Wedding Songs Timeline Music Planner: The Cocktail Hour

Here's a free excerpt from the wedding songs timeline planner! This is the first chapter of this in depth "how to plan a wedding" guide. It the reception planner and talks about cocktail hour wedding songs and how to choose them and what to avoid.

Once the ceremony is over, and all of your guests have heard your ceremony processionals, they will head over to the cocktail hour to partake in drinks, hors d'oeuvres and conversation! Now, it is imperative that your music is at the appropriate level, loud enough to hear but low enough for people to talk. If the music is too low it won’t feel like a celebration and if it’s so loud that people can’t talk they will get bored and be irritated, so make sure your volume level is just right.

To be honest, you can play anything for your background music here, and this goes for your dinner mix, too...but my wedding song suggestions here would be to avoid classical, Enya or any type of music that will make your guests…fall…a..sleeeeeep…zzzzzzz.

Some very popular artists to play during cocktail hour are, of course, vocal jazz artists like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Ella Fitzgerald, and Tony Bennett. There are even more recent swing artists you could add to this mix, like Michael Buble, Diana Krall, Harry Connick Jr. and the incredible Madeline Peyroux. Check her out. For a more modern sound, The Adult contemporary artists like Jack Johnson, John Mayer, Jason Mraz, Colbie Caillat and even Donavan Frankenreiter work very well.

If you’re into 70’s rock, you could choose songs from the Eagles, Journey, James Taylor, even Jimmy Buffett. Just remember to keep it fun and light…you don’t want to be playing deep and crazy songs like The End by The Doors!

(This section talks about a bunch of other music styles. I'm not allowed to post the entire script for the Wedding Songs Timeline Planner since it would be giving it away for free! Hopefully, the information in this article is already helping you plan your wedding songs for your cocktail hour!)

As you can see, the possibilities are vast. So, choose either 20 specific songs for your cocktail hour…or you can choose10 specific artists and let your DJ help you out by picking the most appropriate songs from these artists. If you’re having trouble picking wedding songs here, start with the genres you like, classic rock, swing, country, whatever and build from there. Keep in mind this is the kick off to your celebration so give your friends and family an excuse to start having some fun.  They are not the best wedding dance songs as you want to save those for when the dancing starts.

So, take a minute to write down some ideas you might have for your cocktail hour wedding songs and let’s move on.

The best advice in this first section (and there's a lot) is the fact that you shouldn't use sleepy wedding songs during your cocktail hour. Also, don't limit your genre to the "typical" wedding songs you hear every single weekend.