Huynh Wedding | Exchange Ballroom | Portland DJ

Hai and Nina were one of the first couples to book Silicon Forest Entertainment to DJ their wedding back in April when we first launched the site. They chose to get married at St. Stephen’s Catholic Church and then rolled over to the Exchange Ballroom in Portland for the reception. The guests were able to grab cocktails on the Cascade Rooftop all night and enjoy the awesome Portland skyline.

DJ Thoughts

This was a bit tricky for me as a DJ since I had to maintain music in the Ballroom as well as on the fifth floor rooftop. I ended up bringing both speaker setups (3x 15″ Mackie Thumps, 2x EV-ZLX12Ps, 1x EV ETX-18SP) and put a couple of Thumps and a microphone on the roof with my spare laptop and the rest went downstairs. It was about 99° that day (Which still beats the socks off of Phoenix) so most guests headed indoors for the first part of the evening. There were a ton of family that travelled all the way from Vietnam so Nina’s uncle welcome both sides of the family with a traditional Vietnamese welcome as well as an english translation. The bridal party was introduced with an instrumental version of “Blank Space” by Taylor Swift and Hai and Nina came out to an instrumental “New Flame” by Chris Brown. After dinner, Hai & Nina shared their first dance (Miguel’s “Sure Thing“) and we got everyone on the dance floor to “Five More Hours” by Chris Brown. By that time, it cooled off enough for everyone to head back upstairs for drinks and watching the sunset. When the dance floor died down inside, I headed up to the rooftop to keep an eye on the music there.

I wanted to mention that Casey, the coordinator from VT Group, was an excellent help and made sure we were taken care of with dinner and accommodations. The Exchange Ballroom has a dedicated DJ Stage that’s slightly elevated and gives you a great view of the whole ballroom. I didn’t need to setup my lighting trusses since the Stage wall was already at the perfect height for our LED Lighting, Lasers, and fog. Hai and Nina came up with a Twitter hashtag of #Hai+Nina for their guests to use so we made a custom monogram to match! You can see it in most of the video of the dance floor downstairs.

Highlights

Hai & Nina hired HP Studios to do their wedding video which turned out amazing. My moment of fame is around the 2:48 mark. Check it out here:

Throughout the night, we had a ton of requests for good ole 80’s and 90’s hip-hop with some modern R&B mixed in. Everyone was still going strong when we had to kill the music at 11:00pm. I was able to snap a few videos on my iPhone 6 before running out of storage. Check out the highlights here:

Here’s a quick peak at some of the professional pictures taken by Take 5 Photography. All credit goes to her 🙂

Photo Credit: Take 5 Photography