One of the first emotions you experience when having to plan your event/function is ‘stress’. It is completely understandable as you have plan dates, venue options, music, decor, food, speaker, agenda et cetera, et cetera

In this article, we gotchu! To get started, choosing the perfect venue is one of the first things to tick off your to-do list. 

We’ve listed 6 guidelines & tips on how to choose the best suited venue for you:

1. When do I start looking for a venue?

It is good to start looking for a venue approximately 8/9 months in advance. This gives you enough time to plan other things around the venue.

2. Services and extras

It is very important to know if the venue has extra amenities such as: 

•   A Kitchen

•   Catering Services

•   Tables & Chairs

•   Decor

•   Setup/Cleanup Crew

•   Audio/Visual Facilities 

If the venue you want does not offer all these services but is perfect anyway, you can absolutely hire these extras individually!

3. Capacity

You want to make sure you know the venues maximum capacity… Duuh right? Well, some people miss this minor detail because they are so busy organizing a hundred different things. You want a comfortable space that will look spacious but also cosy at the same time.

4. Layout

Be smart. Choosing a venue that hosts similar events may cater for almost everything that you need. It is also wise to physically view venue to decide on all activities such as guest seating, stage, dance floor, entrance tables etc.

5. Sound acoustics

Ever been to venues where the band plays and everything just sounds so loud and… not so good? I’ve been doing music for years and from experience, you can have the best equipment and mixing engineer but if the venue is not built for beautiful acoustics, it will not sound great.

For smaller venues, ask your band to play at a reasonable level, not too loud. For example, having a smaller amp on a smaller stage definitely helps. Make sure your mixing engineer is central to the band, many venues have the engineer behind the bar or somewhere less central, cutting out a lot of high frequencies. This is a good tip for the band and engineer you are hiring.

Choosing the traditional ‘cuboid/shoebox shaped’ venue is arguably the key to excellent sound experience.

6. How to search for a venue

There are plenty of venue and sound hire deals for your perusal on Hire Deals. Visit their websites and purchase today.

We wish you all the best with your venue hunting and hope that these tips will help get you started in the right direction.