What happens when equipment fails

Equipment breaks. Power goes out. Things go wrong. This is not a risk to be eliminated, it is a condition of doing live events, and anyone telling you otherwise has either been lucky or is not being straight with you.

The question is not whether something will go wrong at your wedding. It is what happens in the ninety seconds afterwards.

Redundancy is the boring answer and the correct one. A second system that can take over. Backup microphones. A battery option for anything happening away from mains power. None of this is visible to you on the night, which is exactly the point, and none of it is in the photographs on anybody's website.

The other half is the human response. The technical failure is rarely the problem. The problem is two hundred people noticing something has stopped and looking around to see how worried they should be. Somebody has to hold the room while it gets fixed, and that is a completely different skill from fixing it.

What to ask before you book. What is your backup for the main system. What happens if the venue loses power. Who is on site who can fix something without leaving the room unattended. And, most revealing, tell me about a time something went wrong.

The answer to the last one matters more than the first three. Anyone who has done this for a while has a story. Someone who claims nothing has ever gone wrong has either not worked enough weddings or is not going to tell you when it does.