Author: Kenny Casanova

ALBANY NY WEDDING DJ WORKSHEET IS A MUST – TOP 4 REASONS

Whenever planning an big event with many people in charge of different aspects, you really should map everything out on paper so expectations are clearly understood. When hiring a wedding professional DJ, photographer, or caterer, always ask for their own custom worksheet. This will help, overall, in the communication department, and lead to the planning of your successful event.

Though there are many disc jockey and photographer planning forms out there on the internet, most wedding professionals provide their own custom document to help you prepared for wedding day activities and at the same time, get organized for themselves. Using a wedding professional’s own worksheet will help you better understand how they see a traditional wedding (and many non-traditional ones) will unfold. It also helps you communicate to the DJ what they need to know in a simple recognizable format, collecting everything onto a few familiar pages for the vendor.

Albany, NY Wedding DJ Kenny Casanova’s worksheet helps you get prepared for your wedding day activities. Our wedding DJ worksheet, as well as a photographer worksheet, will help you make sure that you do not forget anything on the hectic, special day when you get married. There are FOUR aspects that you will want to keep in mind when filling out your worksheet:

1) ATMOSPHERE – Some people want classy and elegant. Others are hoping to have an all out party celebration. Some people want somewhere in between. Checking off on the sheet and key songs/activities, plus the overall tone you are looking for will help us to better understand what you are looking for.

2) MUSIC PLAYLIST – Anything goes as far as options are concerned, so getting some ideas out onto paper will help customize the feel you are looking for. It is your special day so you decide how you want to plan the music for it. You can either create an involved hands-on playlist, or leave it up to us. While you do not need to write every song down that you would like to hear, writing down 10-20 might give the DJ a better idea of what you are looking for.

3) DO NOT PLAY LIST – Make sure to write down the songs you absolutely do not wish to hear, so that there are no surprises. We hate playing The Chicken Dance, for example, and would not play it, unless you asked. However, some DJ’s love it! If you didn’t put this song down on your plan sheet as a “DO NOT PLAY,” you may end up thinking your DJ clucked everything up, watching grandma flapping her wings. You can control this! 🙂

4) ACTIVITY OPTIONS – There are so many activities that you can engage in. Our worksheet has many of them listed and you can simply cross off or circle the ones you like.

If you would like to check out our latest worksheet draft, email me a request at ken@theDJservice.com and we will send it right over!

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With so many old first dance songs out there, it is easy to grab up one people have heard before and seen used at a wedding somewhere. Therefore, if you really want to stand out, you really should consider it important to choose a first dance song that is both important and different.

I’m don’t know you’ve heard this one yet, but there’s a super new track option out there that you may want to look at. As a Wedding song option, and an alternative ceremony song, some people are starting to look at this new tune that is climbing the charts.

Runner Runner‘s new song, “I Can’t Hardly Wait,” is about a groom who is anxious to finally get married to his bride. The lead singer, Ryan Ogren, has explained in interviews and on stage before performing this song live that he wrote this song for his own fiancé, and their wedding.

Runner Runner, a punk band from California, is finding great success from this ballad, an unusually different sound for their norm. The band’s name originated from their love of poker. The card term ‘runner runner’ means to beat the odds and pull a winning hand in the very last possible moment.

My wife and I took a gamble and chose to wait and see what was out there before we selected this unfamiliar song for our first dance. We picked it only a week after it hit the charts. From the reaction, it looks like by holding out until the last possible minute, we too picked a winner.

Here are the lyrics for “I Can’t Wait” Lyrics, by Ryan Ogren

The way you curse while we are in traffic, A million flavors of your chapstick,
The way you keep my heart captive… The Journey concert in A.Z., Do you remember we sang faithfully?
I’ve still got that old hotel room key… This is the way I feel.

Cause I can’t wait for you, to be my wife, To live this life, together.
And I won’t let you go, I need you to know, that you are my heart, forever.

And on, and on, and on…

The way you like to sing my songs,
you always know when something’s wrong.
The way you say you miss me when I’m gone.
The things you do that show you care,
you are always down for truth or dare.
Freeze this moment, let me stop and stare.

Nothing before was real. This is the way I feel

And I can’t wait for you, to be my wife, to live this life together.
And I won’t let you go, I need you to know, that you are my heart, forever.

And on and on and on… And we’ll go on and on and on

For better or for worse, no matter how it hurts
You’ve got me to hold you hand.
I promise you the world, in your wedding dress
We’ll dance till no one’s left.

Don’t wanna blink my eyes. I Don’t wanna miss a thing

I can’t wait for you, to be my wife.
To live this life together.
And I won’t let you go, and I need you to know
That you are my heart, forever.

And on and on and on… And we’ll go on and on and on.

