If you’re having a civil ceremony in Asturias and you want it in the garden, the short answer is yes, you can, and you’ll be preparing two ceremonies. One outside and one inside. They aren’t the same ceremony with the chairs moved. The volume changes, the microphone position changes, the cut point of every piece changes, and sometimes a whole piece changes.
The decision about which one happens isn’t taken on the Monday of that week. It’s taken on the day, about two and a half hours before the scheduled start, with the radar in front of us, and you’re the ones who take it with the technical information on the table. What follows is how those two ceremonies get prepared in parallel, and what happens exactly when the wind comes in from the north-west at half six in the evening.
Getting married outdoors in Asturias is a gamble
The forecast here lies by omission. A day in June can give you sun, a twelve-minute downpour and sun again, all inside the same hour. Then there’s the orbayu, the fine drizzle that keeps this corner of northern Spain green. It doesn’t show up in the forecast as rain because technically almost nothing falls, but in twenty minutes it leaves hair wet, the mixing desk damp and the back rows looking at the sky instead of at you.
Wind has a timetable. On the coast, from Villaviciosa to Llanes, mornings tend to be calm and the sea breeze gets up from midday onwards. By six or seven in the evening, which is when nearly every civil ceremony is held, there’s sustained wind at most venues on the rasa costera, the flat coastal shelf that runs between the mountains and the cliffs with nothing standing in the way. It isn’t a storm. It’s a constant breeze that moves fabric, tips over lightweight mic stands and gets into any capsule that isn’t protected.
Inland, in the valleys around Oviedo or along the Nalón, wind bothers you far less. What turns up there in July and August is the afternoon thunderstorm, which you can see coming half an hour out and which unloads hard and short. And there’s a third factor nobody writes into the spreadsheet: temperature. A twenty-five-minute ceremony at eight in the evening in September on the coast, sixteen degrees and high humidity, feels long. People don’t complain about the music, they complain about the cold, and cold shows in how a room responds.
What wind does to a lapel microphone
A lapel mic is omnidirectional. It picks up whatever reaches it from any direction, and that’s the problem. Wind doesn’t sound like wind on a lapel mic, it sounds like a low thud. A dull thump that swallows a whole syllable. If that thump lands right on the “I do”, no amount of EQ afterwards will bring it back. What’s buried stays buried.
The little black foam that comes in the box handles breath and plosives, not real wind. Once the breeze is moving hair, you need a furry windshield, the one that looks like a small animal and ruins the close-up photo. It goes hidden under the lapel of the jacket, on the opposite side to the air. On a dress with no lapel it gets harder. There’s no stiff fabric to anchor it to, the silk rubs against the capsule, and that rubbing is as loud as the wind.
So at very exposed ceremonies I suggest a handheld mic for the vows. It’s dynamic and directional, it rejects almost everything that doesn’t come from the front and it copes with wind far better. People like the look of it less. Functionally it’s the difference between being heard and not being heard. At the desk, on top of the physical protection, I work with a filter that cuts below 100 or 120 hertz, where wind rumble lives and no part of a voice does.
The officiant is another matter. They usually speak standing, turned away, moving about, and if they’re wearing a lapel mic they drift off the point where you set the level. In wind, the five-minute conversation before you start — don’t turn your head while you talk, speak towards the chairs — saves more trouble than any expensive kit.
Plan B is not just moving the chairs
Outdoors there’s no reverberation. Sound leaves, travels and dissipates. The voice sounds dry and you have to push it, the speakers run at a higher level than seems reasonable, and the microphone hardly ever feeds back because there are no walls to send anything back.
Indoors the opposite happens, and this is where a badly resolved move ruins a ceremony. The main hall of an Asturian quinta, one of those old country manor houses, with a five or six metre ceiling, a hard floor, exposed stone and no curtains, gives the voice back with a very long tail. If I go in at the level I had ready for the garden, the words pile on top of each other and from row four you hear noise, not a speech. You have to drop the volume, bring the speakers closer to the guests, lower them and point them at people instead of at the back wall. And watch for feedback, which indoors shows up on the first try.
The repertoire suffers too. An ambient piece with a long reverb tail, the kind that works beautifully in an open meadow, smears in a stone room. The reverb on the recording adds to the reverb of the room and you get a cloud with no edges. There I’d rather have dry piano, something with less sustain and defined attacks. It works the other way round as well. A solo piano miniature that sounds intimate indoors is left small in a two-thousand-square-metre garden and the air carries it off. If you want to go deeper into what plays at each moment of the ceremony, it’s in this article on the music of a civil ceremony. This one is about where, and under what conditions.
