We used Daniel and Yohan, Shine Entertainment as our Wedding DJ, MC, and Photo Booth for our February 2021 wedding. The weeks leading up to our wedding were frantic from a planning standpoint, but we felt confident when we submitted our song playlist and instructions that the requests we had made would be taken care of. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case.
At the beginning of our reception, we were told by our venue to keep the volume down by the venue. I feel like with as much time as there was before our ceremony (which was at the same location) a discussion could have occurred with our venue lead, who was present for the entire day about what the appropriate sound level was. I don't recall there ever being a sound check with the Lead before the event. It was unfortunate that the adjustment had to be made in the middle during the bridal party introductions and literally right before our grand entrance.
The introduction instructions we provided for announcing bridal party didn't get announced as we had noted on the worksheet, and the music cues didn't start at the correct times even though we had provided the timing of the songs beforehand. We spent a lot of time coming up with clever ways to introduce our bridal party, but they were just introduced by their first and last names. We weren't able to hear our music as we walked in for our grand entrance and because the song was started at the wrong time, and it sort of made for a quiet, awkward entrance.
From there, it seems the music and the event went totally off-script. We spent hours picking out "Must Play Songs" for the reception. The bride and I are big music fans, and some of our best memories together are centered around the music we both enjoy and the concerts we've attended. On the worksheet provided, we listed these songs under the section that said "These songs are special to the Bride and Groom and/or their family and friends, and MUST BE played at some point of the reception." We did not hear a single song from the songs we picked that had special meaning to us and instead everything sort of defaulted to a generic wedding playlist consisting of songs that were not really what we wanted. I think based on our selections on the work sheet, it was apparent that we look at wedding music a bit differently than most people (our recessional song was Post Malone), if a decision was made to default to a generic wedding playlist, we would have loved to have been informed about it and the reason why so that we could make a decision about it on the fly.
We had also discussed playing the Shoe Game during the reception, at Shine's instructions, we purchased a number of gift cards and prizes that we had hoped to give out to our guests. Because we were streaming the wedding, we wanted to give something for the people watching the stream to enjoy instead of just watching people eat without anything else going on, we thought that was a great idea to fill the time. The game was cancelled for time and people watching our stream were asking us if we intended to just have a video of people eating. We were disappointed that the gift cards and prizes didn't get used.
I think we're willing to overlook the above as just being circumstances that were out of anyone's control, but there was a major cue that didn't get played during the ceremony during the Scripture reading, which ended up making for a bit of an awkward moment all around. Also the music that was played before the ceremony had lyrics when we specifically requested songs be played from an album containing only instrumental songs. The song for the father-daughter dance was played prior to the ceremony, so it had less of an impact when it was played again during the reception. If there was any inability to obtain the songs, we would have been more than happy to provide a spotify link to a playlist with all the songs we requested, but we were never requested for it.
The bride's father was also introduced as "Mr." but because he is a Dentist, he should have been introduced as "Doctor."
I think our expectation was that when we provided the song worksheet that any issues with our song selections would have brought to our attention so that we could propose an alternative or opportunity to fix it.
I will still say that almost everyone has told us that they enjoyed the event and had a good time, it's just these few things that could have gone better in our eyes. We appreciate the work leading up the event but we would ask that you consider that for a lot of people, there is no opportunity to re-do the wedding, so when big changes like this happen or things go off script, it naturally causes some level of disappointment. We did bring these issues to the attention of Allen, and we did get an apology which is why this is not a two-star review. I wish, though, that it was enough to make up for the issues we had at what was supposed to be our most important day. read more