Ceremony DJs 2645 24th Street • San Francisco • CA 94110

What 3 words best describe your work?

Fully custom playlist, beat-matched and in key.

Tell us about your company name.

It's a song by New Order. And all our design elements are subtle New Order references. We wanted something that would be a wink to the music nerds, but still totally acceptable to your usual wedding crowd. It's also the last song we played at our friend's wedding years ago and the processional from our first client before the company had a name.

Why should someone hire you?

There are a lot of things that are sub par about the normal wedding DJ experience and we've been doing our best to fix them. A lot of it boils down to time and money. We sort of prioritize quality and pride in our work. I'm not sure it's the best business model to do loads of custom research and give people gigantic mountains of free speakers, but at the end of the day, the clients are happy and we get to feel good about what we do.

What are the common misconceptions about your services?

Everything we do is basically opposite what's normal in the wedding industry. We do fully customized playlists and unlimited requests. We live DJ the entire event from 45 minutes before the ceremony until your last vendor goes home. We party mix genres most people have never heard in a DJ set, let alone at a wedding. We do a full club sound system with multiple speakers and subs instead of your usual rinky dink set up. We use real turntables and vinyl wherever possible, instead of CDJs or MP3 controllers. We're all also fairly accomplished DJs with loads of awards, press, and prestige guest spots with big-time artists.

We're really giving away the farm here to prove that wedding DJs can be good—and up to the quality level of all your other vendors.

What drew you to this field/how did you get started?

We have a lot of friends in the wedding industry and we were sort of shocked at the mismatch between the prices and the quality level. It took me 15 years as a club DJ to make $1000 a night and wedding DJs with almost no experience do double that.

Since we started the company, we've learned a lot of the reasons why it's often less good boils down to supply and demand. There are just more people that are getting married than there are experienced, qualified DJs. It's almost an accident of history that I'm a DJ. I'm supposed to be an international trade expert and nonprofit marketing consultant.

Between you, me and the wall though, the whole wedding thing really suits my personality. I really enjoy getting to know people and the creative challenge of trying to stitch together so many different people's tastes and show that anything can be dance music if you take the care to arrange it musically.

I'm also blessed that my partner and now fiancé endorsed me leaving my day job to pursue music full time, and now we're saving up for our own wedding, so thank you for your business!

What are some sources of inspiration or influences on your work?

I first learned to DJ in the early 2000s when the whole mash up thing was at the center of the game, but after a few years playing club nights with our friends trying to prove who could get away with the craziest song, I realized it was even more exciting creatively to show how you could do even more with music by just putting it in its appropriate context.

We made our name doing club nights where we would learn the charts from a certain year and then DJ the whole night as though it was that year. After a dozen years doing club nights of every conceivable sub-genre, we realized we could apply the same process to private events and make someone's wedding really great. Your wedding is now my PhD thesis in the history of country music. Only we beat match it, scratch it, party mix it and tweak it into a club set, regardless of whether it's folk music or soul, or hip hop.

Tell us about a favorite, unusual or very interesting moment at a wedding:

We've done so many different ideas, I would hate to pigeon hole us as only being able to do one thing, but some of the cool ideas we've gotten to do include one where the family had a history sailing together and we made it sound like Ibiza at the birth of rave in 1989. We had one recently where the groom's family liked country and the bride's family liked cumbia, and I learned the history of both from scratch. We get a lot of alternative type clients that like punk stuff, and we've done a few different versions of punk, power pop, 80's club, and goth. We also get a lot of 60's ones that are more standard wedding fare, folk, rock and soul, but also our share of modern hip ones where we do the latest indie tracks and mix them with their classic influences.

What makes a wedding memorable for you?

Everyone says that a good wedding nowadays expresses the personal style and relationship of the couple, but I would argue it goes beyond that to include the ambience of the space and the tastes of the family. I feel like a great wedding puts the songs people love into the context of the songs their family loves, so that everyone can bond over the music and celebrate their connectedness as a family. I don't know about you, but I got a lot of my music taste from my parents. I'm looking forward to seeing how my parents react when we turn our wedding into a three-day-long music festival with all our friends DJing. I feel like they are going to like it a lot more than they realize.

What have weddings taught you?

The thing I learned most recently is that a good wedding is a balance between planning and spontaneity. It's an elaborate affair and no small task to keep everything on schedule while still hitting all the notes and the changes, but if you stick too close to the plan, you risk wringing some of the magical moments out of it. Some of the best moments are when people go a little off script and start enjoying themselves, so I try and give those moments a little space to breathe when they happen at this point. In DJing, the number one thing you can do wrong is to play a prepared set. The whole point of DJing is to select songs in the moment and react. When we used to do our club night, we would always say "Prepare, prepare, prepare. Then freestyle!"

What is the best advice you give a couple when planning their wedding?

Get everything in one place on your timeline including all the little details about songs, vocal cues, names, relations, and pronunciations, the names and contact info of all your vendors and the contact information for everyone in the bridal party. Then when things go a little off plan, everyone is prepared to adjust.

If you could have any superpower on the job, what would it be?

I feel like I have a superpower that I learned from the job and it involves time dilation. When your job is basically to make decisions in 3 minute and 30 second increments, you really realize how much you can do in that amount of time if you just stay calm, think, and trust your instincts a little bit. It's really helpful as far as making good decisions in a pinch. I constantly find myself saying "It's cool, I still have 30 seconds to solve this problem and it's going to be ok!"