There are quite a lot of things I think about at a wedding that you probably won't notice. Where the speakers are positioned. How high they are. Where the cables run. What the room is made of. Where the bar is in relation to the dancefloor. Whether people are likely to congregate in a corner that will later become acoustically awkward. None of this is especially glamorous, and I would be slightly concerned if you spent your wedding admiring my cable management. But you will notice if I get it wrong. That's the odd thing about attention to detail: when it works, it tends to disappear.
Good equipment helps, obviously, but good equipment isn't enough. You have to know what to do with it. A speaker placed badly is still a badly placed speaker, however expensive it was. Put the tweeters too low and the people at the front get rather more treble than they were hoping for while simultaneously blocking the sound for everyone behind them. Put a subwoofer somewhere because it looks neat rather than because it works acoustically and you can end up with all the bass in one part of the room and almost none in another. I usually couple my subs together and, where the room allows it, make use of a wall to help reinforce the low end. Nobody dancing needs to understand why. They just need the music to sound good.
Then there are cables, which remain stubbornly necessary and visually determined to ruin everything. They have an extraordinary ability to turn an otherwise tidy setup into something resembling the back of a television cabinet in 1997. So I spend a fair amount of time hiding them, dressing them properly and making sure nobody has to step over one on the way to the bar. Partly because it looks better, but mostly because weddings are more enjoyable when nobody spends the evening in A&E after becoming tangled in an extension lead. There are details you obsess over because you're fussy and details you obsess over because they stop becoming problems later. I try to stick to the second kind.
The room matters just as much as the equipment. When I arrive at a venue, I'm not simply looking for a space big enough to put the booth. I'm looking at the shape of the room, the hard surfaces, the ceiling height, where people will sit, where they'll stand, where the bar is, how easy it is to see the dancefloor from elsewhere and whether the entire evening is likely to migrate through a doorway once the sun comes out. Every room behaves differently. Some make it very easy to build a party. Others need a little more thought. That's why I tend to see the room itself as part of the setup. The aim isn't to make the DJ equipment the centre of attention; it's to make sure everything works together well enough that nobody needs to think about it.
And then there are the details that have nothing to do with equipment at all. Remembering that you mentioned a particular song six months ago. Knowing that another one absolutely must not be played. Realising that a request is a brilliant idea, just not yet. Noticing that the room needs more energy, or less, or simply a change. Recognising when something I've chosen isn't working and moving on before everyone else has had time to notice. That's attention to detail too. Really, it's all the same job: looking for the small things before they become big things. If I've done it properly, you shouldn't spend your wedding wondering about speaker placement, acoustics, cables or whether the next song is going to work. You should just experience the result. And that's exactly the point.
Related Articles:
Why Your Wedding DJ Should Probably Arrive Before Your Guests Do.
What A Wedding DJ Can Tell About A Room In 60 Seconds.
Your Wedding Doesn't Need To Look Like A Wedding (My War On Tackiness and Clutter).
