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There is no doubt its loads of fun picking all the different suppliers for your wedding but before you hire a live wedding band, there are 7 essential questions you should ask yourself. Taking my 15 years of experience in the wedding industry, I’ve compiled 7 simple but crucial questions so you can pick the perfect live band for your wedding!
Could I have not come up with loads more questions? Well, we do have a popular guide here that goes through every conceivable question you should be asking once you’ve chosen a live wedding band. It’s a pretty chunky guide with a lot of information so I decided that this guide would
a) Be about helping you while you are still trying to choose a band
b) Would focus solely on the essential questions
Today’s questions and guide are also relevant if you are looking to hire a band for your party or event although I will mainly reference wedding bands and weddings throughout the guide.
I wanted to keep this guide leaner and meaner when compared to our monster guide (mentioned above) because it’s just information overload otherwise! This guide will give you all the help you need but quickly and in more easily digestible chunks. Less is more sometimes! If once you’ve read this, you feel like you want more information, I really recommend you read the above guide or contact us, obligation free, 7 days a week, 10 am to 10 pm for all the help you could need.
Yep, that’s right, I’ve gone and made an infographic for you all too. You can’t get clearer than that! After you’ve had a good look at it, carry on with my 7 key questions in more detail…
You’ve asked yourself the all-important 7 questions above and are ready to look at some award-winning live wedding bands! Well, our popular guides below will show you all the live bands you could wish for. Otherwise, keep scrolling for my 7 questions covered in more detail…
I’m sure this is already a huge part of your wedding planning, but your wedding theme is also hugely relevant when choosing a live band. Are you having a suave and sophisticated or riotous festival-style wedding perhaps? If you are designing a wedding anything like this or like anything else in between for that matter, you want to make sure all your wedding music and your live band fit into your carefully styled theme.
When it comes to live wedding music, there are so many different types of live wedding band out there so you can easily choose a band that will suit your theme or themes and perfectly complement your special day. You can also easily pick a live band that won’t suit your wedding theme at all and this is mostly down to wedding entertainment websites selling you the wrong band. They can’t always help it as unlike us, they don’t perform in the bands you see on their website so they don’t always know what’s suitable for you.
On two ends of the wedding band spectrum, we have Southside Sparkle (above) who will add a glamourous splash of vintage 1920s wedding music, and Stan Darsh who deliver an uncompromising festival-style rave to any wedding. Established live wedding bands like Good Fellas and The Usual Suspects bring a fantastically varied live show that seamlessly fits into any wedding theme and gets any guest and their dog up on that dancefloor!
If you and your guests like all the hits performed with a slightly rockier edge, all-male, 4-piece band League of Gentlemen are the live wedding band for you but conversely if you want great wedding music performed with folky festival flair you can’t go far wrong with hugely popular Paper Boats (above). If you are after the softer side of the wedding music spectrum, The Meraki Jazz Collective and Anthropology are perfect and if you want an in-depth look at all the different styles of wedding band on offer, have a read of our fantastic guide here.
I’m sure you have a pretty good idea of how much your wedding will cost so having a good idea of how much you can or want to spend on your wedding band is a crucial question to ask yourself. Hiring a good quality live wedding band can start from as little as £700 and go right up to £10,000 or more!
Fantastic do-it-all wedding bands like The Avengers will get everyone on the dancefloor from £700 upwards while 4-piece, in-demand all-round music masters Playback are available from £1200. With their specially tailored Swing, Ratpack, and Soul wedding music set, Night and Day (above) add stylish sophistication to any wedding from £1100 and our epic 12-piece monster wedding band Flair Twelve will blow you and your wedding guests away from £7900. Why not check out our in-depth 25 award-winning wedding bands guide for loads more great band ideas and insight?
With over 60% of weddings going over budget, have a good idea of what you want to and can spend before you start looking, and make sure to be realistic about what kind of band is suitable. I would never suggest or recommend booking a 13-piece act like Flair Twelve just because they are super stylishly massive unless I knew they could fit into your venue, perform properly for you, and were suitable. Our ground-breaking study on how much wedding bands cost is a must-read by the way!
Make sure that with any band you hire, all extra fees, deposits, and any hidden fees are listed in the final price so you don’t get any nasty surprises! Here at Seventh Second, any quotes we give you for our wedding bands are the full and final ones. No hidden fees or sneaky expenses and we think that’s how it should be for every live wedding band out there. If you are on a strict budget or struggling to afford the live wedding band you want, why not ask about possible freebies, smaller band line-ups, shorter live sets, seasonal discounts, or special offers? You should read our guide on how to save money on a wedding band if you have a strict budget to stick to.
Question 3 is an important one as there isn’t much point in booking that stupendously good wedding music band if your venue can’t accommodate them so before hiring any band, check if your venue has any sound, space, or other limitations which could hinder live music being performed. Sound limiters are the big one…
Very common in all sorts of venues nowadays are sound limiters. These systems are there to restrict the level of noise produced in a venue at all times. They punish “noisy” bands (or even “noisy” wedding guests) by cutting the power and lights for 10 to 20 seconds, cutting them off completely, or compressing and so lowering a wedding band’s volume through their PA system. A bit party adverse right? You can learn all you need about these limiters here.
