Chill EDM and Top 40 Dance Wedding, The Secret Gardens, Bodega Bay, CA. Photo: Lotus Productions
“My husband and I hired Jamie as our DJ for our wedding this past September and he did such a fantastic job! He really wanted to get to know what types of music we and our guests loved to listen to and customized the music to fit our group perfectly! On top of DJing our entire wedding, he also helped us livestream our wedding to all of our guests who were not able to make it. He spent so much time making sure everything went perfectly and we are so happy our friends and family who couldn’t travel were able to share our wedding day with us! Jamie was so fun and easy to work with and we are so fortunate to have chosen him for our special day!” - Amanda Tomasetti
“We noticed Ceremony DJs was highly rated on multiple platforms so we set up a call. We liked Jamie so much that we didn’t call anyone else! During the first call Jamie asked us questions to get an understanding of the kind of music that we liked as well as what our guests might like. From there, he crafted an amazing set for the entire wedding! Another awesome thing with Jamie is he helped us with day of coordination since we did not have a wedding coordinator. Apart from handling the entirety of our music, Jamie and his good friend Ed helped us stream our entire wedding for our loved ones who could not make it. They have a combination of cameras for a variety of situations and we received much praise from the stream viewers! Jamie is amazing at what he does but even better than this he is an awesome person to work with! We will be recommending him to all of our friends and family that are getting married!” - James Rymer
A Shimmering, Beach Oasis Garden Wedding
We haven’t done many weddings this past year, but the ones we’ve done have really been a doozy. I suppose a side effect of having significantly fewer customers is that you can devote a lot more time and energy to the ones you have. This project was crazy on multiple levels, but the end result was something we were really proud of and can’t wait to share with you all.
James and Amanda were obviously pretty cool right off the bat and we had a lot of fun talking about music in the initial calls. But as the COVID situation worsened, it became clear that we were going to have to rethink our strategy as a business as far as what services we were offering, and adjust as far as the requirements of specific events as we moved forward.
In the lead up to the COVID crisis, we had already been experimenting at home with DJ livestreams. I do radio shows with both KALX 90.7 FM and KXSF 102.5 FM in my spare time, in addition to club events, and we had been working on a way to combine both the best elements of a radio show and the best elements of a club night into something of a dance TV show.
Our other DJ, ED Garro aka UFO! and I both had been practicing with the open source software OBS and various IP camera apps to do the at home freeware version of a DJ livestream for our friends on Instagram and Twitch as the world began descending into chaos and the music community more specifically was coming to terms with a world with no performances.
We got pretty good at the ins and outs of the software and the next obvious step was to invest in the equipment.
When James and Amanda called, we were already thinking about doing the livestream as an official service, but when they suggested it themselves, we figured this was probably a problem more people were going to like for us to help them solve.
So we signed up for the awesome music curation part of this whole thing, but took on the livestream part as an added bonus.
Livestreaming In the Wild
Now, we were pretty aware that doing a live stream in the controlled environment of your living room is one thing, but the idea of doing it in the wild at a wedding venue that likely had no internet and no power was going to be a logistical nightmare.
Fortunately, James and Amanda are both somewhat tech-nerdy themselves, so we acknowledged the challenge and set out to solve the problem together. A process which we detailed at length in a different blog, so please feel free to click on over there and see what we did.
All livestream aside, these guys had great taste in music as well! And styles, I honestly didn’t know too well, because honestly, I’m getting old. So after what felt like 3 months working on the livestream part of the event, we switched over to the music and that part was also a lot of fun.
And thankfully not as much of a pain in the ass as wading through weeks worth of comparative camera reviews and ethernet recommendations.
A Chill Wedding That Was Both Accessible and Hip
As I mentioned, I’m getting a little up there in the years, and despite my attempt to be as hip as humanly possible 24 hours a day, I don’t always get the kind of clients that I can do an exclusively up to the minute, fresh off the shelf, modern set for.
James and Amanda both go to a lot of EDM festivals with their friends and listen to a fair amount of music online, so it was clear right from the start that we would need to do something that would resonate with them and their friends.
Amanda also likes a lot of pop stuff though like Taylor Swift “Invisible String”, Ed Sheeran “Tenerife Sea” and Justin Bieber “I Don't Care” so it was kind of clear from the jump that we had to split the difference between hip underground stuff and accessible pop stuff.
