Edmonton DJ Holiday season 2018: Lights, Sound, Music and Dancing.

Happy New Year everyone! I’m in recovery mode now that the Christmas season is done. The 2018 Holiday DJ season was the busiest yet with providing music, sound and lighting for multiple events throughout Edmonton and area.

New to me for this year was doing 6 huge multi-company holiday parties with up to 500 or so guests per event. The parties were split between the Italian Cultural Centre on the north side and the Meridian Banquet Centre on the south side here in Edmonton. These parties involved much more than just the DJ work. Besides being the DJ, I was also the emcee for the events and took on all the audio and stage lighting production.

Each of these events had entertainment before the dance. There were comedians, hypnotist and star impersonators. I was responsible for providing the wireless microphones, mic stands and stage monitors for the performers. I needed to make sure they could be heard and seen clearly from wherever people where seated in these large halls. This meant making sure the stage was well lit with professional stage lighting and that the sound was distributed equally throughout the hall.

That required using 10 speakers distributed all around the room and running a ridiculous amount of cabling. It also meant running an audio feed to the video tech who was capturing the stage performances on video. I also needed to accommodate the performers plugging their audio sources from laptops and ipads into the sound mix.

This all required using a mixing board that could provide more inputs and outputs than a board designed strictly for DJ use would allow for. I purchased a new Yorkville 14 channel mixer for this purpose. This let me have individual control over the main front of house speakers, the fill speakers spread through the hall and the stage monitors for the performers.

One of the events also had a funny money casino happening in the adjoining room for which I was asked to also run audio to. Of course I was not able to leave the whole setup in the hall between all the events so this meant setting it up and tearing it down for each event. That is a lot of work.

After killing myself doing this a few times, I decided to try a wireless audio signal transmitting system for powered speakers. I was skeptical of how well this would work, but thought I would give it try if it could save me hours of cable running. I can say that I was very pleasantly surprised at how well this system worked. I will definitely be using this again for my next big setup. It also saved me many rolls of gaffer tape.

For the stage lighting, I acquired 2 Yorkville professional LED stage lighting units and a controller for the units. These lights are incredibly bright and versatile. I can dial up any colour and control the brightness. The light an entire large stage easily. When it comes time to DJ, the lights have many different modes to sync with the music and create an impressive light show. You can see some of it in the video above.

Anyhow, everything went very smoothly for all the events. There were lots of compliments from the guests and the organizers about the sound quality. All of the performers also commented on how good the sound and lightin was. And of course for the dance after the entertainers, we had tons of fun on the dance floor, as you can see in the video.

I’m already scheduled for 8 of these parties next holiday season. Should be another busy year of weddings, graduations and other events before that though. Here’s to another great year of DJ and Audio/lighting production!