Amanda & Eric, Vernon Downs Casino
Peter was great to work with!!! He did everything me and my husband requested and was so easy to work with. He kept the party going all night long!
What a crowd! I’ve seen newlyweds hoisted up on chairs over the crowd at plenty of weddings, but Kara and Andrew’s wedding has my record for having it happen earlier than any other. And that set the tone for the entire evening… photos, song picks and more in this blog post!
Out of more than 160 career weddings, Kara and Andrew’s was my fourth at SKY Armory, which is located in the heart of downtown Syracuse. I always think of it as being right on South Salina Street, because that’s the entrance vendors need to use, but the public entrance is actually along Clinton at the end of Walton, right near the venue’s namesake, Armory Square.
For this wedding, we needed sound on the 2nd floor for cocktail hour, and the 3rd floor for the reception. As in the past, I brought in two complete sound systems, one for each floor. But I was very happy to find out the IEM transmitter I recently added to my arsenal delivered a crystal clear signal from the main setup on the 3rd floor to my wireless speakers on the 2nd floor. While I was ready to give the 2nd floor its own system if the wireless signal wasn’t acceptable, it was nice to skip those steps and devote more time to the primary setup and the uplighting on floor 3.
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Kara and Andrew took me up on my offer to play a different song for each couple in the wedding party. Rather than just talking over the beginning of each song, I always edit the intro songs so that there’s an instrumental part for me to announce (so I’m not stepping on the song’s vocals) and then a hook or chorus from the song (as each couple walks out onto the floor) so guests will recognize it before we move onto the next one.
With 5 toasts on the agenda and plans to get photos of the newlyweds with each table, they wanted to save some time by keeping the first dance and parent dances short. Rather than “just fade out after X number of seconds,” because that always sounds awkward and abrupt… I ask couples how long they want the songs to be and I’ll find ways to make seamless edits to remove one or more parts of a song. The ultimate result is that the song is about the length the couple requested, but we still have the natural ending so guests won’t even realize it was shortened.
Reception
Between the first dance and parent dances, I was able to trim two 3-minute songs and a 4-minute song down to about 2 minutes each. A total savings of 4 minutes might not seem like much, but when you consider the average song is 3-4 minutes… that allowed us to squeeze in one extra song during the open dance floor portion of the night.
As always, the crew from SKY Armory was top notch with service, food and presentation! And as promised, here are the photos from the dance floor including the newlyweds being hoisted up over the crowd on chairs!
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For the first time in 15 years, I wound up doing two weddings in a row with the same photography company… so if you’re a regular reader of my blog and the name “123 Imaging” sounds familiar, it’s because the same company did the photography for my previous wedding.
Thanks again to Kara and Andrew… and to your guests! What a fun group, it’s always great to see families that turn the “celebration level” up to 11 and keep the dance floor packed from start to finish. I wish you both many years of love and happiness together and thank you very much for choosing me as your wedding DJ!
