If you’re planning to throw a silent disco at home, for a birthday party, at a wedding or a school and you’re not quite sure where to start… you’re in the right place! We’ve pulled together a comprehensive list of common questions that customers ask us when hiring our silent disco equipment.
Read the rest of the article to find out our top tips and tricks that will help you host the best silent disco, including:
What is a silent disco?
The craze of silent disco has lots of synonyms around the world including silent headphone party, silent rave, quiet party and headphone disco.
If you haven’t been to one before you might be wondering what is the point of a silent disco?! A silent disco is very similar to a normal club night, or birthday party, except, instead of music blasting out of speakers, music is transmitted directly into LED wireless headphones.
The benefits are that partying can continue way past normal noise curfews, and you can play up to three music channels at the same time. So, there can be different music for everyone’s taste. You could have some 60’s classics for grandparents, 80’s anthems for parents, and house music for your mates, all playing at exactly the same time.
How does a silent disco work?
You might be thinking that it’s really difficult to set up all of the equipment, but in fact setting up a silent disco is really simple. To make silent discos work you need four things; between one & three radio transmitters, a bunch of wireless party headphones, a music source for each transmitter, and some friends ready to dance.
The music source is fed into the radio transmitters which then broadcasts the music wirelessly up to a distance of 100 metres. The receivers located in the wireless party headphones pick up the signal and play the music through the headsets. It’s a little bit like how radio works. Each transmitter you install will be linked to one of the channels on the headphones. This means that attendees at your event can instantly flick between channels and tune into different DJs or silent disco playlists whenever they please.
We often get asked “how do you connect headphones to the silent disco equipment?” because naturally, people think that it’s like connecting your Air Pods to your phone and that there must be a way to ‘connect’ it. However, the beauty of silent disco headphones is that you only need to turn them on. Because the receivers are already programmed into the radio frequencies that the transmitters broadcast, they will automatically play the music when that channel is selected. There’s no need for Bluetooth or infrared, just good old-fashioned radio waves! If you want to know exactly how to use our wireless headphones, check out our detailed equipment set up guide.
What equipment do you need for a silent disco?
Here’s a list of the equipment we provide as part of a silent disco rental package:
- LED 3 Channel Headphones
- 3 x Radio Transmitters
- Audio Cables & Power Plugs
- Free Lightning & USB-C Phone Adapters
- DPD Courier Delivery & Collection
- Free Spotify Public Playlists
- Setup Instructions
What you will need to provide:
- A house or venue to hire
- 3 x music sources such as phones, laptops, or DJ equipment
- Some guests ready to sing and dance the night away
How to hire silent disco headphones
To get all the equipment you need to host a headphone dance party, you’ll need to find a reputable and reliable silent disco hire company, like us. We will rent you all the equipment needed to host a silent disco and deliver it to your address anywhere in the UK via a courier company.
What types of events are silent discos good for?
Headphone parties are great for a wide variety of small, medium and large events. Some of the most popular types of events that clients hire our amazing silent disco equipment for include:
- Birthday Parties
- Weddings
- Children’s parties
- Corporate work events
- Schools & PTA events
- Silent raves
- Music festivals
- Charity fundraising ideas
- Silent cinema
- House & garden parties
Quiet headphone parties work really well for events at home or in the garden. We’ve noticed that at-home events have been happening more and more since early 2020 due to the lockdown restrictions and limitations of social gatherings in public spaces like night clubs.
Silent discos work well for post-COVID events because it’s easy to social distance. There’s no need to be gathered close to a speaker to hear the music. Anyone with a pair of wireless earphones can find some space within a 100m radius of where the transmitters are stationed and enjoy the same quality of music as everybody else. It also works just as well outdoors as it does indoors.
Does everyone listen to the same music at a silent disco?
The headphones can receive three separate channels of different music simultaneously. To change channel you simply press the switch button on the side and the headsets will instantly change to the next channel.
Because there are three channels of music playing, people will be singing to different music at the same time. This makes silent discos great fun and allows you to play a variety of music on each of the three channels. Guests can listen and dance to different music genres and swop when they want!
Find a venue to hire or have a silent disco at home
You know how it works and you know what you need, so it must be time to find a venue to host your party. Selecting the right venue is a crucial aspect of hosting any party and can often be the difference between an amazing or very average party. Luckily, silent discos give you much more flexibility over the venue because you don’t have to worry about noise curfews and the equipment doesn’t take up much space.
Of course, if you choose to host a headphone party at home, the venue is already sorted. However, if you’re looking to hire a public venue or function room, our advice is not to choose something too big. This is because a dance party vibe is quickly lost if everyone is too spread out. A packed dance floor always gets everybody in the mood!
Book a DJ, Band, or musician
Once you’ve decided on the venue and taken care of hiring the silent disco kit, you want to start thinking of the type of act you want up on stage. You have so many options when it comes to booking an act because anything that can be played through an amplifier, can be played through our silent party equipment.
