šµ How this One kind of gig will make you a better DJ. Period.
After 25 Years, Shammy Dee Found the One Gig That Sharpened Everything Else
I donāt give up shared content often, but when I do, itās because the person has something worth hearing. Shammy Dee, āThe Full-Time DJā, reached out with something that stopped me cold ā his own story. If youāre a wedding DJ or thinking about becoming one, pay attention.
Meet āThe Full-Time DJā, Shammy Dee.
When I started my DJ career, I knew I wanted to DJ at big shows.
Butā¦you never get the big stage right away.
Like most mobile DJs starting out, I got my start doing friendsā parties ā birthdays, kickbacks, and other small stuff. Then in college, I did more small parties and eventually graduated into nightlife.
As I kept growing as a DJ, more people learned about me and I got to move into bigger (meaning ābetter paidā) events ā quinceaƱeras, corporate events, and weddings.
But here is something I noticed after 25 years in this gameā¦
Out of every type of gig Iāve played, only one has made me dramatically better. Hands down.
And that was weddings.
Weddings are a different beast from all other events. Not because theyāre wildly different on the surface, but because they require a completely different sensibility.
Youāre not playing to a nightlife crowd that listens to a specific style of music. Youāve got a much wider age range in the room, which means a much wider musical taste range.
So when I started doing weddings, I honestly hated it. What I didnāt like was the difficulty in rocking for people who liked music from different decades in one night. I didnāt have enough music that would make everyone happy. I wasnāt sure what would hit.
And I was learning on the job, which is the last place you want to be figuring things out. People pay serious money to hire a DJ, and a wedding reception is not the place to experiment.
The catch-22 is that DJing is a craft you can only sharpen by doing it in front of crowds.
Weddings became my forcing function. They required me to really dial in on what makes a room work, what gets wallflowers to dance, and what makes the aunties and uncles take the dance floor. That discipline shaped how I DJ everything.
A lot of DJs I know tell me that weddings are not their thing, and for exactly this reason. Itās a crowd that demands a different skill set, and most DJs donāt want to develop it.
But hereās the thingā¦
Itās one of the most lucrative skill sets in this business. And it translates into every other gig you play.
The hardest part for me early on was figuring out what to play to get everybody on the floor.
And honestly, that challenge has only gotten harder. Back in the day, radio, TV, and print did the heavy lifting for us. Everyone was tuning into the same stations, watching the same shows on MTV/VH1, and reading the same newspapers and magazines. The strength of the labels was the marketing machine. If a song was big, everybody knew it.
Thatās not the world we live in anymore. Algorithms fractured that model. Now everyoneās in their own app, getting fed music based on what they already like. This means the pool of songs that a room full of strangers all know and feel keeps getting smaller.
But after a couple of years of consistently doing weddings, something clicked.
My crowd-reading skills got sharper. I became way more comfortable in situations that most DJs avoid. Iāve turned up rooms full of 50-year-olds without breaking a sweat. I played a three-hour corporate dinner once where the request was strictly 80s and pop, no hip-hop at all. That felt like DJing with one hand tied behind my back.
But I made it work, and I made it work because of what weddings had taught me.
Am I saying every DJ should do weddings?
No. But if youāre a mobile DJ who wants longevity, weddings matter. Not just because wedding DJs earn well, though they do. But because you can be a great marketer and still lose every repeat booking if you spin to a dead dancefloor. Weddings build the skill set that keeps you from being that DJ.
But developing that skill set doesnāt have to take as long as it took me.
If Iād had better guidance when I was starting out, I think I would have taken to weddings a lot faster. Thatās why someone like Matt at My Wedding Songs is such a valuable resource. He gives you a real framework around what works on a wedding floor, what genres youāre probably not thinking about, and how to build a set that feels personal to the couple while still keeping the whole room moving. His Substack is worth every penny. I strongly recommend it.
Can you learn these songs yourself? You absolutely can - through trial and error. Resources like this help you get to being a better DJ faster than me. And it helps you provide a better service to your clients. This means more referrals, more bookings, and more money.
Being able to spin a floor with kids as young as five and grandmas in their late 80s, all at the same time, and keeping it exciting throughout? That requires a level of skill that people are desperately looking for. Weddings forced me to develop it.
And that is exactly why Iām a better DJ today than I ever would have been otherwise.
To Your Success,
Shammy
Check out Shammy at The Full-Time DJ.
Shammy was generous enough to mention my work in his piece. If the framework heās referencing is something you want to dig into, the music, the genres, the crowd logic, thatās exactly what the Wedding MusicLetter is built around. Glad youāre here.
Cheers,
Matthew Campbell
Wedding MusicLetter