I went into it with an open mind, and we talked about a lot of more typical wedding fare at first when it seemed like there might be more family involved, but once it became clear that the wedding was going to be predominantly their friends with the family staying home, the scene was sort of set to go all in on the modern stuff.
Honestly, we also wanted to do something we were really proud of since we were going to be doing the livestream recording as well, and when they showed me their first dance song was a custom remix James had done of a chill EDM dance song, it was kind of sealed that that was the direction things might best have traveled in.
So we rolled the dice and set about crafting a set that would be up to the minute modern, combine elements of pop and dance still have some flavors of classic covers and indie sprinkled throughout.
Between you me and the wall, I locked myself in the car for three days straight and wrote down every song on the satellite radio and then cross referenced it for all the sickest remixes and related artists as well as the charts from the famous DJs that week.
What we came up with was pretty good, I think!
An Indie Folk Ceremony
For the ceremony, Amanda had prepared a good run of prelude songs, which really set the stage for the whole event. If any of you are thinking of picking more than one prelude song, I can in retrospect attest, it will set your nerves at ease and also aid in the staging as you can follow along with the songs how much time you have before you walk. So, good one there, Amanda!
I was also relieved to find out before the event that more than one of Amanda’s ceremony songs and first dances was on the lists of artists I had guessed they might like, so apparently we had really nailed it considering she chose songs like Kodaline “The One” and Tritonal “Anchor”.
The ceremony went great, the livestream went off without a hitch and the system we built largely functioned as planned with multiple redundancies in every regard, so if a camera tipped over we could switch the view or if the signal froze we could reboot it. Reassured the livestream was functioning as expected, we set to work on the music.
I really wanted to make the whole experience as modern as possible. Normally, I play into the setting of the venue a lot as far as the selection of music, especially early in the event, but with so many young folks and the viewing audience at home, I felt like folks would be disappointed if it wasn’t super hip and modern and at least close to what they would listen to on their own.
A Chill EDM Cocktail Hour
We did some chill ones to start like Tycho “A Walk”, Yoste “Chihiro” and Medasin “Home” to set the mood and foreshadow the first dance and bouquet toss song. I was worried the synth based music might not jive with the bucolic forest setting, but I think it actually jelled pretty well.
The echo-y, reverb-y elements of the more chill selections actually played off the light through the trees and the babbling brook, so it kind of made a lot of sense without being too overwhelming.
We slowly brought in a little more of a beat as the cocktail hour progressed with ones like Blonde Maze “Not All Flowers Bloom”, Jai Wolf “Indian Summer (Kasbo Remix)” and Kasbo “Found You feat. Chealsea Cutler”.
A Balearic Dinner Party
There’s a style a lot of us here really like called Balearic where you DJ as though you’re on an island at sunset and a lot of the newer songs actually riff on this style from the late 70’s and early 80’s quite a bit.
We did a few underground balearic ones like Petit Biscuit “Sunset Lover”, Poolside “Can't Stop Your Lovin' feat. Panama” and Sade “When Am I Going To Make A Living (Poolside's Tons of Drums Edit)” to set up the more obvious modern pop ones that also riff on that style like The Weeknd “I Feel It Coming feat. Daft Punk”, Harry Styles “Adore You (Extended Remix)”, and Taylor Swift “Style”.
I mentioned this style was popular in the 70’s and 80’s, so it’s chock full of throwbacks like Toto “Africa (Medasin Remix)” and Marvin Gaye “Sexual Healing (Kygo Remix)” but we also dug up a few more recent ones like M83 “Wait (Kygo Remix)” and MGMT “Electric Feel Henry Green Remix)”.
Heading into dinner we wanted to keep it up beat and set the stage for what we hoped would be a slightly more underground than usual dance set with songs like Surf Mesa “ILY feat. Emilee”, Doja Cat “Say So (Remix) feat. Nicki Minaj” and Benee “Supalonely ft. Gus Dapperton”. We even sprinkled in a few indie ones like Spoon “Inside Out” and Tame Impala “Is It True”.
A Freestyle Toast Competition
From here we did the toasts and speeches, which was a lot of fun, especially in the context of the livestream.
They hadn’t actually planned out the order of the speeches, or even who was going to speak, so instead we just opened the floor to whoever wanted to propose a toast and the result was actually really great.
Everyone kept it warm, heartfelt and brief and the whole thing turned into somewhat of a freestyle speech competition. I bet this was a real highlight for the folks at home on the livestream.
