Mitchell, SD Wedding - May 26th
28 05 2007This last weekend, over the Memorial Day Holiday, I traveled to Mitchell, South Dakota for a wedding reception at the Holiday Inn. Since my wife was working that weekend, I had to have Grandma and Grandpa watch our 15 month old daughter, Lillian. The trick was, they were camping in Chamberlain, SD - about 75 miles West of Mitchell, and I was coming from Brandon, SD - which is about 75 miles East of Mitchell. So, in order to drop Lily off, I had to drive past Mitchell and meet them at a half-way point. Then I had to double-back on myself to go to the venue.
The wedding reception started at 5PM, and I was scheduled to start at 6PM. I got there about 4PM and began to unload. There was also a four piece Jazz Quartet there to play dinner music - they did a fantastic job, by the way! Setting up took me no time at all. I was using my condensed wedding lighting rig, which consists of one t-bar light stand with the lights premounted to the top. For lights I was using 3 Par-56 cans, 3 Novascan scanners (2 on the bar and 1 on the floor for the disco ball,) a 12″ disco ball, and a new Chauvet Vue III. I was most impressed with my new Vue, I shined it up on the ceiling and turned it off and on with a switch. WOW, I was blown away! It looked awesome above the dancers. I’ll have to bring my video camera to the next gig to capture some footage. I was really impressed with the rest of the lighting rig as well, it did a good job of washing the dancefloor with light, and had plenty of movement from the Novascans. The third Novascan did a good job of spotlighting the disco ball, but I have a brighter Elation Pro Color color changer on order that should do an even better job.
The bride and groom did a great job of selecting music, and the crowd was pretty lively. I exclusively used Serato Scratch Live for the wedding, and as usual, it didn’t let me down. One of the nicest things about that program is the fact that you can prepare all of the music in a “crate” beforehand. So, I had all of the reception music in one place. The dancefloor was pretty big, not so much wide, but very long. It was a nice venue, I wouldn’t mind going back there.
After the reception ended at 12, I loaded up and headed over to Chamberlain to spend the night camping with my daughter. We were up kind of early the next morning, so we headed back to Brandon, SD and arrived there around 10:30 AM.
The upcoming month of June should be very busy. I’ve got a gig every Saturday. First I’ll be heading to Madison, SD, then Yankton, SD, followed by Brandon, SD (yeah, no travel,) Rock Valley, IA, and finally Hartford, SD.
