O’Dea Entertainment

I’ve used Michael from O’Dea Entertainment for two «BIG» birthday parties of mine. He is fantastic and so accommodating! Played every single song I selected in advance, plus had every «request» that my guests asked for. He’ll get everyone up and dancing and having a blast! His mom, Clara, is the business manager and she is 100% accessible by phone or email and will be sure every detail is in place. They are the best, and I can’t wait to use him again!

I recently had O’Dea Entertainment DJ my wedding and they did an amazing job! They were so easy to work with leading up to the big day and on the big day they didn’t bother me with anything. It was nice being able to count on that. Ed kept the dance floor full all night!

If you need a DJ and you’re in the Chicagoland area, look no further. If there’s a better DJ company out there, I’d love to know what more they could possibly do than O’Dea did for us on our wedding day. Here’s our story.
We planned our wedding out to great detail early on. Early on we decided that we didn’t want a DJ; we had both been to weddings that had DJ’s that turned the wedding into a 4 hour advertisement for their company. I had all of the music on my iSomething and the hall was able to accommodate us just plugging in our music and hitting play.
3 weeks before the wedding my lovely fiancé’ sprung the change on me; she thought a DJ would be a good idea. After my initial shock and protest, as well as her saying she had a friend of a friend that knew someone that had worked with a guy that knew this DJ company (OK, it wasn’t exactly like that but they were referred to us)… I said OK and called them up.
After a brief round of phone-​tag, Clara and I got in touch. We talked through the date, the times, and what we wanted for the wedding. I was initially apprehensive because I had 50+ songs already picked out that we HAD to have at the wedding and she said that we needed to pick 5 «must have» songs. As leery as I was, we agreed to have her DJ (Ed) meet with us. Two days later (we talked on a Saturday, met Ed on Monday), Ed drove out from the city to our home in the ‘burbs to meet with us.
From minute one we were comfortable with Ed. Him and his fellow DJ (I think his brother) are the primary guys doing the gigs and they pick who does what based on Clara’s phone screening (they tailor the DJ to the type of party/​people involved). Ed is a Chicago native with a cool demeanor and he can handle anything you throw at him. We talked through our concerns about advertising, the song list, and what we needed to have played, and at every turn, he was cool with it all. Ed reviewed our song list and made some recommendations that were absolutely spot on; some songs that you and I may THINK are great to dance to… aren’t. Some that we might think won’t work in a dance… will.
I gave Ed some creative license; songs I had planned for the dinner he moved to the dance time. Some that I thought would work for dancing he moved to cocktail hour. It didn’t matter. I gave him a list of 50+ songs that we needed to have played. At the end of the night he came to me all excited that he got them all in except one, which was amazing; it was an eclectic mix!
More than just playing the songs, there were, as there are with any wedding, changes to the schedule. We pulled dinner forward in time, we extended the dancing, we changed up the order of the special dances and the cake-​cutting. Ed rolled with it all. We had a child-​meltdown because he missed HIS song. Ed played a 1-​minute snipit of it to avoid a very important child to us from focusing on missing his favorite song.
After the wedding, everyone that we’ve talked to has said that everything went well but everyone that really knows the behind the scenes parts has said that the DJ was particularly outstanding. Ed did our wedding proud. His whole DJ booth was set up in the corner, with discrete black scrims shielding the lights from his laptop, the mixing board, and the whole setup was as unobtrusive as I’ve ever seen. At the same time, the music was loud enough to keep the dance floor going but not so loud that it drowned out conversations off of the dance floor.
At the end of the day, could we have saved money with an MP3 player and an audio cable? Yes. Would that have caused MORE stress, probably caused some mis-​timed music, some long pauses, and made us unable to change up the order of the songs based on the dynamic nature of events like weddings? Yes. Was O’Dea Entertainment a good choice for our wedding? Yes, Yes, a thousand times Yes. Thank you Ed and Clara for making our wedding sound amazing.