I want to start off by saying our DJ Phil was an incredibly nice person, and was kind enough to help us with cleaning up the tables and chairs afterwards, which is far beyond what ...was expected. He also had a great set up, good sound system, and lights, which were very nice.
If our wedding had been a classic American event, I think he might have done an okay job, but if you are considering hiring them for a multi-cultural event, I would look elsewhere, as they struggled with the song choices, timing, and reading the crowd.
Prior to the event, we communicated frequently with Scott, checking in to see if they needed any additional information as our wedding was a classic Jewish and Israeli event. We carefully filled out all forms, even leaving some additional notes, and just to be sure, I also emailed Scott a list of additional information prior to the event that might aid them. We offered to meet with them via zoom prior to the event, and we were reassured that they do tons of weddings and that this would not be needed – which we trusted, as they are the professionals. I also provided a list of 2 people for them to ask any questions the day of, and pointed these people out to the DJ when he arrived on the wedding day. I made a playlist with all of the Israeli songs, and since the titles were not written in English, I titled the playlist, "Pls Play First 13" and listed the songs in exactly the order so that he wouldn't need to worry about playing duplicates.
From the get-go, he kept asking me A LOT of questions about how to pronounce our names, (which is fair – but the people we put on the list for him to ask would have known that too), when we want the glow sticks to be handed out – this could have been a judgement call, as he is the professional, when we want the dinner playlist to go on – which we had already put on the timeline in their portal. He then played a few of the Israeli songs multiple times, despite the fact that they were listed in order to prevent this, and then his English song choices were not the vibe at all. He put on Chappell Roan and Usher, which the older guests clearly were not familiar with, as well as the college football anthem which was an interesting choice. We had a really hype crowd who was willing to dance to anything so perhaps he was having trouble reading the vibes due to this, but people were definitely confused by the English song choices.
After asking us multiple times how to pronounce our names, he completely butchered it on the introduction, which I expected for my own name and did not care as it is hard to pronounce even with phonetics, but my partner’s name is Ofek, pronounced exactly how it was spelled, and I guess he got nervous or over-thought it, but he ended up announcing him as “Off-ka”.
During the ceremony, my partner’s aisle song was really quiet and no one could hear it and then he suddenly turned it up about 10 seconds in, and then he only played his song for 40 seconds total before abruptly cutting to my aisle/processional song. The timing was very off, and then throughout the reception, there were no remixes and no song merges, which is not a big deal but definitely not what we expected when we hired a DJ, nor is it anything I’ve experienced at other weddings I’ve attended.
I understand having less flexibility with the Hebrew songs, but he did nothing with the English music choices which he had left entirely up to him, assuming that he could do a better job than us.