It had been retired from wedding DJing about a year when I said yes. The gear never left. It sat in a closet while I felll hard for wedding film and photography. I also put my love of music towards my warehouse rave production. These two things had almost nothing in common except that each one felt exactly where I was supposed to be. Stepping back from wedding DJing made room for both.
This couple hired me for photos but they knew about my checkered past and asked whether I'd get on decks too. They were really cool people and something told me I'd get to play good
music. They got me.
Wedding gigs bought me my first real speakers. With my dance party, I had been learning acoustics which means I hear a room before I really look at it. At a wedding, sound sits behind the aesthetics of speaker placement. Nobody wants a stack of boxes in their ceremony photos. You learn to make a room sound good from wherever they'll let you put things.
Working next to other DJs as a wedding film maker taught me something else. Some of them didn't know their own gear, not in the way you'd expect from someone who does this for a living. It never ruined anything. I could talk it through and sort out what we needed, but the gap between owning equipment and understanding it was a strange thing to keep noticing.
Tip 1. Ask your DJ about their gear. Price alone tells you plenty. My own rig costs about five times what I charge for a single wedding. It’s where the money goes when a DJ cares. So many DJs buy the bare minimum. Not necessarily wrong, just worth knowing before you sign anything.
Ask what your DJ's system is worth and see how it lines up with what they're charging you.
Good sound means better connection to the music, a better connection to each other. It means deeper emotional experiences. It’s what allowed you to lose yourself entirely when you dance.
The ceremony was gorgeous. Some of my favorite ever photographs came out of that day. My girlfriend was fully trained by then, so she took the lead on stills while I ran sound. We traded the whole evening back and forth. She handed me the camera the moment the dancing started, because dance photography was my first love from behind a camera. I handed her the decks for a few tracks and she had a lot of fun playing great tunes. It is always great to work with someone that knows multiple crafts.
Tip 2. DJs say yes to almost everything. So do videographers. That sounds like a good thing until neither of you checks whether your gear actually plays nice together. Get looped into that conversation early. Even just cc yourself on the emails between your DJ and your other vendors. It takes five minutes and it means somebody besides them is paying attention to whether the pieces fit.
Dinner ended and the whole wedding vanished and came back in completely different clothes. No heels. No train on the dress. All of them still looking fly as f**k. They'd dressed to dance and from that point the night belonged to whoever was holding the music.
We started out with some of the standard pop music vibes, but as the families went to sleep the officiant (now dressed with stars on her pants) comes up to me. “We’re going to stay up all night. You can quit when you want, but you’re a club DJ right? Just play what you want!”
“I can, but it might get weird.” That was the best word I had for non-ravers unaccustomed to house music anywhere, much less a wedding. I've never been the person to end the party early and we did have the gorgeous Luna Mystica campsite in Taos all to ourselves. I brought my JBL SRX 725s with Grunds 3600 subs and Fulcrum FA22s for monitors. “Do it” she said, and took off her shoes and put on flats.
My gf's job was done, all the photo gear was packed up and then I started doing what I never got to do at a wedding before.
I got to actually DJ.
Tip 3.The most important job of the DJ is to read the room. Start with a playlist that you curate. The good part comes after that. A skilled DJ can take one song you already love and hand you three more just like it that you've never heard, ones you end up loving just as much.
I transitioned from pop to funky house first, kept it easy, nothing anybody had to brace for. Most of these people had probably never been to a real rave. Now they were at one. The officiant asked for Le Tigre's Deceptacon, which walked me straight into drum n bass, and somewhere in there the set found its own gravity, deep into trance and techno with nothing around us for miles and the subs moving air across an empty campsite.
We played until 3am. They'd spent the whole night inviting me to stay, and I'd spent it politely declining. I crashed there anyway.
Tip 4. Even if you build the entire playlist yourself and rent the gear, a DJ is still worth it for the flow of the night. Charismatic. Reliable. Trustworthy. Those three carry an evening further than anything on a spec sheet.
None of that night happened by accident. It happened because two people hired someone they actually trusted and then got out of the way and let me work. That's really the whole guide, if I'm honest. The gear, the compatibility, the range, all of it is just what trust looks like once somebody's earned it.
I mostly stick to warehouses these days. But if you're getting married and want a reference for your DJ, or just want to know the right questions to ask before you sign anything, send me a shout. I still know exactly what a good night sounds like, and I'd love to help you find someone who can give you one.