A Virtual Toast
But that’s not all, because for the next portion of the event the family at home at actually prepared virtual speeches to be shown at the wedding on the projector we had set up for them and integrated into the whole livestream set up.
So the family got to watch everyone’s speeches at home and then watch the reaction to their speeches live.
It was pretty next level.
James had also prepared a video of their wedding proposal which he had filmed using a drone on autopilot as he got on one knee at the beach. A multimedia presentaiton indeed!
Next we did the old “shoe game”, the dances, and the bouquet toss as we headed into the dancing. Amanda had selected Tritonal “Anchor” as the bouquet toss song, which really set things off right, in my opinion.
Top 40 Remix Dance Party
As the dancing started, one of their friends came up to me and said something like “so what are you gonna do now, play LMFAO “Shots”?” and I totally thought she was kidding. Like, she was too cool for LMFAO and really wanted me to play underground stuff.
So I tried a few underground ones and then she came back and was like “No, I actually really like LMFAO “Shots”!” So we immediately dropped any pretense of being cool and just went for the fun ones. But we did get to do a few that I was proud of shoe-horning in there like SAINt JHN ”Roses (Imanbek Remix)” and Breach “Jack”.
We were a little behind schedule because the speeches ran long (I’m always trying to tell you guys!) but we closed out with a few accessible trap ones like Drake “Nice for What” and Lizzo “Truth Hurts (CID Remix)”.
Then it was pretty much time for the grand finale and we finished up with a pretty cool sparkler procession they planned out with the venue to the tune of Tom Petty “Wild Flowers”.
All and all a pretty amazing time!
Big Ups & Shout Outs
Special shout out to The Secret Gardens for having an amazing venue and to John for being so welcoming throughout this whole debacle. If you need a really cool, secluded forest glade to get married in, this is the space for you.
Special shout out to Lotus Productions on photo. Sam was all over the shot everywhere he needed to be and the ceremony photos in particular look amazing!
Special shout out to videographer Last Light Pictures for getting all the footage just in case something exploded with our rig, which it didn’t, but it was good to know there was back up in the house! These guys have really affordable rates as well if you want someone who will film your event quick and dirty and leave it to you to do the edits.
Special shout out to Kinsmoke Catering. The food was great and the staff was working overtime to make sure everything was both hot and as sanitary as possibly. Setting a new standard for both cleanlines and service over here.
Special shout out to officiant Kevin Smith of Kevin Smith Weddings. We love to meet people who have been in this business for years and still love it. Kevin is totally that guy. If you need an officiant, I think he might be the best one we’ve worked with yet!
Special shout out to Nataly Lopez Artistry on hair and make up. The ladies looked amazing as usual and Amanda was stunning in particular. People forget that these photos don’t take themselves and the ladies don’t wake up looking like they walked out of a magazine.
All around thanks to everyone involved, especially James and Amanda for being real partners in figuring out the livestream set up and John, Sam and Kevin all of whom said they had seen one or two livestreams before, but that ours was the most involved and elaborate!
Hope we can all work together again soon.
Ceremony Songs
Prelude 1:
Taylor Swift “Invisible String”
Prelude 2:
Prelude 3:
Prelude 4:
Prelude 5:
