Step 4: Planning Your Timeline: 

Once you’ve picked your venue, set your date, and hired your vendors you will now need to decided how to spend your time on your big day. A true wedding planner or even a day-of-coordinator can help you plan out the whole day, while your DJ should help plan out the guest experience more in depth.

Before The Wedding:

You’ll need to plan time for hair & makeup & getting ready as well any pictures you will be taking before your wedding ceremony starts. The bigger your bridal party the longer these things will take. Your photographer will work with you to make sure they get all of the shots they need before your party starts.

Wedding Ceremony:

We like to start music 1/2 hour before your ceremony begins as guests arrive. Prior to the ceremony we will have already worked with you to pick out all of the songs for people walking down the aisle as well as the recessional song once the ceremony is over. Most wedding ceremonies take around 30 minutes.

Cocktail Hour & Grand Entrance:

Once your ceremony is over guests will travel to or move into the reception room. Most couples will make sure the bar is open and some appetizers are ready for guests to snack on. We like to keep the music fun and upbeat but not too loud as this will be the first chance your guests will get to talk to each other.

Cocktail hour ends with your grand entrance. We’ll line your bridal party up and announce them into the room with a fun, upbeat song. When it’s time to announce the bride and groom we’ll ask everyone to stand and hype up your crowd so you walk into the room to a huge round of applause.

Dinner and Special Moments:

Before dinner is a great time for a “father of the bride” speech if anyone is planning to welcome everyone to the party. We’ll also introduce someone to pray for the meal if that is your style. We usually play slower love songs during this time at a lower level and slowly bring up the pace of the music as well as the volume as dinner starts to wind down.

After dinner come your Maid of Honor and Best Man speeches. We’ll get everyone back to their seats for this moment. Once they finish you’ll cut your wedding cake and move into your first dance and dances with your parents. Dinner can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to get everyone fed and plan for another half hour to make sure you don’t feel rushed through all of your special moments.

Dance Party!

Once dinner is over and you’ve gotten all of your formalities out of the way it’s time to dance! Be open to having a wide variety of music played at your wedding. We like to start with the wedding classics and older songs and work our way towards the newer stuff so everyone gets a chance to dance to something from their generation. Make sure to plan for a few sets of slow dances to give your dance floor a little rest and bring out the couples who might not be the biggest dancers - Weddings are about celebrating love and slow dances are perfect for that.

We suggest doing your bouquet & garter toss a little bit into the dancing. It gets everyone dancing earlier in the night and makes for a nice little break during dancing as well - of course this will depend on how long you’ve got your photographer / video booked - we want to make sure you get photos of all the special moments! Dancing usually lasts 2 - 2.5 hours. Anything less and people feel like it wasn’t enough and anything more wears people out too much. The best dance floors end on a high note, not because it went on too long and people started to head home.