Post by Joe McParland on Feb 8, 2007 14:31:45 GMT -5
Wedding Music
Because of the iPod, today’s wedding receptions can have an entirely different look and feel from the ones held just a few years ago. According to Sharon Naylor (wedding planner), “many couples are shelling out thousands to pay for professional musicians and singers, or experienced DJs who can play the right music for every stage of the wedding. If you look at Costofwedding.com, and plug in your zip code, you’ll see what couples are spending on entertainment.” With one iPod, she said, “take that figure and make it a great big $0.”
Freed from the shackles of carrying around turntables and records, or CD players with dozens of different discs, modern couples can obviously use their iPods to ditch DJs - and even bands. “When you hire a DJ or band, that’s a lot of people that you have to feed,” said Naylor. “With an iPod, that’s a few hundred more dollars saved.” Instead, “you pre-program the soundtrack of your wedding. Together, you choose the original artists’ renditions of the songs from your love story, or the perfect songs for the dinner hour, the perfect songs for the dance hour.”
If you don’t have the music you want already, a good starting place is Apple’s iTunes Essentials section, which currently has three different 70-plus wedding song collections for under $75 a piece, with each collection broken into three $25 purchases. There’s the 80’s-infused modern collection, the soulful R&B collection, and a more traditional classical collection.
Of course, there are other things to consider when you’re your own DJ. “I think iPods are great for music. I use them during my gigs,” explained Jeremy Buchanan, an Orange County, California DJ. “But I don’t rely on them too much cause the response time is still horrible on them,” he said, referring to the time it takes for the user to switch between songs, and the lack of soft fading from one song into another. Unless you’ve fully pre-programmed your playlist, and don’t want to deviate from it, expect to need an iPod operator, and to hear some rough song-to-song transitions. As Buchanan puts it, despite the iPod’s functional utility as a music playback device, “I think people still are looking for that one on one communication.”
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