About 13 years ago, I started making Halloween inspired mix tapes & CDs after growing tired of just hearing “Monster Mash” & “Werewolves of London” at this time of year.  My Halloween playlist for my iPod is now close to 500 songs consisting of rockabilly, goth, metal, horror soundtracks etc.  Among them are quite a few that would be fun for an October wedding.   For this list, I’ve chosen to stick with more upbeat, danceable tunes, leaving behind the more gruesome & spooky songs.

So here, in no particular order, are 10 fun Halloween inspired songs suitable for a wedding:

1.     I Put a Spell On You – Cow Fingers and Mosquito Pie by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins  This bluesy great has also been covered by Nina Simone, Credence Clearwater Revival, & Marilyn Manson.

2.     Dead Man’s Party – Dead Man’s Party Nothing screams Halloween like Danny Elfman & Boingo.  This danceable 80s classic was part of our wedding playlist.

3.     The Ghost of Smokey Joe – Cab Calloway.  The Ghost of Smokey Joe – Halloween Classics: Songs That Scared the Bloomers Off Your Great-Grandma A fun swing ditty that continues in the vein of Calloway’s classic Minnie the Moocher.

4.     Grim Grinning Ghosts – Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion from Grim, Grinning Ghosts – Mickey’s Monster Bash)  I love the HM at Disneyland!  Thurl Ravenscroft sang on the original (voice of Tony the Tiger & You’re a Mean One Mr. Grinch).  Los Lobos also recorded an awesome cover of this tune.

5.     Evil Night Together – Diabolical Streak by Jill Tracy.  This sultry cabaret singer reminds me of a “gothy” Tori Amos.

6.     Boogie Man – Lee Press-On & The Nails.  No, not KC & The Sunshine Band’s song, this is jump swing from hell.  Many songs from LPN’s Swing Is Dead album would be a perfect fit (I Prefer A Coffin, Ghostriders in the Sky, Waltz of the Damned).

7.     Time Warp – The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Soundtrack from the Motion Picture).   It’s just a jump to the left…’nuff said!

8.     Oogie Boogie’s Song – Nightmare Before Christmas (Special Edition).  I just had to throw in this one.  Two new great covers by Tiger Army & Rodrigo y Gabriela show up on the Nightmare Revisited album.

9.     Howl At the Moon – The One And Only.  Here’s an awesome rockabilly tune that’s great for dancing.

10. Thriller – Michael Jackson. I’ve never been a huge MJ fan, but this song has “the funk of 40,000 years and grizzly ghouls from every tomb are closing in to seal your doom…”

Happy Halloween from the DIY DJ.

1. Do you have time to plan 5 – 6 hours (or however long your ceremony/cocktail hour/reception are) of music? This is a project that can take weeks to complete. We found this out first-hand! Getting the right songs together in a way that flowed throughout our reception was maddening. But fun. But still hair-pullingly frustrating at time. There’s a real art to song selection.
2. Do you have enough songs to fill your time requirements? To give you an idea of what you’re looking at: if the average song on your play list is 3 minutes, you’ll need around 100 songs for a 5 hour reception.
3. Are you wanting more of a “listening” experience for your guests or are you wanting them to dance? Does your music selections support that?
4. Is your music collection diverse enough to appeal to most of your guests, young and old? This is the trickiest part of music selection process because your guests will have wildly different tastes in music. Still, to keep everyone comfortable and mostly happy, you’ll need broad appeal in your play lists.
5. Do you have the budget for the equipment, rentals, and songs? Will you need a new iPod or laptop? Will you need special software? How many songs will you need to buy to bridge gaps in your collection? Is the sound system rental affordable?
6. Who will stand in as emcee and guardian of the DJ setup? Is he/she reliable? Sober? Not afraid of public speaking or being an enforcer? By asking friends or family to fill this position, you’re pretty much giving them a job. They’re not going to be able to mingle, dance, or have fun as a guest.
7. Does your venue allow DIY setups? Will you be required to provide insurance for bringing in your own sound system?
8. Is your venue equipped for a DIY setup? Do they have an in-house PA system? Is your equipment compatible? If you need to bring in outside equipment is it appropriate for the venue size? Are there enough electrical outlets? Will you need external power supplies or plug adapters?
9. Are you aware of noise laws in your area? Many areas, especially residential, regulate how loud and for how long outdoor music can be played.
10. Who will pick up, set up, break down, and return your rentals? What if something happens to them or the equipment?
11. Will you be able to test the rental equipment before the wedding?
12. Do you or your designated person know how to work the equipment? Can she/he learn before the wedding?
13. How will you handle song requests?
14. Do you have a backup plan if the equipment doesn’t work or your designated DJ stand-in gets hit by a bus or your “OMG! This song is totally awesome to dance to!” puts people in their seats?

