Wedding songs for your ceremony need to be chosen with care and with regard to the type of weddingceremony you will be having. You will need a range of suitable songs to play at various intervals before, during and after the ceremony and each song needs to be chosen with attention to when it will be played.
Wedding Songs for a Religious Ceremony
A religious wedding ceremony can be quite restrictive with regards to the type of wedding songs you can play. You will need to choose songs for the recessional, processional, signing of the register and possibly some hymns to be sung during the service itself.
The venue itself may well issue you with a list of approved wedding songs, although not all with necessarily insist on you choosing songs from that list, in fact many more venues are now becoming more flexible on the kind of music you can have. But whatever you choose you should talk it over with your wedding officiant well in advance of the wedding day to ensure your choices are appropriate.
When choosing wedding hymns make sure you pick hymns which are well known and which you are confident your guests will be able to sing. Your aim is to achieve a rousing chorus rather than a low mumble because your guests don’t know the tune! You also need to consider the organist who may not be able to play some more modern or more radical requests, so it is worth getting any song choices run past them as well.
Wedding Songs for a Civil Ceremony
Civil wedding ceremonies are rather more flexible in terms of wedding songs, however, they must not contain any religious references so make sure you listen or read through any lyrics carefully beforehand. Many couples will choose a mixture of traditional and modern wedding songs for a civil ceremony. For instance the bride may choose to walk down the aisle to Mendelsshohn Wedding March and back up the aisle to Westlife’s You Lift Me Up.
As with a religious venue a civil wedding venue may also hand you a list of wedding songs. These are not so much approved choices but more like suggestions as they have been popular with other couples who have married there. It is worth considering the songs on this list as they offer you tried and tested titles, but ultimately the choice should be yours.
If you choose to bring your own music then you should try to have it all on one disc and assign someone to look after it for you. You also need to make sure that whoever is in charge of pressing ‘play’ knows which song to play and when and also to play it at the right volume!
