Photo-Booth for Keeps!!

So, you're running around planning your wedding and doing everything from checking out venue sites to hiring photographers, caterers and, of course, the DJ! These are some of the big pieces that go into the planning of a wedding, but what about the other 'minor' (so to speak) details, such as the seating arrangement, the center pieces, and finding just the right wedding favor unique to your celebration?  It can be those 'minor' details that eat up most of your time & energy, especially when it comes to finding a keepsake that your guests actually want to keep! 

...And this is where the Photo-Booth comes in to save the day......(or Spiderman....what, it could happen!?)

At most wedding celebrations, couples are very busy doing things like.... let's see...getting married (including all the fun formalities like familyl photos, dances,etc.) & running around mingling with guests to share as much of the experience as possible, but it's not an easy task!

 Having a Photo-Booth at your wedding let's you share something unique & fun with all of your guests and sends them away with a keepsake they'll actually keep! 

Our Photo-Booth gives you unlimited, INSTANT double prints!!  And the fun doesn't stop there.....there are so many options to help customize the Photo-Booth to make your wedding day stand out!

Check it Out.....

1. PHOTO BOOTH PROPS

Ask most people what their favorite thing is about Photo-booths and you'll hear this answer over & over again, "the props"!!   Just you wait and see....put a basket or table outside your booth and stock it with sillies like fake moustaches, hats, sunglasses & costume beads and let your guests choose their poison!

You can even choose to tailor your props to follow a specific theme; the beach, superheroes, pirates, the eighties and so much more!  

2. MEMORY BOOKS

Imagine this: your big adventure of a wedding day is winding down, the guests have departed, your family and friends are heading out and you and you new wife/hubby are finally able to take a deep breath and absorb the day. 

Sadly, you probably won’t get to see your formal wedding photos for a while, but the Photo-booth let’s you sneak an instant peek into what your guests were up to during the big celebration!  Picture it now …a whole book filled with fun, silly (and  yes, sometimes whacky & embarrassing) photos of your guests with a personalized message from them to you.  Unforgettable to say the least!!!

3. PERSONALIZE YOUR PHOTOS

Props add much of the fun and a bit of the uniqueness to the Photo-Booth photos and the shoot itself.  You can further personalize the experience by selecting text (of your choice) to be printed on every photo strip. 

Often, we can add two lines of text and some of the options include:

a)   Couples Names : Last Name(s) or First Names

b)   Date of Wedding

c)   Special message to Wedding Guests

While Photo-Booths are a recently growing trend at Weddings, it is still less common than you think.  The Booth gives your guests a chance to feel more included in your big day and gives everyone a chance to go home with a memory they won’t soon forget!! 

For more information and all the juicy details about renting a Photo-Booth for your Wedding celebration, click here and check out Sound Choice Event's Photo Booth page on our website!  To see more photos from our Photo-Booth, click here to check out our Facebook page photos from our most recent Photo-Booth Weddings!!

Is your "Do Not Play List" becoming your 'Do Not Dance" list

Right now, many of our clients are busy little bees planning for their upcoming wedding day(ok, ok...so even bees need a shameless plug once in a while!). 

As you go through that process, we want to share some of our expertise and experiences that we think can help make your celebration unforgettable!  

Like many people in the wedding industry (and like many soon-to-be wed couples), we often see and hear about websites providing tips and 'tricks' around everything from working with your wedding caterer to selecting your music and working with a DJ for the ‘big day’. 

Over the next several weeks, we will review and discuss the pros and cons of some of these tips and provide suggestions for how get the most out of working with us as your Wedding DJs.

 Tip #1: The “Do Not Play” list

For most wedding couples, the music is an essential part of their celebration.  It is for that reason that the ‘Play’ or ‘Do Not Play’ lists can be a good guide for us to understand more about your taste in music and your ideas about what will work to get your guests dancing.  You may even notice that many Wedding Planning websites strongly encourage couples to create a concrete play/do-not-play list to ‘guarantee’ that the DJ plays what you want and keeps the dance floor packed. 

One of the popular wedding planning sites suggests the following when creating your play/do-not-playlist:

“The Do Not Playlist is probably more important than your actual "play" list -- make your DJ or band swear up and down that they will follow it no matter how much cash Aunt Milly is waving.”

