Funkified Entertainment

Funkified Entertainment

Dear Bride,

With this question, the only people whose answer should matter is yours and your fiancees. In our experience (about 10% of the 3000 weddings we've done have been day weddings), it is much more difficult to create a dancing atmosphere during the day due to the environment, lighting, and general human inhibitions. It becomes much more difficult if you don't have a dancefloor, but similarly if you prepare a versatile entertainment option, where there's a will there's a way. My advice would be to book a DJ or small band (no reason to book larger than a 4-piece if you're not having a dancing focus), and allow them the freedom to 'read the crowd'. This requires a level of experience and expertise, so ensure that you don't go with the cheapest option - an act with at least 100 gigs of wedding experience is a good level to look for, and won't cost you the world.

In short, the answer to all your wedding questions comes down to the kind of wedding you want. Prepare that, and then accept that even the best-prepared event has unexpected occurrences on the day. Your guests might decide your wedding is going to be Ibiza for a few hours, and in that situation you simply want to have booked a band or DJ that can accommodate this.

Good luck, and all the best for a stunning day :)

The Team at Funkified

Funkified Entertainment

Hi Susann,

It's always a tough one when you're looking at hiring a friend to DJ or play live for your wedding. It can sometimes work out to be a great opportunity to both save budget and get live music, but I've also seen it go very badly for a few reasons:

1. As you're not paying a band, coupled with it being a friend (and your boss!), you'll have far less flexibility over song choices. If you have a good gauge on what your guests will want to hear and will respond to on the dancefloor, this can be disastrous;
2. Weddings are a very different beast to playing a pub gig, as there is an energy requirement needed to keep the dancefloor full all night that isn't there for public gigs - if the band in question are not used to playing events, or are made up of part-timers, you're rolling the dice that the front-man or woman will have the professionalism and experience to engage with your guests, and that the band will be able to minimise the gaps/silences between songs and read the crowd to keep them on the dancefloor. If their approach is going to be "We'll play the songs we like, if you like it then dance, if you don't we don't care", then your wedding will suffer as a result.
3. Generally part-timers won't have a sound engineer, which is suicide for a wedding - there are so many moving parts at play that require somebody driving the levels from the front, including speeches, volume concerns from older guests over dinner, differing mixes required over dinner as opposed to dancing and a semi-DJ role required to operate iPod for some special songs/band breaks.

Good luck, and all the best for an unforgettable wedding!

Gus