Ever been to party where you look awkwardly at each other while you can hear the hosts arguing in panic in the other room?
You may not be able to avoid some last minute firefighting (the swiggy guy always needs directions when you have people over), doing it out of earshot might be a good idea, as also having some sound dampener like light music going in the background. This will also come in handy when that in sync end of conversations happens followed by the pin drop silence that no one wants to be the first to break. No party is immune to the awkward lull of conversation, but there is vaccine to make it less painful when it happens – music!
For this some pre work is required, unless you’re ok to let your party be democratically run by letting everyone have a say in the jukebox, or worse, ruined by an autocratic guest’s taste in music.
Here are the steps to make your party have the most memorable background noise and fewest awkward silences:
- On any free day, just sit and create your own song play list titles. You may already have a library full of them, or you can use the preset playlists of music streaming apps as starting base.
Some ideas for play lists for different party moods are:
- Rock
- Soul soothers
- Jazz
- Retro
- Instrumental
- Classical
- Bollywood
- Dance Western
- Country specific – French, Italian, Celtic (After our visit to Ireland , we played Celtic music in one of our get togethers – it was a refreshing change from usual genres and led to a lot of discussions on Ireland.)
- Kid friendly. On a side note, don’t play nursery rhymes at kids’ birthday parties -Have you ever seen any kid really get that excited when ‘wheels of the bus’ starts playing, but must surely have secretly winced at the made up cartoon voices and jarring music that comes with this territory. There are a lot of songs which are kid friendly and still good for a grown up company (Happy, Wavin’ Flag, I Like To Move It…no baby shark please)
- Every time you hear a song that you like, add it under its mood list. You can have so many playlists, even the ones in languages you may not know - thanks to cloud and Shazam. Whoever says ‘those were the days’ show them a 100 song Spotify/Amazon Music mood playlist and see how it compares to the A and B sides of the mix tape. Just giving credit to tech and engineering where it’s due.
- Armed with ready lists, when it is time to have people over, you just have to ask yourself these questions to get the right playlist for your get together:
- Who are your guests – If they speak different languages – English is a great unifier and European is a great leveler. If you all share a language then the easy choice is obvious.
- What is the mood you want – relaxed or energized. It’s a conversation over dinner, keep it low volume and soothing music. If its an activity based evening or brunch, the music can be one that you can dance to too.
- Who are you – what makes you happy, is there a part of you that you’d like to talk about through music – it’s your party, you have to be there from start to end so it should speak to you most of all.
If it were to be laid out in a Venn diagram or Johari window exercise, you’d be left with a tiny pie of the universe which satisfies all three criteria– but thankfully we are only talking about a background noise we love and the songs are almost as abundant as humans on earth. So be assured, more than one playlist will find some common ground for your evening.
- Choose your speaker for the venue. You can play it through Echo kind of devices or keep the speaker bluetooth connection to your phone ready. Best to keep your phone on charging while it is playing so it doesn’t run out of battery coz the party will be long and you (ideally) shouldn’t have much use of the phone on your hand.
- Only intervention you may need is to increase the volume a bit once all your guests are there and conversation volumes have increased, making sure the music is a background element and never makes conversation strained by being overpowering.
- Add starting your playlists to your things to do before party starts. Along with
- Light the candles
- Pre-plate the munchies
- Spray the room freshener
More on the last minute preps later…
Till then, groove on to your music!
#hostingeasy #gettogether #partyplanning
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