Image by @intodustphotography
A few tips on how to plan the ultimate wedding experience, without fragmenting or over-entertaining your guests:
We’ve performed at over 2400 Seattle based weddings, most of them wildly successful. Our top-notch live wedding party band has been perhaps the greatest factor in hundreds of unforgettable experiences to last a lifetime. But over time a few things have become clear as planning mistakes or pitfalls, leading to disappointing outcomes. So here are a few items of concern for the ultimate wedding party plan: Venue layout, Crowd flow, Bar placement, and what I call “Over-entertainmnent”.
First and foremost – choose a wedding party reception venue that maximizes connectedness and “togetherness”. Multiple, separated rooms divide people and restrict the flow of guests, especially when the bar is in a different spot from the dining/dancing area. This is the NUMBER ONE energy killer of dance parties. Some venues have very cool bars and they are rightly proud of them!
But, if you’ve hired a wedding party band and want to see momentum and excitement throughout the evening…and then let people get bottled up in different rooms waiting for a drink or stuck in a conversation, they’ll miss out on the tunes and energy your wedding band is churning out for them. Avoid this.
A wedding band like ours is known to thrive on creating intense momentum. For that to happen, the ideal space is a room large enough to have tables for dinner, a bar in the same room, and a dance floor right in front of the band. Best to have the BAR AS CLOSE to the band/dance floor as possible so guests can see and hear the action. Getting on and off the floor easily for refills or to come out when they hear their fav song. Also important: Arrange tables around the perimeter of the dance floor, again, for easy on-off when the dancing mood calls!
Image by La Vie Photography
Another planning mistake: Over-entertaining guests with multiple activities. Each interest you add beyond cocktails, dinner and dancing, pulls people away from a shared experience and divides the flow. Examples of this: games (outdoors or in), casino tables, costume photo booths, specialty liquor bars, cigar smoking rooms, oxygen bars, s’mores around campfires, and special sweets spreads – all set up in different areas from the dance floor. Bad move. Each one of these subtracts numbers of guests from “connectedness”, sharing the fun, and the excitement of being all together as one. Which is what families really want!
Finally, provide safe places for your non-music oriented guests. (the hard of hearing, the elderly, the dance-averse, or maybe just grumpies) Seat them away from the band and dance floor in case all they want to do is talk…off in the wings to the side of the dance floor so they won’t complain. Complainers are vibe killers. There’s always a certain few who just want to talk – and good for them – even though the rest of the crowd is in nirvana with the music. So make that easy for them so they don’t kill your vibe.
Michael Benson Band wedding performances are literally talked about for decades after the events. But as a live performer, nothing is so frustrating as seeing people drift off the dance floor into separate rooms or spaces for fragmenting entertainment while we the band are crushing hit after hit in full mashup mode delivering our most celebrated product: an epic dance floor frenzy. HOWEVER, there is ONE entertainment add-on I’ve seen work well with our flow. It’s a photo booth set up IN THE MAIN ROOM with the music. Just like with a “close-by bar”, where you can easily step on and off but still see and hear the party around you, the crowd will hang together with a photo booth in the same room.
Image by @loganwestom Photography
Wrapping up: In your Holiday/New Year wedding planning, help your guests to be able to see and experience each other, the music, the food, the drinks and the dancing as ONE, and you’ll provide them with one of the most, if not THE most memorable night of their lives. The Michael Benson Band wedding experience guarantees this will happen. And remember, on exquisite balmy Northwest summer nights, places like Kiana Lodge and The Golf Club At Newcastle will always draw folks outside for sunset views, dreamy vistas and sips by starlight. There’s nothing to be done about those distractions. We wait all year for it in Seattle!