Ok, so yes, you can make your DJ swear not to stray from your list; however, there is much to consider when selecting the ‘must plays’ and ‘never plays’ for your special day.  First, you’ve taken the time, energy and hard-earned monies to hire a DJ and you should absolutely take advantage of his/her expertise on what may/may not ‘move’ the guests. 

If your main goal at your reception is to hear your favorite songs during the celebration, then only utilizing your playlist might be the best path.  However, if your main goal is to keep your dance floor packed (or a balance of both of the above), then consider this:

If your crowd requests songs on your ‘Do Not Play’ list and/or are not responding ‘well’ (meaning not packing the dance floor) to the songs on your ‘play’ list (for whatever reason), you can give your DJ the wiggle room to try out some other songs and ‘chase the crowd’ (in other words to meet the crowd where they are in terms of music that will make them want to dance). 

The songs don’t necessarily have to be pulled from those stereotypical, most requested wedding songs, such as Celebration (the 3^rd most requested wedding song of all time from guests nationally!), but rather your DJ can continuously assess the crowd by watching their response to specific genres and head in that direction for a bit just to get/keep them moving.  If your playlist is important to you, your DJ can use it as the foundation for the 'night' and return to that list throughout the event.

REMEMBER: Whether you’ve been to similar events with all of these same guests or it’s the first time some/many of them have been in a room together, every crowd has their own personality at different events and our goal is to capture that personality and work with it.

Now, your crowd could absolutely pack the dance floor with just the songs you’ve requested to hear (or similar artists), but being pro-active and discussing all the options ahead of time with your DJ gives us a better chance to understand your vision and follow that in order to help make your celebration the spectacular day you imagined!

Sound Choice Events Suggestions:

1.  Decide the goal or role of the music at your reception.  Is your goal to hear the songs on your playlist no matter what with more of a focus on guests interacting OR is your goal to keep the dance floor packed no matter what.  (there are options in between as well to meet a balance of the two)

2.  Discuss the role you want music to play with your DJ ahead of time and ask for suggestions on how to make that happen.  Be sure you are direct about your vision so your DJ is clear on your vision.

3.  If dancing is very important to you at your reception, consider giving your DJ ‘wiggle’ room to ‘chase the crowd’ with their music selections to get the dance floor moving or to keep it packed.

4.  Maintain open communication with your DJ throughout your reception (or assign someone else to do so).  During the celebration, we will check in with you a few times (briefly) to insure that you feel things are running smoothly with the music and to see if there is anything you want to switch up in terms of the type of music we are playing, etc. 

Lastly, it is most likely the case that no one hears those very stereotypical, most requested wedding songs more than your DJ (or possibly that special relative that requests them at EVERY family wedding). 

As DJs (and occasional wedding guests ourselves), we would love nothing more than to have the opportunity to get your guests moving to something a little less familiar and something that is unique to your taste(s)!!  With some pre-event discussions & brainstorming with your DJ about the music you like and your vision of the big day, we can help make your wedding sound as good as it looks!!

Even if you didn't hit the Mega Millions like we did, you can still have the Wedding of a Lifetime.

Ok, so we didn't quite WIN the lottery, BUT... someone in Massachusetts won some money from that recent Mega Millions drawing & in our own twisted way, we thought that the whole six degrees of separation rule must have to apply here too, yes?

Whew!  It has been quite the weekend here at SCE & as promised Prom season arrived most officially this Friday in the form of us DJ'ing to a packed house for one local high school & rolling out our oh-so-loveable Photo-Booth for another...points awarded to the group of students waiting in line for the booth who started their own dance party and drew quite the crowd for themselves!!

Saturday saw a few doubles for us...starting off with a very rowdy crowd at Hannah's Bat Mitvah at the Beth El Temple Center in Belmont that ended with the entire family young & old (er) singing Journey's Don't Stop Believin' (most popular Karaoke song ever..really!) led by a very fun group of Hannah's older cousins!  They ate up the photo-booth throughout the whole event and just had the best time!!  Our night was full of parties, and most memorable was a Prom celebration for a local Newton High School that requested everything from New Boyz to Lionel Richie!

Sunday saw more doubles and tired, but happy DJs as we shared a very important walkathon with a local non-profit organization & ended off our evening with a very talented group of kids at Wellesley's Elm Bank Reservation who were celebrating their recent production of a little something related to ...umm...OZ (less the HBO series, more the one with the yellow brick road--because the HBO series done by kids would be...well...just kind of creepy and lord of the fly-ish, no?).

