Music for various stages of the wedding

Wedding songs will play an important role during your wedding reception. You will need to choose music for various stages of the afternoon including the cocktail hour, background music during the wedding breakfast, cutting of the cake and of course your first dance and evening party.

As your guests arrive at the reception venue it is always nice to welcome everyone with a glass of champagne and show them through to a bar or lounge where they can mingle and chat amongst themselves whilst you have more of your wedding photographs taken. During this time, commonly known as the cocktail hour, it is a good idea to have some form of background music playing to help create an atmosphere. Avoid anything too loud or raucous and instead think about a compilation CD of classical or instrumental music or even hiring a harpist, pianist or string quartet to play.

When you and your guests move through to the wedding breakfast having some quiet background music playing will also help with the joyful atmosphere and avoid any deafening silences (which hopefully won’t occur). Again, as with the cocktail hour you can play a CD of background music or ask the musicians to join you and play on through the wedding breakfast.

If your wedding is intimate or your reception fairly small then it may be better to simply use a CD player or MP3 for your music rather than trying to squeeze everyone, musicians included, into a small room! Of course, playing music during the reception will eat into your budget, particularly if you hire in live musicians but CD’s or MP3 could cost you nothing to put together if you raid family and friends music collections for some choice tracks! Whatever your choice, make sure it isn’t too loud as your guests will want to be able to chat and converse with each over the meal.

Your choice of wedding songs for the first dance and dances with your parents are a personal choice and one you should make yourselves. Avoid anything too somber and be mindful of any risqué lyrics, other than that the choice is yours and many couples will have a song which holds particular meaning to them.

The first dance is traditionally the signal to the other guests that the evening party has started so it is at this point you can crank up the volume and tempo! Your choice of wedding songs for the evening party need to be lively enough to get everyone up and dancing so pick tracks with a disco and pop style and which are well known.

Many couples will hire a DJ for their evening entertainment, but it is important that you don’t leave the playlist down to them to decide. Work with them to put together a lively track list which includes well known songs from across the decades and tracks which you personally like. A live band who can play a range of cover songs from across the decades is another option, whilst for the smaller wedding an MP3 player hooked up to good sound system is sufficient – in this case you will need to assign someone to keep the music going!