LOOKING FOR AN ALTERNATIVE WEDDING HALL IN YOUR AREA?

If you are looking for a nice event hall for a small-to-medium sized wedding that allows outside catering, you probably know that your choices are limited. Many places today, have in-house catering, as this is a big money maker for the venues.

If you live in the Troy area, or nearby, and are working with a budget as many of us are, Petersburg might work for you.

LOCATION – “Petersburg, NY? Where the heck is that?” It’s funny. I’ve been a disc jockey for a number of years now and never heard of Petersburg Memorial Hall before, either.

I live in Wynantskill, off of Pawling. This is between Troy and Albany and I asked the same question. After I initially talked with the bride and groom about providing music for their special day, I had to run a Google map search to familiarize myself with a town that was less than 25 minutes away from me. (In case you are like me and are wondering, Petersburg is the next town down Grafton State Park.)

The reception I DJ’ed for was at a cute little place called “Petersburg Memorial Hall,” located conveniently on 71 Main Street. The venue is located right before the Petersburg Town Library. The hall provides plenty of parking and does work out to be a great little place for a great little wedding to take place.

AFFORDABILITY – Someone looking for a smaller wedding with the potential to meet affordability restraints can benefit considering this venue. While many halls in and around the Capital District that house wedding receptions also provide their own dinning packages, at the Memorial Hall, this is not the case. Here, you can book any catering service that you like and also make provisions to set up your own bar. This means an incredible amount of savings, as these two expenses are quite often the largest for any wedding.

SPECIFICS – The Memorial Hall can seat  80-100 people fairly comfortably. It has two side access doors to allow easy access for vendors and also any decorating purposes you may have. It has plenty of chairs and tables and a decent linen selection resource, along with seat covers.  The hall also has very high ceilings and also a great little stage with draw curtains that could easily be used for your DJ or even a small live band.

There are a few little facility points to note. There is a decent kitchen, but it is not very large. It is probably, however, suitable for your outside caterer to make due with for what the hall can comfortably occupy. Also, it is import to note that there is only one shared bathroom. It is, however, handicap accessible, I believe.

On a technology note, the town of Petersburg is out in a rural area. It does not provide any Sprint cell phone coverage, but it does have Verizon cell phone coverage. Internet access is also provided to the hall through a wi-fi hub in the town library, nearby.

I would give it a three out of four stars for a good affordable wedding venue/hall option.

In planning your wedding, you’ll find yourself describing what you want to a lot of people (the wedding planner, the florist, the venue, your friends, your Mom, etc.) Sometimes people just can’t see it. They might go in a direction you weren’t expecting because they thought that’s what you wanted.

One neat tool to be able to explore the possibilities, and then make a visual representation of what you want the overall wedding theme to be is polyvore.

This online tool is is a great resource to help you get your ideas out to wedding vendors and people helping you plan your special day.

Polyvore lets you make a collage of products and images. It is most often used for fashion collages, but wedding collages are popular as well. On polyvore, you can set up the ideal feel of the wedding. You don’t have to put in the exact items you have or will purchase.   Set your budget aside, and create the dream wedding on polyvore.  Then look to reproduce that look and feel for your own event.

Ahoy party people! “The Prince of Passion” DJ Kenny Casanova is here, with my very OWN wedding report on the real royal bash of the year… “The DJ Kenny Casanova & Maria DJ Pirate Wedding Extravaganza.”

A PIRATE WEDDING CAN BE AWESOME

In case you are keeping score, I practiced what I preach. I always say, “If you have the guts, always go with a theme for your wedding. Theme weddings make for a better time! ” Many traditional weddings are real fun, but all have the same flavor to them in the end; a fancy bridal dress and a whole lot of monkey suits.

Being wedding DJs that attend a few weddings a week, Maria DJ and I had to do something different for our own reception so it would stay in our minds forever, and not blend into the many memories of our clients’ passed special days. The question at hand was, “What do two wedding DJs do when they get married to each other?” We, therefore, decided to answer with having a theme wedding ourselves, so OUR special day would be memorable.

My wife randomly chose PIRATE, from a blog I wrote a few years back and the outcome was awesome!

A lot of local people from Albany, Troy and Schenectady and land lubbers from around the world browse my blog here at TheDJservice.com/blog for great planning ideas and wedding tips based on all the succesful weddings I have have been a part of. “Sharing is Caring,” is my motto, but this time it is ironic that I am sharing some fun things from MY actual wedding.

THEME WEDDING IDEAS

OUR CELEBRITY EMCEE – Always jazz things up with a surprize! We wanted the most pirate-like celebrity we could think of to be the replacement voice of my own.

