Choosing the right wedding ceremony music is key to setting the mood of your wedding, and an outdoor beach ceremony brings a few practical considerations you won’t find in a typical indoor wedding guide. Here’s our guide to picking the right tunes, and making sure they actually work in a Key West setting.
This guide covers the three parts of your ceremony that need music, how your venue affects your choices, what changes for an outdoor beach ceremony specifically, and how to make the moment feel like yours.
Know the Parts of Your Ceremony
You’ll need to select music for three parts of your ceremony:
- Prelude: Light, ambient music that plays while guests are finding their seats and waiting for the ceremony to begin. Start your prelude music when guests begin arriving at your ceremony site.
- Processional: This music accompanies the entrance of the families, wedding party, and the person walking down the aisle. Use the same song for the entire processional, or switch to a new piece for a specific entrance.
- Recessional: Typically bright, lively, and joyful, recessional music plays at the conclusion of the ceremony as you make your exit.
Consider Your Venue
A religious venue may require you to choose from a pre-approved list of songs. Other venues will approve any music as long as it’s instrumental, while some have an anything goes attitude. Make sure you know your venue’s policy before you get attached to any particular songs.
What Changes for an Outdoor Beach Ceremony
A Key West beach wedding doesn’t come with a venue’s sound system or a power outlet nearby, so your music choices need to work with that. Acoustic live music, a harpist, violinist, guitarist, or steel drummer, tends to hold up better against ocean breeze and open air than a small speaker trying to compete with the wind. If you do want recorded music, a battery powered speaker with solid sound quality is worth the investment over a phone propped up on a chair. Either way, it’s worth doing a quick sound check at your actual ceremony location beforehand, since wind and wave noise can be louder than you’d expect standing there on a calm afternoon.
Make It Unique
Do you and your partner have any artists or songs that are meaningful to your relationship? Pick ceremony music that’s genuinely unique to the two of you rather than defaulting to what’s expected. A song tied to a real memory almost always means more than a generic wedding standard.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the three parts of a ceremony that need music?
The prelude, played as guests arrive and get seated, the processional, which accompanies the wedding party’s entrance, and the recessional, played as the couple exits the ceremony.
Does live music work better than recorded music for a beach wedding?
Often, yes. Acoustic live music tends to hold up better against ocean breeze and open air than a small speaker, though a quality battery powered speaker can work well if you prefer recorded songs.
Can we use any song we want for our Key West beach ceremony?
Most outdoor beach ceremonies in Key West don’t have the song restrictions a religious venue might, giving you far more freedom to choose music that’s personal to you.
Does Aaron’s Key West Weddings arrange live ceremony musicians?
Yes. We can book a harpist, violinist, guitarist, or steel drummer for your ceremony as part of your wedding package.
Conclusion
Great ceremony music comes down to picking songs that mean something to you, and making sure they’ll actually be heard clearly on the beach.
To plan the perfect Key West wedding, contact Aaron’s Key West Weddings. We’ll make your special day everything you’ve dreamed of, including booking live ceremony music if you’d like a harpist, violinist, guitarist, or steel drummer. Call 305-295-0137 to learn more, or complete our contact form online today.