Sebastian Yatra, Isabela Moner “ My Only One (Instrumental)”
Processional 1:
Processional 2:
Recessional:
Cobie Calliat “I Do (Instrumental)”
Grand Entrance:
Cake Cutting:
First Dance:
(Custom Edit)
Father Daughter Dance:
Anniversary Dance:
Westlife “I Wanna Grow Old with You”
Bouquet Toss:
Last Song:
Jamie’s Chill EDM Set:
Tycho “A Walk”
Yoste “Chihiro”
Medasin “Home”
Blonde Maze “Not All Flowers Bloom”
Jai Wolf “Indian Summer (Kasbo Remix)”
Kasbo “Found You feat. Chealsea Cutler”
Petit Biscuit “Sunset Lover”
Poolside “Can't Stop Your Lovin' feat. Panama”
Sade “When Am I Going To Make A Living (Poolside's Tons of Drums Edit)”
The Weeknd “I Feel It Coming feat. Daft Punk”
Harry Styles “Adore You (Extended Remix)”
Taylor Swift “Style”
Major Lazer & DJ Snake ”Lean On feat. MØ”
Toto “Africa (Medasin Remix)”
M83 “Wait (Kygo Remix)”
Black Coffee “Ready For You feat. Celeste”
Daft Punk “Something About Us”
Ed Sheeran “Happier (Kasbo Remix)”
Ellie Goulding “High For This (Kygo Remix)”
Kygo & Selena Gomez “It Ain’t Me”
Lady Gaga “The Cure”
Niall Horan “No Judgement”
R3HAB, HRVY “Be Okay”
Rihanna “Needed Me (R3hab Remix)”
Chainsmokers “Closer feat. Halsey (R3hab Remix)”
Marvin Gaye “Sexual Healing (Kygo Remix)”
Henry Green “Electric Feel (Kygo Remix)”
Laid Back “Fly Away (Poolside Edit)”
Mike Posner “I Took A Pill In Ibiza (SeeB Remix)”
Marshmelllo “OK Not To Be OK feat. Demi Lovato”
Sam Smith, Normani “Dancing with a Stranger”
Kygo & Whitney Houston “Higher Love”
Sam Smith “Diamonds”
Carly Rae Jepsen “Run Away With Me (EMBRZ Remix)”
Ed Sheeran “Shape of You (Major Lazer Remix) feat. Nyla & Kranium”
Ed Sheeran & Justin Bieber “I Don't Care (bvd kult Remix)”
Lonely in the Rain “Slow Down feat. Devyn Moon”
Tame Impala “Breathe Deeper”
Spoon “Inside Out”
Surf Mesa “ILY feat. Emilee”
Doja Cat “Say So (Remix) feat. Nicki Minaj”
Victoria Monet “Experience feat. Khalid & SG Lewis”
Tame Impala “Is It True”
Miley Cyrus “Midnight Sky”
Grimes “REALiTi (EMBRZ Remix)”
Tritonal “Hung Up feat. SJ, Emma Gatsby”
Benee “Supalonely ft. Gus Dapperton”
Jamie’s Top 40 Remix Set:
3Lau “Tokyo feat. XIRA”
SAINt JHN ”Roses (Imanbek Remix)”
Topic x A7S “Breaking Me”
DJ S.K.T “Poison”
Bazzi “Paradise (The Magician Remix)”
Lady Gaga “Rain On Me feat. Ariana Grande”
Joel Corry “Head & Heart feat. MNEK”
Tiesto “Lose You feat. ILIRA”
Breach “Jack”
Calvin Harris & Dua Lipa “One Kiss (Oliver Heldens Remix)”
Mark Knight & Rene Amesz “All 4 Love feat. Tasty Lopez (Extended Mix)”
Post Malone “Circles (Charlie Lane Remix)”
RAYE “Natalie Don't (Punctual Remix)”
Kesha “Tik Tok”
Katy Perry Teenage Dream”
Riton x Oliver Heldens “Turn Me On ft. Vula”
SOFI TUKKER x Gorgon City “House Arrest”
Khalid “Love Lies feat. Normani (Matt Medved Remix)”
M83 “Midnight City (Eric Prydz Unreleased Remix)”
Mat Zo “Colours”
Odesza “Say My Name (Remix)”
Regard “Ride It (Jonas Blue Remix)”
Tritonal “You Found Me”
Robyn “Call Your Girlfriend (Kaskade Remix)”
Azealia Banks “212 feat. Lazy Jay”
Billie Eilish “bad guy (Tommie Sunshine & B!tch Be Cool Remix)”
BONNIE X CLYDE “Love Is Killing Me”
Megan Thee Stallion “Savage feat. Beyoncé (Major Lazer Remix)”
Cardi B “WAP (Nitti Gritti Remix) feat. Megan Thee Stallion
Major Lazer “Que Calor feat. J Balvin (Saweetie Remix)”
Icona Pop “I Love It feat Charli XCX”
Katy Perry “Teenage Dream (Kaskade Club Remix)”
Rihanna “Only Girl in the World”
Avicii “Levels”
Calvin Harris “Feel So Close”
David Guetta “Memories (Feat. Kid Cudi)”
Drake “Nice for What”
Lizzo “Truth Hurts (CID Remix)”
Venue: The Secret Gardens / Photographer: Lotus Productions / Videographer: Last Light Pictures / DJ: Ceremony DJs / Caterer: Kinsmoke Catering / Officiant: Kevin Smith Weddings / Hair & Make Up: Nataly Lopez Artistry