Therefore, with a little deliberation, we picked Glens Falls native and former WWE United States Heavyweight Wrestling Champion, “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan! He became the special “mystery groomsman” and then the special guest emcee. Hoooo! We agreed in the end that he was great!!!

Everyone loved him, he fit the bill perfectly, and was better than any other extra we could have thrown in there. People from another wedding even came in to meet and greet the WWE Hall-of-Famer.

CENTERPIECES – Our beautiful centerpieces were pirate treasure chests, but not like you would think. We loaded ours with mardi gras beads, gold coins and large crystal gems. In the centerpiece department, we did not skimp out on the contents at all. We did not use any cartoony-like, plastic happy meal-like prize inserts, which would have been easy to do. Our philosophy on making this celebration a success was to decorate for “a fancy pirate wedding.”

We tried our best to make everything look as legitimate and as real as possible, so the reception didn’t look like a kid’s pirate birthday. Using Broadway play quality costumes and high cost quality decorations made everything look and feel all-the-more classy …or at least as classy as a pirate shindig can be!

FLAGS – Cloth is a definite must. None of this plastic or paper table cloth nonsense. We adorn the hall in full pirate regalia. We posted 17 different “jolly roger” pirate flags up in each window-bay of Hebert’s of Birch Hill’s large reception hall. (With each flag hand-chosen to be slightly different, the attention to fine detail made things more interesting to the eye. It was interesting to see the little variations of each traditional pirate flag than to quickly browse over the same print over and over again of the same skull & crossbones. There are actually many different pirate flags out there, and if you look online, you can find full real 3 x 5 foot flags for $5-$10 a piece, that may not be all that weather-sound, but perfect for the short-term; an indoor reception like ours.

FOOD – In the true spirit of a pirate, we had a feast. We had buffet style thick carved prime rib, lobster penne, and chicken marsella.

CAKES – Arrrghhh! Yes matey! We had two cakes; one custom pirate wedding tower by yummy local wedding cake favorite Coccadotts, and a surprizingly scrumptious groom’s cake by my own sister that was peanut butter frosting, peanut butter cake and topped with crushed reeses everything! (My favorite!)

I actually fed a piece of this to my best man, the same as you feed one to your bride, in full pie-face tradition.

PHOTO MAGNET PHOTO-SHOOT – Ever see this yet? For party-favors, a photography service comes in with a green screen magnet shoot so that people could bring home high quality magnets to put on their refridgerators of the night. The magnets are a great way to remember the fun had with all their friends. These magnetic keepsakes are great for a pirate wedding theme because our photographer (Holmes Photo Imaging) changed the background on demand to match the guests costumes and our theme. And, the super sharp full color quality was also unbelievable! This extra fun option was again provided by Holmes Photography in the Albany, NY area.

STAY TUNED – There will be much more to come soon, on how to actually plan a great pirate wedding, once we go through the pictures. In case you might want to walk the plank yourself at your own wedding, here are some of our guests pictures to hold you over, as the professional shots by Manny at Affordable Photography are not quite done yet.

In the meantime, more of our guests photo shots at www.kenmariapiratewedding.shutterfly.com

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As you may or may not have noticed, much of what I blog about here at www.TheDJservice.com/blog ends up being a lot of cool ideas for those who are in the midst of planning weddings. The reason wedding advice ends up, quite often, being a large portion of the content is that I end up DJ’ing one or two weddings a week, and the events become easy content for my DJ blog. It is a no brainer. If you have been following my blog, you know that I like thematic weddings the best.

Anyhow, I just wanted to let the readers know that I practice what I preach; Theme Weddings are one of the best ways to really make your wedding memorable. Therefore, my wedding will be loaded with PIRATES.

About a year ago, I wrote a blog about how I would plan a “pirate wedding.” The way I write my wedding theme blogs are I either go to a wedding that has an awesome theme and absolutely have to share what I saw, or I do a bunch of research up on an idea and write.

In the case of my researched pirate blog, I had gone to my nephew’s birthday party which had a pirate theme, due to his love of The Pirates of The Carribean movie franchise. Then I got to thinking how it would be interesting to take some of the fun birthday party ideas and transform them into a bigger wedding that afforded a bigger budget to the theme.

Before posting the finished draft of the blog, my fiancee read it and told me I shouldn’t put it out there for everyone to read.

“Why?” I asked. “Is it not realistic? Do you think nobody will want to do it?”

“No. No. Not at all,” she replied. “I don’t want anyone stealing it, because I want it for our wedding.”

A woman into the idea of a pirate theme?! This is why I am marrying her!

Anyhow, we have had an absolute blast planning for our own special day.

Here are some shots of the best man, or first mate, Marty Carbone and myself, sporting the costumes that didn’t quite make the cut:

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