First let me say, I loved being able to have one vendor for DJ, Photo Booth, Ceremony Music and Uplighting. Our Photo Booth and attendant were great! And our ceremony musician, a solo violinist was fantastic. What left quite a bit to be desire...d was our DJ.
We had selected a DJ, who we adored very early on in our planning. Unfortunately, there was an unexpected issue and our DJ was unable to perform at our event. So at approx. 1 month out, we had to select from 2 DJs that were still available. I have absolutely no doubt that if we had our original DJ, we would have given them all 5 stars.
In the initial planning, we had a quick phone call with the first DJ where we hashed out a ton of details. When we had to select the new DJ, I asked for a similar planning call and he brushed me off, asking me to complete a Word document style, 6 page form. It was a poor format and required a ton of details that I wasn’t fully prepared to answer yet. He didn’t schedule a call until 4 days prior to our event, at which point we finally learned that he operated quite differently from our original DJ. And he didn’t match our style and would not have been our choice, but by that point we didn’t have any other options.
He didn’t volunteer any of the details that we had discussed with the original DJ and I had to ask a lot of probing questions to gather that he didn’t bring his own table or linens (when my rental order had already been finalized), that he brought an assistant (when my catering order had been finalized) and he that he wasn’t a mixing DJ, which was what we had been expecting. Given the short turn around, we didn’t have another choice. We had a set list of 20 songs that he was going to play and an 8 song medley that he was going play at 9:30 PM.
For the event, he did not play many of the 20 songs we had listed. He lost the crowd a couple times and my MOH had to go speak with him to bring the energy back. His solution was a slow dance, which she told him not to do. So he found me, to ask me what I wanted and I had to step away from talking to a guest to confirm that a slow dance was not the right call. At another point, I had to go find him because he was outside and a song I had never heard before was playing, with an empty dance floor.
In the prep sheet, I documented that after a certain point in the night he should be playing the explicit version of songs. This wasn’t discussed on the call, so I didn’t think it was an issue. However, when he finally played some of our favorite songs he played the clean version. I had to stop in the middle of dancing to ask him to restart with the explicit version, which he didn’t have. He said he only had the clean version of the songs we requested. And he just skipped others without warning.
He totally skipped the 8 song medley we had agreed upon, without any discussion with us. And we had told our guests that it would be played at 9:30, but it never happened. I don’t believe he even prepared it to play.
During our event, he did not bring an assistant but I had prepped my tips to include an additional person. By the time I had realized this, the tips had been handed out and I couldn’t retrieve the additional, unearned tip.
Again, I don’t think we would have had any issue had we been able to stick with our original DJ. But we understand completely why they were unable on our date. I really would recommend CMG for other couples, but I can’t in good conscience recommend DJ Dan Cormier (DJ DC).