Weddingbee Blog

The very first wedding-related project that made Mr. Guinea Pig’s eyes light up was music (the second being our website design). Mr. Guinea Pig loves music. He refuses to have single songs in his iTunes library, only complete albums - he says artists create albums so that they are listened to in their entirety, not piecemeal. This means he has a LOT of music on his computer, and he’s always exploring new bands/artists. Once, I thought I had finally heard of a band before he had, so I excitedly played a song I liked for him - he listened to about 30 seconds of it and said “Oh yeah, I forgot about these guys - did you know they’re comprised of members from {this other band} and they actually released this song a year ago?” … le sigh. Someday… someday, I will introduce a new band to him! It’s now one of my life goals.

So! Why am I telling you this seemingly random bit of information? Well, once we started talking about reception music and lamenting the fact that bands are so freaking expensive, Mr. Guinea Pig decided we would have an iPod reception, with all music chosen and organized by him (along with my input, of course). We operated under this assumption for about 5 months of our engagement and were slowly adding songs to the ’must have’ list - until in June, we went to a friend’s wedding. At the reception, there was a guy operating an iPod. It was unclear whether he was actually a DJ or just a friend of a friend, but this guy was. not. good.

When he announced the bridal party, each introduction was awkwardly paused as he clicked through the menus to the next song. He mumbled. When the bride and groom were announced and went to the dance floor for their first dance, they stood there in silence for about a minute as the DJ searched for their song (a minute is a long time when everyone is silent and all eyes are on you, I’m sure!).

(source - yes that is cross-stitching!)

But it wasn’t that the iPod had failed, it was the operation that wasn’t so hot. With every misstep that took place, Mr. Guinea Pig looked more and more concerned. As we left the wedding, he turned to me and said, “Please tell me there’s room in the budget for a DJ.” Thankfully there was, because I had never taken the DJ out of the budget in the first place, just in case. Don’t tell Mr. GP.

Now, we both realize that an iPod/computer playing at the reception is a perfectly feasible and totally reasonable thing to do. But we also realized that we didn’t have any friends/family who would be able to man the iPod, or any friends of a friend who were DJs. And we reaaaally didn’t want a repeat of the wedding we had just left (sorry friends!), so we decided we would find an awesome DJ.

(Not this kind of awesome, though - source)

And an awesome DJ we found!! A DJ who totally got us, knows his music, runs a very organized business, and was super nice! In fact, you already know our DJ: Evan from MyDeejay.com was also Mrs. D’orsay’s DJ! We met with three DJs, and Evan was the last - we knew right away at that meeting that Evan was the guy for us, and we haven’t looked back since. I’m actually pretty excited to have a great DJ play our wedding instead of a band: I’m one of those people who likes my favorite songs in their original form, and get annoyed if they’re played differently, so unless the band only played songs I didn’t know, I would have spent our whole reception annoyed!

The short playlist we organized pre-DJ will not go to waste, however - Evan will play (or NOT play - those do not play lists are just as important!) whatever we want, or we can just give him suggestions and he’ll run with it. I think Mr. Guinea Pig still thinks he’ll be figuring out most of the music for the reception, but I’m pretty sure we’ll get down to a time crunch, and end up just giving Evan suggestions along with several absolutely-must-play songs. Either way, our reception will be a rocking party and everybody better be dancin’! I’ll talk more about specific music in a later post (i.e. once we actually figure it out).

Are you going with a band or a DJ? Have you been to an iPod reception? How did it turn out?