If you have not yet chosen a venue for your event, it’s worth at least considering room acoustics as one factor in your choice. A great many events we have played, especially weddings, have been held in rooms that are very “lively” acoustically — that is, they have a lot of hard, reflective surfaces like hardwood, marble, glass, tile, etc., and very little absorbing material like carpet, drapes, acoustic ceilings, upholstered chairs, and so forth. While a room like that can be great for choirs, string quartets, and the like, it can be very problematic for a rock band with drums and amplified instruments. In particular, there is no “volume knob” on the drums, and so the sound of drums can be overwhelming in a small, reflective room. Moreover, the volume on other instruments and on the band vocals needs to be brought up to be heard over the drums, so there is a definite limit to how quietly a rock band like ours can play in any given setting!
The bottom line is this: If you choose a room that has a lot of natural reverberation, then it will be difficult to make the band sound really good (not boomy or muddy), and it will be even more difficult to effectively control overall volume so that people sitting at the other end of the room can converse normally. We will of course do our best with whatever room we’re given, but please understand that our sound engineer has only so many ways to work magic! It will help, by the way, when the room is full of people, since people help absorb sound — a nearly empty room reverberates much more than a packed one!