The floor is the whole job.
Nobody at a school dance is waiting politely through your set. If the floor thins, that is a mistake, and it gets fixed in the next two tracks.
Gobo Studios · a DBA of Monterey Skates LLC · Monterey, CA · (831) 264-8797 · gobostudios.com
School events · Monterey & the Central Coast
We do rooms with 400 teenagers in them. The floor stays full.
Prom, homecoming, grad night, winter formal, rallies. One person who runs the music, the lighting, and the sound, and who knows what your district office is going to ask for before it asks.
For the district office
Everything your business office is going to ask for
Here is the whole list, in roughly the order it comes up. Print this page if it helps. If your district has its own vendor packet, send it over and it comes back filled out, not “in progress”.
Paperwork
- W-9 on request, returned within two business days.
- A written contract on every event. Scope, arrival time, hours, load-in door, overtime rate, cancellation terms, and what happens if equipment fails. Plain English, no attachments you have to chase.
- Your district’s vendor forms, registration portals, and conflict-of-interest paperwork completed by me, not handed back to you.
Payment
- Purchase orders accepted.
- Net-30 on district invoicing.
- ASB accounts, booster club cheques, and parent-committee cheques all fine.
- If your business office cannot release a deposit before a PO number exists, say so at enquiry and the contract gets structured around the PO instead of around the deposit.
Music your admin can sign off on
- Radio edits only. Every track is checked for lyrics before it goes anywhere near the show.
- You get the playlist for approval ahead of the date.
- A do-not-play list is honoured exactly. Artists, songs, whole genres, whatever your admin decides.
- Student requests run through the same filter. Nothing goes on because a kid asked nicely at the booth.
- Where the music comes from: every track was purchased outright or comes from a professional pool subscription. No rips, no YouTube audio. Karaoke tracks come from licensed commercial catalogues.
One honest note on licensing. Under US copyright law the ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and GMR licences sit with the venue or the event organiser, not with the DJ. If a vendor tells you their licence covers your event, check that claim carefully. What a DJ can actually tell you is where the library came from, which is the line above.
On the day
- Arrival 90 minutes before doors, every time.
- Load-in through whichever door your facilities manager wants, at whichever time he wants.
- Cable taped or matted on every path a student walks on.
- Sound check finished before the first student is in the room, not during.
- Give me your facilities contact and I will deal with him directly instead of routing it through you.
When something breaks
- Backup gear travels to every event: a second controller, a spare wireless mic and receiver, spare cabling, and a backup laptop carrying the same library.
- The failure plan is written into the contract. What fails, what covers it, and how long the gap is.
- The worst outcome at a school dance is silence in a full room. The plan exists to make that a thirty-second problem instead of a night-ending one.
Clearance
I am completing Live Scan clearance under California Education Code 45125.1. If your district requires clearance on file before I am on site, tell me early. It takes about two weeks.
Insurance
Coverage is being placed through the ADJA and is not bound yet. I will not tell you I am insured before it is, and I will not send you a certificate I do not have. Ask at enquiry and you will get the current status and a date rather than a brochure.
Why that matters to you
A room full of students is its own kind of job
Plenty of event work runs to a timeline that holds still: a seated room, a printed programme, a start and an end that nobody moves. We do that work too, and it is a real skill.
A prom is 400 teenagers, a hard three-hour window, an administrator watching the floor, and a room that empties in ninety seconds when a slow song lands in the wrong place. Different gear, a different read of the room, different paperwork. The rig, the library, and the paperwork here are all set up for that room.
The buyer is not the audience.
Students hear the music. An activities director signs the contract and a business manager pays it. This page is written for the second two.
The paperwork is the hard part.
Most vendors are fine at the dance and terrible at the district office. That is the part we prepared for.
| Room | What that room actually needs |
|---|---|
| Up to 150 — winter formal, middle-school dance, small rally | One pair of tops on poles, one sub, a four-fixture wash, one wireless mic. One person on site. |
| 150 to 400 — homecoming, most proms | PA sized to the room with a fill for the dead corner, the full moving-head and wash rig, uplighting in your theme colours, a dedicated announcement mic. |
| 400 and up — large prom, grad night, all-school rally | Coverage measured rather than guessed, the full rig plus front light so the photos are not lit by a phone, and a second person on site so the booth is never unattended. |
What moves the number inside a tier: how many hours of show you need — setup and teardown are never on your clock — whether there is a second room, how far the load-in door is from where the gear parks, and how big a rig the room calls for.
The rooms
Five different nights, five different jobs
These get sold as one service and priced as one service. They are not the same job.
Prom
Prom is the one with a run of show. Grand march, court announcement, photos running in a side room, dinner if you are doing one, then a floor that has to hold until the last twenty minutes. Send me your timeline and I run to it. Announcements land at the minute you set, music drops when the principal needs the mic, and the lighting changes state for the slow set instead of strobing through it. Bring your theme and the rig gets programmed to your colours.