The most popular type of act is always a head-to-head DJ set. This is where two DJs battle it out to try and win the crowd. It works really well if you have each DJ playing a completely different music genre because you’ll see different dance moves being thrown to different beats, which is entertaining for everybody to see. One specialist silent DJ playing the full night also works really well and you can set up playlists for other channels for a bit of variety too.
It’s also possible for bands to play a silent disco if they use all electrical instruments. So, you can bring live music to any venue without having to worry about upsetting neighbours with loud drumbeats and heavy basslines.
Create your own silent disco playlists
Of course, not every party has the budget to book a professional DJ. If that’s the case, then you can take control of the music by using a silent disco app and creating your very own party playlists, or find playlists others have already made. You can type in keywords such as ‘indie rock‘ or ’80s classics’ into Spotify, Apple Music, or other music streaming apps, and find lots of playlists filled with the best silent disco dance party songs ever!
If you’re going to create your own playlists, then we recommend setting up multiple channels at once so that your attendees have a choice of what to listen to. Try making genre-specific channels and have some fun with it! You could have a channel with 80s classics to see how people react or a channel solely dedicated to the Spice Girls and watch out for any unexpected fans singing along to the lyrics. With three channels of simultaneous music, the possibilities and combination of music is endless.
Think about lighting
Great lighting for a traditional event usually involves a complicated set up where the lighting syncs with the music. However, you can forget about the complicated stuff when you’re hosting a birthday party or wedding reception because it will be impossible to sync the lights with all three music channels anyway. It is still important to get the lighting right though because great lighting pulls people on the dance floor, whereas bad lighting can send them running for the hills.
Check out our lighting options available to hire.
Crowd management & protecting the equipment
For at-home events, you don’t need to hire any security to control the flow of people and staff to keep track of the equipment. You can trust your friends and family to hand everything back at the end of the night in one piece… although we all know how family parties go sometimes!
For large public events here are some tips we find are really useful for managing the crowds and protecting the silent disco equipment:
- Ask your guests for a refundable cash deposit, or hold onto a form of ID in exchange for the headphones. This will reduce the number of runaways leaving the event with your headphones.
- Set up one entry/exit point and have someone on the door to keep an eye out for anyone leaving the venue with a set of headphones.
- Make sure that everyone who enters the event has a pair of quiet party headphones. This will reduce the number of people who claim they didn’t get a pair or say that they have lent them to a friend and now want another pair. It will be much easy to keep track!
Make your silent disco party one to remember
If you’ve still got some time left after you’ve followed the rest of the steps, then why not plan some fun games, create a fancy dress code or add a party theme. Go the extra mile for your guests and make it one to remember!
For example, having a competition at a kid’s party for the best dancer, loudest singer, and best dressed is a great way to get everyone more involved in the party.
Whether it’s a club night or a dance party at home, everyone loves an excuse to dress up. Having a fancy-dress theme will get the laughter started and people seem to lose their inhibitions quicker and start dancing sooner if they’re already dressed up as Frankenstein or Danny Zuko from Greece.
Silent disco hire costs
By this point, you probably only have one question left on your mind… “How much does it cost to hire a silent disco?” Well if you choose to rent your equipment from us, you can have everything you need from just £90. We’ll deliver the equipment to any UK address via courier and you’ll get free access to our Spotify playlists to help with the music on the night. Obviously the bigger the party, the more headphones you will need so here’s a breakdown of our prices for different party sizes. All of the hire prices below include headphones, three transmitters, cables, plugs, courier delivery and set up instructions.
Our Silent Headphone Rental Prices:
- 10 headsets for £110
- 20 headsets for £125
- 50 headsets for £180
- 80 headsets for £225
- 100 headsets for £250
- 125 headsets for £290
- 150 headsets for £345
Which areas do you supply silent disco hire to?
Over the years we have rented our fantastic equipment and silent disco headphones all over the UK including Brighton, Bristol, Nottingham, Swansea, Southampton, Plymouth, Leicester, London, Reading, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow and Edinburgh.
In fact it doesn’t matter where you live in the UK as we can deliver our headphones to any address by courier delivery.
It’s Time to Have Your Own Silent Disco
Hopefully, you now understand lots more about silent headphone parties, which are becoming more and more popular every year with partygoers and event hosts. They work well at weddings, birthday parties, music festivals, schools and anywhere with enough room to dance. The result is a room full of people dancing and singing like nobody’s watching, and what can be more fun than that!?
Here at Silent Disco Party UK we can hire all the equipment you need to throw your own silent headphone disco and deliver it to any UK address. What are you waiting for?!
If you have any questions about silent disco kit hire, want a quote, or would like to book, please Contact Us and we’d be more than happy to have a chat.
Read more of our articles:
- Top 10 Reasons to Hire a Silent Disco Wedding
- The Best Kids Birthday Party Ideas
- How to DJ a Party Using a Music Streaming App
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