And the timings change. Outside, the aisle can be twenty metres and an honest entrance runs close to a minute. Inside, that same walk is eight metres and twenty seconds. The piece you had cut for a minute and a half needs a different exit point. That’s why I carry two timing scripts, one per setting, with the cut points marked on each.
The last thing, and the dullest, is the power supply. At many venues the garden circuit and the hall circuit hang off different boards, and there are halls where the only decent socket is thirty metres from the altar. You check that on the site visit, not on the day with the dress already on.
If you’re thinking about an outdoor ceremony and want to know what it means at your particular venue, tell me where it is and I’ll tell you what you’re dealing with. See how I work in Asturias
Asturian venues and what each one asks for
- A venue on the rasa costera. The coastal shelf, flat open land above the cliffs. Wind is close to guaranteed from five in the evening and there’s nothing to stop it. Speakers low and well forward, handheld mic for the vows, furry protection on everything else.
- The garden of a palace or an inland quinta. Little wind and a demanding plan B, because indoors usually means a stone hall with a long tail. Here the move changes the sound more than anywhere else.
- A marquee. Solves the rain and complicates the audio. With orbayu you notice nothing. With real rain, the drumming on the canvas lifts the background noise enough that an unamplified voice won’t reach the third row. The roof reflects, too.
- A terrace or a city garden in Gijón or Oviedo. The enemy isn’t the wind, it’s the city. Traffic, bar terraces next door, and the curfews and decibel limits each space sets. There’s more detail on the wedding DJ in Oviedo page.
- A llagar. An Asturian cider house, lined in wood, low-ceilinged, with good natural acoustics for the spoken voice. There’s room for very little kit, and that plays in your favour, because very little is enough.
- The beach. On top of the permit and the sand, the sea makes a constant broadband noise that eats the intelligibility of consonants. It’s the most beautiful setting and the hardest one to get sound right in.
Each of these places also shapes what comes afterwards, because the ceremony, the cocktail hour and the party are built on the same day and the same logistics. How I fit the three pieces together is in the full session of a wedding in Asturias.
When the decision is made and who makes it
I look at the forecast on the Thursday, yes, but that’s for a general idea, not for deciding. A forecast more than twenty-four hours out gives you the tendency of the day. The precipitation radar two or three hours out tells you whether that cell is going to pass over the venue or over the next valley along.
The useful moment comes during the setup. Striking a ceremony rig, moving it and getting it ready again with a soundcheck takes forty or fifty minutes, and only if the indoor space is free, which it almost never is because it’s usually the same hall where the cocktail or the dinner is already laid out. That’s the real point of no return. Which is why the conversation happens about two and a half hours before the ceremony time.
You decide. I give you data, not opinion dressed as data. What time the front comes in, how long it takes to pass, how long your ceremony runs, whether people in row four will understand you in that wind. The venue says how long it takes to move the chairs. Whoever is coordinating the day fits the two things together. And if the technical answer is that you won’t be understood, I say it in those words.
One thing that doesn’t work is starting outside to see what happens and moving halfway through. Shifting ninety guests while the two of you wait is a long, awkward twenty minutes with everyone on their feet. If the doubt is serious, you do it inside and, if it clears, you go out for the cocktail. The other way round is worse.
The questions that always come up before deciding
Nearly every couple asks me the same things, so I’ll leave them here. Yes, it’s worth taking the risk on an outdoor ceremony, as long as there’s a real plan B and not a hall kept “just in case” that nobody has measured. Most days it ends up happening outside. What can’t happen is the alternative being improvised at seven in the evening.
Moving a ceremony from outside to inside costs between forty and fifty minutes on the sound alone, counting the strike, the reset and the check. Add whatever the venue takes with chairs, aisle runner and decoration, and you’ll see why the decision is taken hours ahead and not minutes ahead.
The kit is the same in both settings, the same speakers and the same microphones. What changes is the level, the height, where they point and the EQ on the voices. Outdoors you need to push. In a stone room you need to hold back.
If it rains on the marquee, orbayu makes no difference at all. With real rain, the drumming on the canvas lifts the background noise enough that someone reading a text from the guest seats won’t reach the third row without a mic. Better to have that spare mic planned in advance than to go hunting for it at the time.
And if you’re marrying on the coast, the earlier the ceremony, the better for the sound. The sea breeze builds as the afternoon goes on, so a five o’clock ceremony usually has far less wind than the same ceremony at seven. If the time is locked by the light or by the caterer, you compensate with protection and a handheld mic.
If you already have a date and a venue in Asturias, write to me and we’ll go through scenario A and scenario B together before you sign anything. Check availability