Homecoming
Same week as a game, usually in a gym or on a quad, louder and shorter than prom. Load-in has to happen around the field schedule, so tell me what the schedule is and I will fit into it. A gym is an acoustics problem before it is a music problem. That is a speaker placement job, and it is one of the reasons the van arrives ninety minutes early.
Grad Night
All night, no alcohol, and the enemy is 3 a.m., not the playlist. It runs in blocks: real energy while everyone is still up, quieter beds while the inflatables and the games take their turn, then a hard push in the last hour so nobody goes home remembering the flat stretch. Karaoke is a good grad-night weapon, and it is the one thing that reliably brings back the kids who have stopped dancing. Chaperones get a microphone that works.
Winter Formal
Smaller than prom, dressier than homecoming, and usually in a cafeteria or a hotel room with a low ceiling and hard walls. Sub placement and an uplighting wash do most of the work. This is the right night for the smaller rig. A room of 150 does not need prom’s rig and should not be charged for it.
Rallies
A rally is twelve minutes of audio cues under a gym full of noise. Class walk-on tracks, a countdown, someone’s phone with the video on it, and a microphone that has to be understood over 600 students. It is a different job from a dance, it takes less gear, and it is usually the cheapest thing on this page.
The lighting is not a preset off a rental shelf. The moving heads, pars, and wash bars run on DMX out of SceneRig, a lighting and visual engine built here. It locks to the beat of whatever is playing, so the room changes on the music instead of on a timer, and a scene change between “slow song” and “last twenty minutes” is one control, not a rewire.
Karaoke is the same story. KaraokeFlow is our product, and it runs our own shows. Guests scan a QR code and queue songs from their phones. Phone requests, no paper slips, no shouting. Two companies sell school and venue karaoke on exactly that hook. We built ours.
All of it was tested in our own venue. Monterey Skates ran a pop-up rink at the Monterey County Fairgrounds from May 2025 to March 2026, served more than 4,000 customers, and was a runner-up for a Monterey Bay Parent award. That is where the rig and the software got their hours. It is not a DJ statistic. It is just where the gear was proved.
Questions we actually get
Asked the way administrators ask it
- “Are you insured?”
- Not yet, and I will not pretend otherwise. Coverage is being placed through the ADJA and is not bound. Ask me at enquiry and you will get the status and a date. If your district requires a bound policy on file before a contract is signed, that is a reasonable rule and I will tell you plainly whether I can meet it for your date.
- “Do you have a Live Scan on file?”
- I am completing Live Scan clearance under California Education Code 45125.1. It takes about two weeks. If your district requires clearance before I am on campus, tell me at enquiry so the timing works.
- “Can you invoice the district? We can’t release money up front.”
- Yes. Purchase orders accepted, net-30 on district invoicing, and the contract can be structured so nothing is due before a PO number exists. ASB, booster, and parent-committee cheques are all normal here.
- “Who approves the music?”
- You do. You get the playlist ahead of the date and your do-not-play list is honoured exactly. Everything is a radio edit. Student requests are filtered against the same list at the booth.
- “What happens if the equipment fails in the middle of the dance?”
- Backup gear is in the van at every event: second controller, spare wireless mic and receiver, spare cable, backup laptop with the same library. The contract states what covers what. The goal is a thirty-second gap, not a phone call to your principal.
- “Our gym already has a sound system. Can you just use ours?”
- Sometimes, and I will tell you honestly. Most gym systems are built for a whistle and an announcement mic, not for music at dance level, and pushing them there is how they get damaged. I bring my own PA and can run announcements through yours if that is easier for your staff. Tell me what is on the wall and you will get a straight answer instead of an upsell.
- “Do you do fog or haze?”
- Haze is included in your package, but it only comes out if your facilities manager clears it in writing — and in a lot of gyms the answer is no, because the alarm system will not tolerate it. Nothing changes on the price either way. The rig is built to look good in clean air.
- “How loud is this going to be?”
- Loud on the floor, conversational at the edges. If an administrator asks for it down, it goes down immediately and stays down. That is not a negotiation on the night.
- “Can you MC?”
- Yes. Court announcements, class walk-ons, raffle, the principal’s two minutes. Give me the script and the pronunciations and I will read what you wrote. If you would rather nobody on staff hears the DJ talk, that also works.
- “What do you need from us?”
- Two dedicated 20-amp circuits if you can manage it, a six-foot table, a load-in door, a facilities contact, and the run of show. That is the whole list.
Next step
Check your date
Send the date, the school, the room, and roughly how many students. You get availability and a written quote back, not a call-me-to-discuss. If your business office needs the W-9 or the vendor packet to start moving, ask in the same message and it comes with the quote.