More weekday corporate events have arrived on our doorstep recently.  These events are always so much fun because we get to sick the game-show on them...boss vs. employee...co-worker vs. co-worker, spiced up with a little Pat Sajak or Steve Harvey (Harvey, you know...hosting the Family Fued--or we can just say me if you want to get technical) & they always leave with the biggest smiles. Of course, we're not there in the morning to see who gets the pink slips, but all in all everyone seems pretty friendly!!

The business-E side of things has seen us finalizing the changes to our webpage, purchasing heaps of new equipment (ok, heaps may be an exaggeration, but ....a lot!) & just working to get the word out about all the cool stuff we're offering these days!

We leave you this fine evening with a tip to help make your wedding day pop:

Most couples want the dance floor hoppin' all night (or day) during their reception and one of the best ways to make that happen is to be flexible and allow your DJ to "follow the crowd" or in other words, play music that seems to pack the dance floor, even if it steers a little away from your playlist.  Remember, that while you may know the guests and be familiar with their tastes, that crowd together as one at your celebration has it's own spirit and may just surprise you when it comes to what will make them dance.  

Until next time... 

Springing Ahead & Movin' Right Along.....

Hello All!

It's been several months since our last blog entry (why is this starting to sound like a confession?) and there has been so much happening with Sound Choice Events!  We did a sort of experiment by utilizing our Facebook page as our main stream of communication & while that's been serving us well, we miss doing the blog and realize that using both as part of our marketing strategy makes the most sense!  

Be sure to check out our FB page, where we post all of our gig pictures & videos!

https://www.facebook.com/SoundChoiceEvents

And, so it shall be... 

So, what have we been doing one might ask?--everything!  We are in full swing of the heavy booking season and have had meetings non-stop throughout the week & weekend (on off hours).  Gigs are going strong with a ton of Weddings, Mitvahs, & Corporate Events. We've also recently had the chance to work with a few amazing non-profit organizations for celebrations & fundraisers....and let us not forget that Prom season is in bloom!  

Our Photo-Booth bookings have been off the charts this season & the trend continues.  We've had a large number of Wedding Couples add this option to their DJ Packages and are seeing more and more Mitzvahs & High Schools requesting it as well--yay!

Fun!

Lastly, we were nominated for & awarded the Bride's Choice Award from Wedding Wire again this year & they had this to say about our services:

------------------

{Natick, MA} – January 23, 2012 – WeddingWire, the nation's leading wedding Marketplace, is excited to announce Sound Choice Events has been selected to receive the prestigious Wedding Wire Bride’s Choice Awards 2012 for DJ!

The esteemed annual awards program recognizes the top local wedding vendors from the Wedding Wire Network who demonstrate excellence in quality, service, responsiveness and professionalism within the wedding industry. While many industry awards are selected by the organization, Sound Choice Events was selected based on its stellar reviews from past newlywed clients.

Sound Choice Events is recognized as part of the top five percent of wedding professionals in the Wedding Wire local vendor community, comprised of over 200,000 wedding professionals throughout the United States and Canada. The Bride’s Choice Award recognizes the best local wedding vendors across 20 service categories, from wedding venues to wedding photographers, based on their overall professional achievements throughout the past year.

“Wedding Wire is thrilled to honor the success of the top-rated wedding professionals within the Wedding Wire Community,” said Timothy Chi, CEO of Wedding Wire. “Since the launch of the Bride’s Choice Awards™ program four years ago, thousands of outstanding wedding professionals have been recognized by the bridal community for their supreme service and dedication to the wedding industry. It is with great pleasure that we congratulate Sound Choice Events for their continued professionalism and commitment to enriching the wedding planning experience for engaged couples.”

We are happy to announce that Sound Choice Events is one of the very best DJs within the Wedding Wire Network, which includes leading wedding planning sites Wedding Wire, Project Wedding, Brides.com, Martha Stewart Weddings, and Weddingbee. We would like to thank our past clients for taking the time to review our business on Wedding Wire. Thanks to their positive feedback, we were able to receive the Wedding Wire Bride’s Choice Awards™ for 2012. 

-------------------

It's a cool recognition & we're happy that our hard work seems to be paying off and giving couples the celebration they envisioned on their Wedding Day!

Happy Spring!