Re: No DJ at wedding
It takes a bit of preparation beforehand but you could burn your own CD with the music you and your family like. I did the same a couple of years ago at a cousin’s mehndi and wedding. Some of her family are quite conservative and didn’t want a DJ either.
A few days before the mehndi I got her to write down which songs the girls would be dancing to at the mehndi and at what point in the song should the music start and end (most of the dances weren’t the full length of the songs). We also decided on the running order for each dance and any additional songs they wanted as general background songs.
All the songs they were dancing to, they had seen on YouTube. So I searched for high quality versions and downloaded them from YouTube, used a basic video editor to edit the audio tracks, so I was left with shortened versions of each track which faded in just before their dance would start and faded out just after the point the dance would end. I also boosted the volume levels so it would sound better on the night. I then placed a piece of filler music in between each track and burnt it to CD in the exact order that had been agreed. I gave them a copy of the CD so they could use it for their final dance practices.
It was all fairly straightforward, the only tricky one was a dance they wanted to do using bits of 3 different songs. Again I used the video editor to merge the 3 tracks together at the exact points they asked for. It actually sounded pretty decent the way one track blended into the next.
I did another CD which was full of general mehndi songs, which again are fairly easy to get online or if you ask around someone somewhere will already have one. This also had a couple of specific songs they wanted for entrance music. Finally there was one other CD which was full of classics like Gangnam Style! I typed up the running order of each CD so they knew exactly what was on what.
On the night they started with the CD of general music. Then they switched to their dances CD, by now everyone who was dancing knew in which order the dances were and would get ready when they were on next (they also had a few copies of the typed up lists to refer to). As one dance ended, the filler music would kick in, the next lot would get ready to do their dance and someone would just hit the button on the CD player to switch from the filler music to the next track. At one point they took a break from the dances and just put the general music back on until they were ready to start dancing again.
It all worked out really and the kids loved Gangnam Style
For the wedding I just burnt a couple of CDs of popular wedding songs including the ones they wanted specifically and they were just left to play during the event. The venue already had a sound system so we used their microphone for speeches and announcements. No one really missed not having a DJ there.
Yeah, this seems like a cheaper option. My ipod has a pretty good selection of music so I was just going to hook that up to the AV system (or something) and play that. I only need specific music for the dances and for my friend’s wedding, we just mixed our own songs and then burned it onto a cd. The entrance music would be the only major thing that I want to make sure I get right. Other than that, I’m not from a very ‘dancing/singing’ community so all that would be in the background anyways