Starting The Year Off Right

When it comes to the Cleveland Wedding DJ Business there’s a seasonality-based flow to what our years are like for us. Because of the weather in Northeast Ohio and venue availability, those of us who are in-demand find ourselves very busy with the final planning and celebrations that peak between May and October. November and December cool down with the frequency our teams are performing while our sales team starts to really pick-up with initial meetings. By the end of December, our team is ready to take some time off after another very successful year.

When going through our non-critical e-mails at the top of the year, we saw a wedding entertainment review that has since been passed around the office quite a bit. It reflects the experience a groom had at his December wedding as well as a year’s worth of planning with us. His point person and entertainer was Jeremy, Jay R, Rich.

Jay R is the founder of Selective Sound Entertainment. He is just one of the many entertainers that we have and is also likely the humblest one. This review is very glowing of Jay R. because he was the right entertainer for this family. It wasn’t because he’s always the very best for everyone. While this review made him very happy, he didn’t share it with the rest of the team to toot his own horn. Rather, Jay R knows that inspiration at this time of the year is vital to the team. Seeing the results of our shared work is what fuels us to deliver consistent world-class wedding entertainment.

We’re going to share some of Kevin K.’s words with you here as well as a little commentary. Our hope is that it will give you helpful context while planning your own wedding. We think it would be amazing that when your wedding day is done you’ll have similar joyful sentiments that Kevin shared with our team about his experiences.

Here’s the breakdown of this brilliant wedding entertainment review:

Jay R is a 10 because I literally can’t think of anything I’d change about our experience.

We know that if you go into your wedding day with the right mindset, you’re almost certain to have a good time. That means you have trust and confidence that everyone helping to make your vision real will do just that. The secret to having clients often say “I can’t think of anything I’d change” is a simple one…we listen! The reason they think everything happened just the way they wanted is because they helped define what success looks like and we followed that playbook. It’s the result of never performing in a cookie cutter style.

Some things we especially liked: – Jay R was extremely responsive via all forms of communication.

This is a point of pride for us and something that we think speaks to our actual work on the day of your wedding. We listen, respond, and are accommodating in all points concerning your wedding. It’s not just a performance attitude, it’s our way. We think our clients deserve that level of respect because those working on your event are in the world of hospitality. There is a right way and a wrong way with very little gray area when it comes to service.

Jay R was perfectly accommodating of our requests, but he was also real with us (in a way that was polite yet clear) about the things that, in his experience, typically ‘work’ for weddings — something we newbies really appreciated. 

This makes us so happy! It’s such a fine line with what we do. We’re service professionals. This means our place is to create the vision you desire. However, we must also be up front with you about the realities of your vision. Service is on one side and professional is on the other. If you don’t understand where we come from with that, it might seem like we’re being negative or not supportive of your ideas. Kevin got it right here, though. When you pay true professionals, you get their council, recommendations, and honesty. With decades of experience, we hope everyone understands that you can benefit greatly from hearing our perspective.

 

It was such a relief to have Jay R for our ceremony, which went perfectly; his mic-jobs (two lapel mics, one on a stand) were perfect and discreet – True to his word, Jay R vamped one of our processional songs with a smooth cross-fade that probably zero people noticed.

Kevin admits to being a newbie but he’s pretty savvy! We know our clients are smart, pay attention, and know what they want. It doesn’t matter that they’ve never hired a DJ before. It’s likely they’ve been paying attention to what matter the most to them with entertainment and sound for years. He also brings up another important aspect of what we offer – ceremony sound. As much as you can’t wait to have your meal and get on the dance floor, the vows are what we’re really here for. To have sound issues that exclude anyone from that special moment would be beyond disappointing. We take microphone placement, testing, and connections very seriously.

Jay R didn’t just care about getting his own job done and getting outta there; he seemed to have all vendors’ itineraries in his head at once — he was essentially our point man for the entire evening, for all things, not just music (and in that way, he partly helped us to plan the wedding!).

This is exactly how we define what an Emcee does. A DJ plays music. Making in the moment decisions between what’s been asked and what’s resonating with a crowd makes a DJ great. They also make sure everyone is having a good time. An Emcee can have these skills as well in addition to a host of other responsibilities. Exactly what Kevin stated in his review is what our Emcees focus on. We make sure there is cohesion with all wedding professionals so that you don’t have to micro-manage your big day.

The extent to which Jay R interacted with the crowd was just right — I wouldn’t have asked for any more or any less.

Jay R interacted with Kevin’s crowd uniquely. Meaning, he acts differently at every wedding he performs at. Nothing is cookie cutter when it comes to being a great DJ and Emcee. There isn’t a right and a wrong way to engage a wedding dance floor because it’s more art than science. A great Cleveland Wedding DJ uses the planning process to get to know the couple’s preferences. Then, he weighs that against the emotional responses he sees from the crowd as they react to music and engagement. It’s a balance between listening skills and experience which turns into muscle memory. It’s all the things an iPod can’t do!

One of our favorite things: we made a lot of Play-If-Possible song requests that probably weren’t very wedding-friendly (e.g. the full studio version of Richard Harris’s ‘MacArthur Park’), but Jay R managed to play a truly amazing percentage of them, and all at the perfect moments

Deep cuts, niche artists, and non-dance friendly music are frustrating to a lot of wedding entertainers…but not us! We make sure we’re all on the same page. Meaning that our main goal is making sure the most amount of people at your wedding are enjoying the music. Now that doesn’t mean there isn’t ways to introduce them to some of your favorites. That’s why we have lists of “Must Play”, “Never Play” (where the Chicken Dance often ends up), and “Play If Possible”.

Thorough communication and the sharing of mutual expectations, we ensure there’s a win/win for every wedding reception.

Jay R was immediately responsive to the movements (as it were) of the dance floor; he’d start a song and, if it wasn’t catching, smoothly beat-match it with another song and move on.

Honestly, Kevin is one of those clients who really pays attention to these details and we love it. He’s describing something most guests wouldn’t articulate this accurately but they’d instantly know when it wasn’t right. Our Cleveland Wedding DJ’s have honed skills over years of experiences with diverse crowds. What he’s describing is exactly what went down but most guests just knew they had a good time.

To top it all off, Jay R has a cheerful personality and a great sense of humor!

The secret to this one is loving what you do. There’s a level of stress involved with performing that never goes away regardless of how many engagements you’ve had as an entertainer. You only get one shot to make a wedding go well and there’s many variables. With all that, we know we have the privilege of doing what we love. Getting to do the thing you enjoy and are good at makes the whole process more fun for everyone. We’re definitely glad that adds something extra for our clients.

A few of our (older…) wedding guests mentioned that the music volume was just a touch loud, but I thought it was perfect, considering the event (and I have sensitive hearing!).

Ha! Well, we’ll take the constructive feedback! That’s what a wedding entertainment review is for, right? There’s a lot of subjectivity when it comes to entertainment. We do our best to please the most amount of people as we can but people are all built differently. Consider this feedback when you are working on your seating charts.

 

All in all, this is one of our favorite reviews because it articulates so many of the areas we believe are vitally important for a successful wedding reception. Contact us today if you’d like to have an experience like this. Nothing would make us happier than to read your positive wedding entertainment review of our work!

Click here if you would like to read Kevin Kane’s wedding entertainment review in its entirety.