Creating an ipod wedding playlist

Making our iPod Playlist

I always thought that I would have a live band at my wedding. I've never been to a wedding with a real band, but who doesn't love a great cover band. The more I got to thinking about it, I didn't want people focusing on the band, I wanted them enjoying each other's company.

This is where the wedding mix research began.

We invited all of our friends and cousins over with their CD's so we could burn them. Great way to get to spend time with family and friends and get cheap music. We ended up with 16 hours of music.

I looked all over the web for a "formula". I found other people's playlists, but no formula for slow to fast.

I ended up doing a ton of research and found the most help on some DJ networking sites:

http://www.ourdjtalk.com/

http://www.djforums.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?s=366a3ace04958372095994...

You can do a lot of reading there, or you can trust me.

Here's the formula:

Start with older songs that old people will want to dance to and get to the more popular current music later.

1 slow song, 3 or 4 fast songs, 2 slow songs (repeat a couple times)

As the night goes on, the slow songs get fewer and fewer (most of the night should be 6-8 fast songs to 1 slow song).

Keep genre's of music together (disco around the same time of night, country, hip hop and pop music toward the evening).

We ended up fast fowarding through some of the slow songs later into the night.

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Our site had a mixing board and speakers so all we had to do was bring the ipod and put someone in charge of it.

My brother started the cocktail mix too early and started the dancing mix during cocktail hour, but it was easy enough to give him a signal to have him change it back.

Greatest dance party ever.

Surprising hits:

The Grease MegaMix
No Scrubs
Michael Jackson (though it wasn't a surprise, it was a huge hit)

We didn't plan a first dance or father daughter dance, but they happened organically early on in the night just because we wanted to dance with each other. It was pretty perfect.

I'll post the actual playlist tomorrow.