If your venue has one of these systems and its decibel limit is below 90db, pretty much all live wedding bands apart from acoustic ones such as Acoustic Captain or Brilliant Corners are really going to struggle to perform for you.
Question 4 time. My guide on wedding DJ vs. live band really digs deep into this topic and will leave you in no doubt but maybe you do want a DJ as well as a live wedding band, or maybe deep down you just want a DJ. Both have different entertainment on offer so check our guide out before you book!
I don’t want to spoil the ending of my wedding DJ vs wedding band guide but if you can stretch your budget to have both, everyone here at Seventh Second wholly endorses it! You will have a fabulous wedding party and if it is a bit too expensive, don’t worry, all our wedding bands offer a DJ’ing service for free. Ask us all about it.
I know it’s your wedding and you are splashing the big bucks but trust me when I say that over the 15-odd years I’ve been performing at weddings, the best ones, the ones with glowing newlyweds, proud parents, and guests that just couldn’t stop partying are the ones where wedding music was picked because it would entertain everyone. Being part of a wedding where everyone is having a fantastic time is truly amazing. When we have the time, everyone at Seventh Second heads to the pub and talks about how fun it was to be a part of all those people’s special days.
We speak to so many couples who just want to make sure the band they pick will make everyone happy and get everyone dancing at some point. Check out our real wedding testimonials for hundreds of lovely tales of wedding bliss.
Three stand-out wedding bands that consistently amaze a wide range of guests and have the art of jump-starting a wedding party down to a tee are Good Fellas, Stan Darsh (above), and The Usual Suspects. These acts are the perfect starting point when you start your search for a live band that performs wedding music that will entertain you, your family, and your friends all night.
So, with all my above waffle in mind, when picking a live wedding band, take a moment to think about what all your friends and family would enjoy too. It could mean your wedding smashes all your expectations and that’s what we all strive for here at Seventh Second. It means we have great memories too! They do travel all over the world and the UK to entertain, so you could also check out our guide on our London wedding bands that guarantee a packed dancefloor. Those 40+ bands won’t let you down.
Sometimes one isn’t enough right? Maybe you’ve picked a great live wedding band for the evening’s shenanigans but they can’t quite accommodate all your wedding music requirements. Maybe you still really want some early evening entertainment, some live wedding reception music, or ceremony ambiance?
Well, one way to fix this with budget permitting is to hire two live wedding bands. Many like Southside Sparkle (above) and Flowers excel at performing wedding reception music, atmospheric drinks reception renditions, or wedding breakfast tunes. Booking them alongside your evening wedding band could be the perfect way to go. It means every musical base is covered for your wedding in a nice simple way. Have a look at our award-winning wedding reception and ceremony musicians here!
If your budget can’t quite stretch that far, solo artists like Rae (above) or duos like Cadence are a slightly more affordable way to enjoy some wedding reception music. Artists like Rae or Cadence really can deliver all the wedding music you could want during the day or early evening and with many of our other bands offering similar solo and duo acoustic sets, there’s more choice than you can shake a stick at.
However, most Seventh Second acts like Blue Eclectic and Captain Obvious can always play the part of an all-guns-blazing evening wedding band and intimate acoustic solo, duo, or trio act during the daytime too. If your wedding budget is running low this is an excellent and popular option. Many of our wedding bands have years of experience moonlighting as daytime wedding ceremony bands or evening live wedding bands so you are in safe hands! Our acts can do it all so have a chat with us as we can get some great deals for all you couples out there.
Good memories come from good times and I know that choosing the right live wedding band is an important ingredient for your wedding. Question 7 is something you may not have to ask yourself but if you are struggling to pick a live wedding band you could always go down the bespoke or niche route. It’s well worth chatting with us about this as we can design pretty much any type of wedding band you desire and that’s because everyone that works here also performs in the bands you see advertised. It makes us highly flexible, able to avoid hiring salespeople and charging you a commission, and means we can offer our bespoke, niche, and standard live wedding bands at prices that simply can’t be beaten.
Acts like DJ Republic (above) and Knight Riders are two highly sought-after, specialist acts. They quite simply aren’t your normal wedding acts so could be just what you are looking for. However, on each of our wedding bands profile pages, (as shown below) there’s a handy band lineup and booking options section where you can view every type of musician a band can provide plus all the added extras they can offer as standard.
You may find you can edit one of our bands in just the way you want with these options but if you don’t see the instrument, lineup, or option you fancy, talk to us and we can look at adapting any act so it’s transformed into your ideal live wedding band. Sometimes bespoke is the only way to go and we are here 7 days a week, 10 am to 10 pm via email, text, live chat, phone, and all the usual social channels to help!
So, there you go. 7 questions to help you choose a live wedding band! These will be super useful as you work your way through the world of live wedding bands and try and make some decisions. Ask yourself these questions with any band you are looking at hiring and once you have, you will know if they are right for you.
Don’t forget to get in contact with any questions, queries, comments or to simply chat about our wedding bands. Lastly, we spend a lot of time making our guides the best we can for you so if you liked what you read please consider sharing it with others.
Thanks!
Matt and the Seventh Second Team