Reasons To Be In Favor Of The DIY DJ Experience

1. Creative control. You get to decide what’s played and when. Don’t want to ever hear Lady Gaga or KC and The Sunshine Band? No problem! That’s entirely within your control. We’ve heard horror story after horror story about DJs that totally ignore the almighty DO NOT PLAY list. Jason and I have witness that first hand a couple of times at the weddings  of our inner circle pals.
2. Cost control. Depending on what equipment you’ll need, the DIY DJ option is often cheaper than hiring a DJ. If you need to buy equipment or songs, they’re yours forever and you can consider it an investment.
3. Cheese control. A good wedding DJ is worth her weight in gold. Unfortunately, there are a lot of so-called professional DJs who are horribly bad. We’ve seen drunk/stoned ones on more than one occasion, some who’ve been so in love with themselves that they forget they’re hired pros and not the center of attention, some who’ve made ridiculously inappropriate comments, some who are stuck in a some sort of music time-warp and, I’m sure, you’ve all seen …

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 DJ

After being guests at a few weddings during our engagement, Khris & I would joke about what songs the DJ would be spinning: YMCA, Brickhouse, Macarena, Who Let The Dogs Out. Although I love the kitschy-ness of disco, I didn’t want those wedding DJ favorites at our reception. We couldn’t afford a band (I dreamed of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy) and the DJs we interviewed just seemed too cheesy. With our eclectic tastes in music, it would be difficult to find our answer “out there.”

Realizing that we had an expansive CD collection, we thought about making our own wedding CDs. However, at the time we had one of the first iMacs on the market, which only had a CD-ROM drive. After some thought, we decided to purchase an external CD burner. In addition to creating the music mix that WE wanted to hear at our wedding reception, we would also have a hard copy to remember our special night. Realizing that, we came up with the idea to make our “guest book” jewel case inserts for the CDs. It’s fun to bust out the CDs now & read what our guests wrote.

Not having a wedding coordinator, we needed to organize our evening: cocktail & dinner hours, our first dance & general dancing, cake cutting, and our crazy end of the night mix. We ended up with four discs (two cocktail & two dance). Picking songs created a few arguments such as critiquing each other’s choices, what fits the mood, what is danceable (more on that in a later).

Here’s a brief rundown of our night:

• Mellow jazz & tiki lounge music started off our cocktail & dinner hours, including some hidden humorous highlights such as Pat Boone’s version of “Enter Sandman”, “Lesbian Seagull” by Engelbert Humperdink & a jazzy cover of Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun.”
• Our first dance song was “Still In Love With You” by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy followed by some fun swing.
• Our cue for the cake cutting was a sample of the Impressive Priest’s “mawwage” speech from The Princess Bride with some bouncy Danny Elfman music after. Before getting into more dance music, we had a bit of devilish fun with Satan’s song from the South Park movie.
• Disc Four ended the evening with some fun. We mixed in 80s new wave & some 70s funk & disco: Fishbone, The English Beat, Oingo Boingo, Go-Gos, B-52s, Parliament, Love Rollercoaster, and yes, The Grease MegaMix (I was denied from using any music from Xanadu). The night ended with some metal including the Rammstein song that I proposed to Khris during one of their concerts.

I loved the experience of creating our own music playlist for our wedding. However, there are a couple things here & there that I would have done differently. We sacrificed some of our favorite songs for ones that we thought people would dance to. Since a lot of my friends aren’t really dancers, I would have used more songs that were more meaningful to me. (Grease is fun, but I would‘ve ditched the MegaMix).
I look forward to future posts where I’ll be tackling more of the technical aspects of the DIY DJ (equipment, song normalization, iPod info) and answering your questions.

Jason, The DIY DJ.

One of the biggest DIY projects that Mr. DIY and I did for our wedding was our reception music. It is one of the things we’re most proud of and, nearly 10 years later, something our friends and family still comment (in the positive) about. It wasn’t the easiest project we did – far from it, actually – but it is one we hold dear to our hearts.

Our DIY DJ experience was back in the day (October 2000) before the first iPods even existed and before anyone really talked about doing their own wedding music. We were pretty much on our own t0 figure out the technology, play lists, timing, and all abundant details that go into creating our ceremony music. We made some mistakes but we pulled it off, learned some great lessons, and are ultimately happy we did it. Today it is not so unusual to hear about “iPod weddings”. Technology has made it a heck of a lot easier and, accordingly, there has been a marked uptick in interest from DIY Bride readers about going the DIY DJ route.

It is my great pleasure to introduce our newest contributor, Jason, who will be writing the DIY DJ column here, at DIY Bride. In addition to being my husband, Jason is also a contributor to the upcoming version 2 of the DIY DJ Guide [our first guide (released 2004) is woefully outdated and has been removed from the site]. His musical interests are vast; he listens to everything from Classical to Death Metal, ’80s Pop to Gregorian Chants, Bluegrass t0 Electronica — and beyond. (Ask him about his love for Mary Schneider, Australia’s Queen of Yodelling… )

Jason will be answering your questions about doing your own wedding music. Please feel free to submit your questions about play lists, equipment, technology, and all-things wedding music.

Hey DIY Bride:

My fi and I are going to do the iPod reception thing. We did a test run at our reception hall (our church’s hall) after a group meeting a few weekends ago and it sounded like crap. What did we do wrong?

-K&S

Hey K&S,

Having an iPod reception can work – and work well – but it needs some serious prep work and the right equipment. Before I can really answer your question, I have a few of my own for you:

• What equipment did you use? (iPod, laptop, PA system, speakers…?)
• How big (square feet) is the venue?
• How many guests will you have in that amount of space?
• What, exactly, sounded like crap? The acoustics? Your choice of songs? The sound quality of your speakers?

Until I know more here’s what you need for kick-ass sound:

1. The appropriate speakers/PA system and set-up for your venue size. An iPod and your laptop speakers aren’t going to cut it in most situations.
2. The right music.
3. Quality music files. Are your files CD quality? What bit rate were they ripped at? Is your playlist all at the same volume output?
4. A properly working iPod and cables.

Hit me back with your replies and we’ll revisit this.

Have a burning DIY question? Lay it on us, baby.