LCQ Musician Blog

There is a beautiful new hotel in San Diego's Gaslamp Quarter - the recently opened Margaritaville Hotel! We got to take a tour of the property with the National Association of Catering & Events (NACE) and experience everything the property has to offer. 

Located in the heart of the Gaslamp, only 2 blocks from Petco Park, the Convention Center, and tons of restaurants and activities, this beautifully renovated hotel boasts awesome spots for events, weddings, and hang outs. 

Many people we talk to regularly think that the go-to ensemble for wedding ceremonies is a string quartet. Of course that is what is seen in the movies often, having a string quartet serenade guests as they arrive, or play processional music while the happy couple walks down the aisle. 

But while string quartets are still very much the standard, there are so many other options available to provide that same sense of grandeur and elegance, who can bring the atmosphere of live music, and who can customize your wedding songs to suite your desires and specifications. 

There are also many amazing San Diego string quartets out there, some of them are professional, some are more amateur but still do a nice job at weddings. As local San Diego musicians, we all run in the same circles and know each other from various symphony, stage show, and other local ensembles and have a good time together catching up on the wedding and events business and trends that we are seeing. 

But what I hope brought you to this blog today is a desire to see what our ensemble can provide for your wedding that a string quartet can't. As a wind quintet, we have a very wide array of music stylings - over 700 arrangements of music spanning cinema soundtracks, classical and Baroque favorites, jazz and swing, Broadway, pop covers, and more. In fact we custom arrange music to fit many of our clients - some that are Disney lovers enjoy listening to their favorite melodies from Aladdin or The Little Mermaid, others that love the Beatles find their wedding songs in our extensive Fab Four catalogue. 

Wind quintets are made for outdoor performances. We typically do not need to be amplified and our sounds carry throughout the wedding venue, allowing us to instantly set the mood as guests arrive. Historically, wind quintets have been around for hundreds of years, and were a common sight in the plaza's of Vienna performing for royals and at special celebrations. Our ensemble consists of the principal wind instruments of the symphony orchestra: clarinet, flute, oboe, French horn, and bassoon. The sound combinations of our instruments meld to create unique colors, harmonies, drama, flare, and a full rich feeling.

​Wind quintets are made for outdoor performances. We typically do not need to be amplified and our sounds carry throughout the wedding venue, allowing us to instantly set the mood as guests arrive. Historically, wind quintets have been around for hundreds of years, and were a common sight in the plaza's of Vienna performing for royals and at special celebrations. Our ensemble consists of the principal wind instruments of the symphony orchestra: clarinet, flute, oboe, French horn, and bassoon. The sound combinations of our instruments meld to create unique colors, harmonies, drama, flare, and a full rich feeling.

​So we hope that you will consider booking the Left Coast Quintet for your upcoming wedding celebration! While we are not a San Diego string quartet, we are a professional San Diego classical ensemble made up of fun, engaging, and down to earth musicians who can really impress and elevate your day!

We get it, weddings can be costly! From venue rentals, decor, invitations, photography, and hiring your favorite musicians, it is understandable that trying to find places to save some money might be high on your importance list. Take our word for it though, from experience at hundreds of weddings, you want to make sure you have a wedding planner or at least a day-of coordinator.

Wedding planners are pros, and there is a reason they charge what they do. They've been in the industry, they know the "behind the scenes" scene at venues, they know which vendors are best and how to get them set up, and they know how to organize your wedding day as well as the week and month prior to it. Honestly, they know how to handle emergency situations and make them work as well - really they can be event savers in some situations.

We've been at a number of weddings without a planner/coordinator, and here are some things we've seen happen:

• At one wedding, guests arrived and didn't know where to go or where to sit. There was no organization or order to what was happening, and guests were still mingling around without direction when the processional was supposed to start.
• A wedding in Bonita, the officiant wasn't advised that the wedding processional was starting, and had to run around the outside of the seating to get to the front. In all honesty, we didn't know it was starting either, we were just playing background music when the first groomsman started walking down the isle with others following!
• At a different wedding, no one was there to tell the wedding party what order they were in or when they were supposed to walk down the isle, there was no rehearsal, so everyone was confused about what to do. At the end of the wedding, the bride was overheard exasperatedly talking to a family friend "why isn't anyone organizing anything!?!" 

Well, the answer and solution to all of these problems would have been to have a wedding planner list out all of the details, times of arrival, order of the ceremony, and everything else. Not be wedding planners ourselves, we can see the amount of work that goes into their daily schedules, it is really imperative to know in advance how your day will go.

There are of course many options to wedding planning. Most couples do some type of hybrid, a planner who will start working with them about a month before the ceremony to get all of the venue details and vendors in order, plan the day, and work the event. If you happen to be a very organized and detail oriented person who has free time, you could instead just hire a day of coordinator to run everything for your wedding day smoothly. If on the other hand you don't have time or the desire to plan anything, hiring a planner that can run things starting a year out, including venue tours and vendor contracts, might be more beneficial.

One last point to remember - venues typically provide a venue coordinator for their site, a person who is an event manager specifically for the venue. They are there to ensure the venue is open, clean, and that staff and vendors show up and set up in the right places, but typically they are not your day of coordinator. Unless you've worked something out with a venue who has onsite coordination staff to help you out, don't assume that an event manager will be there to help with your day of timing. 

If you have other questions and want to speak to us about experiences or learn about some of the amazing San Diego wedding planners we've been honored to work with, drop us a line or leave a comment below!