Why Your Wedding DJ Should Probably Arrive Before Your Guests Do.
Most wedding DJs arrive in the evening. Dinner finishes, speeches happen, somebody starts clearing tables and, at roughly the same moment, a person with several large speakers appears and begins carrying equipment through a room full of guests holding drinks. This is perfectly normal and, in plenty of venues, perfectly sensible. But particularly for summer weddings, I've become increasingly fond of doing things the other way around: arriving early, while the florists are still moving vases around and the caterers are unloading enough food to sustain a small military exercise, and getting everything done before anyone needs it. By the time the wedding is properly under way, the speakers are in place, the microphones have been checked and nobody's grandmother is standing exactly where I need to put a lighting stand.
The useful bit isn't really that you get more DJ. You probably don't need someone enthusiastically mixing records while you're signing the register. It's that one person can take care of the sound and music throughout the day. Ceremony microphones. Music while guests arrive. Drinks reception. Dinner. Speeches. That slightly untidy stretch after the meal when people disappear in twelve different directions. Then the first dance and the party. None of these things needs to feel like a performance in its own right; most of the music should simply make the day feel better without anybody particularly noticing it. Relaxed when it needs to be relaxed, a little more lively when the drinks are flowing, and absolutely not announcing THE PARTY HAS STARTED while somebody is still eating a canapé.
It also removes a surprising amount of faffing. “We'll just hire a couple of speakers” always sounds wonderfully straightforward until somebody has to collect them, set them up, find the correct cable, discover why one of them isn't making any noise and then appoint an usher as temporary Head of Audio despite the fact he's already trying to locate the rings. Add a wireless microphone, several phones, Bluetooth and a Spotify playlist and what was supposed to be background music can quietly become a small AV project. I've seen enough weddings to know that the easiest technical solution is usually the one where somebody who knows what they're doing has already set it all up and tested it before anyone arrives. It isn't terribly glamorous, but neither is asking three bridesmaids whether anybody owns a Lightning-to-3.5mm adaptor.
Then there are the timings, which weddings treat more as suggestions than commitments. Speeches overrun. Photographs take longer. Dinner is late. Someone important disappears just before they're needed. The best man reveals that what everyone thought was a speech is in fact the first volume of his memoirs. If you've booked different people for different parts of the day, a twenty-minute delay can suddenly matter because somebody has another job to get to. If I'm there for the day, it mostly doesn't. The schedule moves, so I move with it. There isn't a drinks-reception musician glancing anxiously at their watch or somebody waiting to set up for the evening while your guests are still using the room. Particularly in summer, when everyone quite reasonably wants to be outside for as long as possible, there's something very nice about knowing the evening setup is already sitting there quietly waiting for you.
That's why I don't really think of the full-day option as buying extra hours of DJing. You're buying certainty. You're buying the version of the day where the microphones work, the music is at the right volume, nobody is carrying speakers through your drinks reception and the evening party is ready long before anybody starts thinking about dancing. More importantly, you're removing one more small category of things that could require your attention. You shouldn't be wondering who is pressing play, whether the Bluetooth connection has vanished or why the speech microphone suddenly sounds like it's transmitting from the bottom of a well. You should be getting married, talking to people you love and wondering where the last three hours went. I'll worry about the sound. From the first microphone check to the last song of the night, it's already taken care of.
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