour and we had our DOC let him know when we wanted to do spotlight dances, so he could quickly cue that music up.

4. Figure out whether you want to take requests and how to handle that since your playlist will be set up before hand. We asked our VIPs (parents, wedding party) if there were any songs they wanted to hear and tried to accommodate those requests within reason. During cocktail hour, we also played the first dance songs of a number of our close married friends and family. We got lots of compliments on that.

5. Don't put off planning your playlist. For about 9 months before the wedding, H and I kept a running list of songs we'd like to play at the reception. We'd be driving and hear a song on the radio and add it to our list. We didn't end up playing all these songs, but it made things a lot easier later. Start assembling your actual playlist at least a month before the wedding so that you have time to make changes and get it done before the immediate pre-wedding craziness. People will notice if there is no music.

6. Make use of the CD collection at your local library. We checked out a bunch of compilation CDs and found some songs we loved but had never thought of using before.

7. Remember your audience. You may love death metal music and want to play it all night at your reception. But chances are, not everyone there is going to be in to that. So mix up genres a little. Throw in some classics and some poppy stuff, even if its not your taste. 80s music seemed to go over really well with our crowd (fortunately, we like a lot of 80s music). We even played a couple of country songs, even though neither of us are fans. The nice thing about making your own playlist is that even if you play something from a genre you aren't crazy about, you get to pick the songs from that genre that you play, and chances are there are a few in there somewhere that you like.

8. Make a good fast-slow mix. This was H and my biggest disagreement. He thought we should have more slow songs than fast songs, I thought more fast than slow. I think we ended up going with about a 60-40 fast-slow mix. We'd play 3-4 fast songs, then 2-3 slow songs, depending on the length of the songs, etc.

9. Start the general reception dance part with a song that will make everyone get up and dace - fast or slow - so something that is familiar to lots of people. I can say our most popular slow song was "All of Me" by John Legend (dance floor was packed and it's a really pretty song too). Our most popular fast songs were probably 80s music stuff.

Good luck and have fun!

JennyColada · March 2015

I did an iPod playlist at our reception and WHOA! PP covered everything!

Knottie3135957 · May 2015

I was just about to ask the same thing--glad I saw this post!
We're doing a super-low budget backyard wedding. Thankfully, there's already outdoor speakers near the pool, so we just need to crank it up a bit to hit the actual yard area where the ceremony will be.

Create Your Own Playlist Advise!

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