We’ve got our bride-to-be guest blogger Kelsey back today to talk about picking her wedding band! Take it away Kelsey.
How to Pick Your Wedding Band | By Kelsey
As you may remember from my first post, the three most important things to me at my wedding are: venue, food, and band. We’ve talked venue, we’ll get to food, but today we’re talking music. I am marrying a music lover. His taste is eclectic in that his top 25 played songs include Beyoncé, The Pointer Sisters, and Hall & Oates. I knew the music had to be perfect, and in my mind I had pictured that perfect music coming from a live band.
Fun fact: I looked into how much Earth, Wind, and Fire costs. Turns out, they’re not in my budget. But that gives you a sense of the vibe I am hoping to pull off.
I wanted a band that will keep my guests dancing all night. Like I can’t feel my feet in these shoes any more, all night. Like this:
So I started googling. I made a spreadsheet. Shocker. I read reviews, watched videos, and narrowed it down to my top five bands. Then I scheduled a date night in, we got some wine and we watched the top five on the tv. My best advice for this type of evening is to put a time limit on it, because there is only so many times you can listen to renditions of Uptown Funk before you want to elope. We narrowed our choices to three bands and called it a night.
I emailed those bands to make sure they were available and to get additional details about fees and costs. For instance, some bands bring their own sound system, some do not. Some bands require you to have a stage, some bands will learn a song for a fee. Make sure to ask the questions that are important to you up front. Most of the time I was dealing with the band manager or agent, so they knew the logistics and business side of things.
Knowing all of these details, I thought we should narrow it down to one band by watching the top three one last time. I really, really recommend doing this because turns out, we had a lot of wine the first go around and thought everyone sounded fantastic. Like we were Paula Abdul Season One of American Idol.
So we picked a band. They rule. There’s a horns section. Section, you guys. A whole section full of horns. I am confident they will have people dancing all night long. In the meantime, I signed the paperwork and sent the deposit. I recommend reading all of the contract and asking questions, because other than the venue, it’s likely to be the longest one. It’s got details you need to be aware of, like sound check timing, lighting requirements, etc. These are things that maybe won’t make a big difference for you, but your day of gal is going to need to know.
We also listened to every single song on the band’s playlist. Yeah. Not my favorite task, but it helped us to rate (yes we had a rating system) must-play songs, ok songs, and never in a million years do not for the love of God play this song. This spreadsheet, I imagine, is going to be really helpful or really annoying for the band. TBD. But as I started out saying, I am marrying a man who loves his music, and that music does not include the Cupid Shuffle.
1 comment