Seeing the various responses and questions to the new DIY DJ column, I thought my next few posts might have some answers.  In my next post I’ll discuss editing software & creating mixes.  For this post, I thought I would relate what we did after we had our CDs created.  Okay, what do we do now?  A boombox wasn’t going to cut it and just who would change the CDs?

Since we had a bagpiper play music for our wedding ceremony, we just needed to rent a P.A. system for the reception.   We were looking for speakers, a CD player & a mixer and since I owned a nice microphone we didn’t need to rent one.   Using the yellow pages (yes, I’m old school), I checked out some local places that provided sound system rentals.  Most seemed to be catered for corporate events: more expensive and more equipment than we needed.  I found the set up we were looking for at the guitar shop where I bought my first guitar.  They were reasonably priced & had various options on what equipment would be included.  Since this was ten years ago, I’ve forgotten the specifics of what we actually used.  The two speakers we had were on tripod stands and provided great sound for the room we were in (about 100 people).

Next was trying to figure out how to get everything connected & operating without being there myself.  Since many of my friends are quite familiar with sound equipment, we decided to ask one of them (for a few extra bucks) to set up and watch over the CDs during our reception.  We provided a track listing & cues for changing the CDs for him to follow.  For announcements & the toast, we had my Best Man on the microphone (he hammed it up).

All in all, it worked out great.  We had one mis-timed part of the evening where we had to stall by starting one of the CDs over again.  Like, I said in my first post, we did not have a wedding coordinator, so we guessed at what times we would be doing dinner, dancing, cake cutting, etc.

Just to calm some nerves, setting up speakers, a CD player, a mic & mixer is not too complicated, just more than I could handle on my wedding day.  For those looking to use an iPod to make your ultimate wedding playlist, I would suggest a sound system with a receiver to connect the iPod.  There are few different ways to connect an iPod to play on a sound system depending on what cables you have.  I would recommend connections through the headphone jack (1/8” cable) to stereo RCA inputs (red & white cable connections) or to a ¼” cable input.   There are ways to connect through the docking USB cables as well, but I’m not too familiar with how to do so.  I hope this helped answer a few questions and I’d be happy to respond to more specific questions you might have in more detail.

Jason, The DIY DJd