Unique and Challenging
Most High School and College class reunions I’ve performed for as a DJ Entertainer have been for only one year or class, i.e. just he class of ‘95, or just the class of ‘80… you get the idea. I performed for a high school class reunion recently which combined several consecutive years, all from the same high school. This one was the classes of: 1962, ‘63, ‘64 and ‘65. I think this is a trend we can expect to see more of in the future.
Challenges abounded with this celebration. There were about 175 in attendance and we used a space in their old high school building, which has been converted into a community center in recent years.
The room is half of a basketball court with room on three sides for portable game seating. The fourth wall is a theater stage whose front lip is about 30 inches from the floor. The ceiling is very high, about 30 feet, which will soak up sound like a sponge. But the room also has cinderblock walls and hard wood floors which both reflect sound. The room was set up with rows of banquet tables and seating, a small dance area, about 25 by 25 feet. The caterer’s buffet tables were along one wall and a beverage station (bar) was across the room from the stage.
This age group typically does not enjoy high volume dance parties. A large part of their time will spent visiting with classmates and friends they haven’t seen in many years. They want to talk but they want to dance too, which means I needed to put a little more sound pressure on the dance floor while keeping levels low enough so folks could talk and visit each other.
I decided to set-up my workstation at floor level with one 8-foot banquet table between the stage and dance area while using the stage directly behind as a second work surface. I placed a T-Bar of Par 64 lights on a tripod directly behind me so the lights shone on the dance floor. Simple lighting was plenty for this gathering. Then I set up two speaker tripods on the stage, one at each front corner of the stage which put them about 7-feet above the floor. When I extended the tripods to their full height which put the speakers about 10 feet above the floor.
Rather than aiming the speakers directly across the room, I angled them toward the center of the room so the sound was a little stronger at the dance floor. This had the effect of increasing the sound pressure at the dance floor but avoided the “slap-back” echo from the block wall directly across from the stage.
I’m no engineer, but I believe that at that speaker height and angle, echo from the hard surfaces in the room were counter-balanced by the high ceiling and people, which together soaked up the resonance. The result was just the right amount of sound pressure all over the room. Everyone left the celebration with good memories of a fun party and there were no complaints about the sound levels. With my workstation at floor level, I got to talk with people, take requests and generally engage with those attending. It was fun, but then I get to party for a living.
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