I would like to take this opportunity in today’s article to speak about hiring Jazz band together with the sound system at weddings in Malaysia.
After today’s experience, I would highly recommend any bridal couple who is engaging a jazz band for their wedding to include the sound system. Never under estimate the significance of having reliable sound.
To me it makes little sense to hire a good jazz band when there is no proper sound support. Packaging the sound with the band is absolutely essential for the band to sound good. A wedding is a once in a lifetime occasion and I am sure wedding couples would want it to be memorable.
Sound system that is provided by hotels and restaurants are basically for announcements and do not have the capacity to handle live bands. I have encountered many clients who are of utmost concern on sourcing a good quality band to hire for their wedding reception but are unaware of the importance of having compatible sound support.
I must admit I have in the past tried to help client budget by utilizing the venue’s sound system but as I’ve mentioned after today’s event, my view on that has changed.
I was at the venue at 3:30pm today, an earlier arrival for me than my usual sound check time. I felt confident that there would be ample time to sort out the sound and being there early gave me the allowance to ironed out any unforeseen technical issues that may arise and usually do when relying on foreign sound support.
Unfortunately, the restaurant has their own rules and I was told that the technician will only be arriving later.
When the technician finally arrived at almost 6pm, there were insufficient microphones for us and the reverberation of their sound system was centralize thus assigning individual reverb to different instruments / voice were not possible.
What this means is you either have reverb for the whole band or not at all which is to us unacceptable, as we require reverb for the vocal and saxophone but not for the keyboard. This was apparently not possible.
At the end, we reluctantly had to acquiesce for the reverb to be disabled and the conga was not amplified due to the lack of microphones. Consequently, the integrity of the band had to be “compromised”… from my perspective at least…
Having said that, I realize this is how I felt personally on hindsight, but to be honest, I doubt the guest at the wedding or even the bridal couple themselves felt any inadequacies in the sound of the band. Everyone still enjoyed our music and the band received constant applaud of appreciation throughout the night.
Hence in reality, most people at the event will be too busy eating, drinking, chatting and basically having a good time. They will react to the live band in a more holistic manner, in terms of how the band looks, whether they can be heard and whether they could relate to the band’s choice of song selections.
The music must be set at a comfortable listening level, not too loud where they are still able to speak effortlessly and not too soft to the point where the band loses its presence. Then again this is a rather subjective topic as it all depends on where you are seated at the venue in relation to the location of the speakers.
Tristan’s comments rounded off the evening for me, “Great music Jason, I’ll definitely recommend your band to my friends”
By the way, this is the wedding reception of Tristan and Christina held at the Golden Dragonboat Restaurant KL on the 17th of October 2010.
If you wish to hire a Jazz band with sound system at your wedding in Malaysia, give me a call at 016 2800216 to get more information and clarification ~ Jason Geh
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