Quintets and Weddings.

[hyperbolica]

My quintet education continues. We have a group off the ground, and about to perform our first high visibility gig on Christmas Eve. I'm mostly happy about where we are.

Now it's time to prepare for the next big step: wedding gigs. We got a freebie gig playing at the local bridal show. We don't have a booth, just playing outside the main venue. I'm hoping we can give out some business cards and shake some hands.

Anyway, I have to admit that I have never actually played at a wedding. I'm assuming this falls into a couple of categories: playing in the church (or wherever) at the ceremony and playing at the reception venue for a dance. I also assume that a quintet generally is hired only for the ceremony. Is that correct?

We have the Canadian Brass wedding books and some other standard stuff, plus some custom arrangements that will add to the ambiance. I'm thinking this is a classical, baroque and romantic type event? Is it often requested to play classy pop tunes? What should we be prepared for here?

Thanks for sharing your experience here.

[BGuttman]

No two couples are alike and you can expect them to request almost anything you can play. I'd recommend having a stable of classical, jazz, rock, pop, and ethnic tunes. You never know what the bride will decide she wants for "her" song (and let's be honest, it's the bride's day and she generally gets what she wants). You might want to make a demo with a wide variety of "wedding tunes" that will include the Pachelbel Canon, Mendelssohn Wedding March, Elsa's Processional, Pomp and Circumstance #1, a couple of 1930s tunes, some rock (Beatles and Elvis are usually popular), an Italian tarantella, a hora, an Irish Jigg, something Hispanic, and a Strauss Waltz (I like a conglomeration called "Heut Spielt der Strauss").

Good luck.

[officermayo]

I ran a quintet in coastal SC for many years. Mainly our gigs were for churches and weddings.
We played mostly out of the Canadian Brass books with a handful of other arrangements thrown in.
I'd provide potential customers with a recording and song list. Any special requests incurred an extra
charge, but most folks were satisfied with our set list.

One piece of advice I'd give is to have a written contract that includes a non-refundable 50% deposit.
You might be surprised by how far in advance weddings are planned AND how often things fall apart
before the set date.

One other thing I'd suggest is to make sure the wedding planner has an inclement weather plan for
outdoor ceremonies.

[hyperbolica]

Thanks for the tips.
Where, other than Canadian Brass, do you find tunes? Do you wind up arranging your own? Is there a Wedding Fake Book?

[officermayo]

I bought arrangements from JW Pepper.

[BGuttman]

I bought something called a "Wedding Survival Kit" for brass quintet. It was a PDF download. I printed out a set of parts, but the original file is on a computer I don't use any more; so I can't give you any more detail.

[Jimprindle]

The brass quintet I was in for about 30 to 35 years ended up playing about 25 weddings a year. We would usually play about 30 minute prelude music before the ceremony, part of the ceremony, and about 15 minutes of postlude music while everybody left. Sometimes we would play at the reception, anywhere from one to two hours. Most of the music we used was arranged by the leader/contractor, the lead trumpet player.

For the service including the prelude and postlude we would mostly play baroque music, some classical and occasionally some more modern music like A Time For Us or music from West side story.

For the reception music we would mix it up with popular music and classical music and music from shows like Les Miserables and some arrangements of Bocelli songs.

We also had some things from the Canadian Brass and a couple of other books, but most of our music was from our own arrangements.

At one time in my area, San Diego, there were 3 to 5 active brass quintets all doing that kind of thing. Besides my group I often subbed in those other groups. It became a big part of my freelance income along with playing touring Broadway shows, subbing in the SD Symphony and Opera, local performances, church gigs, etc. In the early 2000s the work for brass quintet seemed to just drop off. Don’t know why, we had been working steadily until then and our only competition were string groups and solo trumpets.

We played wedding shows for over 20 years and some of that generated some work and some of it did not. About 15 years ago I realized that this group was not working nearly as much as it could be so I dropped out to do other things.

[hyperbolica]

Ok, great. Wedding survival guide and lots of stuff for quintet:
https://mattkingston.com/brass-quintet- ... uct-swiper

Looks interesting. No idea if the arrangements are good. The 2 playing samples were pretty mediocre. Good collection of titles, however.

@jimprindle, thanks for the suggestions.

[calcbone]

As others have said, it could be almost anything, depending on the couple!

I played a rather lavish wedding with a brass quintet, in which we were supposed to play about 10 minutes of prelude music (we played a few of the baroque classics as well as Barber’s “Adagio”; ended up playing all of it twice as the bride was a little late), a few of the usual things during the ceremony, and then, after the ceremony, we played some jazzy tunes for a cocktail hour.

The bride, a musician herself, was kind enough to give us a table for the buffet/open bar dinner after that.

[LeTromboniste]

I used to work as an agent at booking agency. By the end of my working there we had transitioned to mostly the corporate market because that is generally more lucrative and you can repeated business from the same customers (whereas individual couples don't get married so often!) so it was cheaper for the agency to maintain and increase sales (booths at wedding conventions can be extremely expensive), but when I came in, most of our sales were still wedding gigs. And I have to say, we really didn't have a lot of business for quintet. The vast majority of wedding gig sales were for trios and quartets, for budget reasons. So my advice would be to make sure to have some quartet and trio arrangements in your book and not being bound to absolutely be a quintet.

[Crazy4Tbone86]

I have been in a brass quintet since 1992. Was the tenor trombone player for most of that time and recently switched to bass trombone to cover the “tuba book.” I have found the switch to be very rejuvenating because covering the low, technical tuba parts on bass trombone can be very challenging.

Anyway……I have found the best way to shop for music is to go to brass conventions or workshops. If they have a vendor (like Hickey’s Music) that has a very large sheet music inventory, it is easy to find several new pieces that are appropriate for your group. I always prefer to see the music instead of ordering it only based on the title or a brief description.

[hyperbolica]

Hickey's is one of my favorites. I've found myself in Ithaca NY and gone in to browse. Always come out with an arm load of stuff.

Bass bone instead of tuba? That seems to be a matter of personal preference.

And maybe this whole genre is in decline, but I'm going to give it a go anyway. My preference has always been chamber music setting. It's not like my survival depends on it. I'd just like to find a place where my interests and abilities intersect what other people also find beautiful.

[Mikebmiller]

I have only done a few weddings with my group, but my advice is to charge way more that you think you should. You are giving up 3-4 hours of your time on a Saturday and having to put on a monkey suit. I value my Saturdays, so if I am going to play a gig, I want to be well paid for it. The wedding is likely costing the family a fortune anyway, so another $1,500 (at least) for a quintet is a drop in the bucket.

Like someone else said, get a contract and a non-refundable deposit.

Be sure to have the wedding planner or someone who knows what is going on tell you exactly when to start and stop playing.

Have fun and don't drink all the punch - that's for the guests!

[hyperbolica]

Just to follow up, for others possibly interested in this topic, we played a local wedding expo. 4 hours. Nice practice session, and a good way to practice spacing out tunes and saving your lip. The best thing we got out of it was a lot of practice. Plus, it forced us to develop a facebook page, website, business cards, take some pictures, do some recordings, and of course select and practice a wide range of music. Nobody was throwing money at us at the show, but we did give away a bunch of business cards. The organizer let us in for free, but we had to play for the show, so we didn't really get much opportunity to actually talk to brides or planners.

It remains to be seen if it was a waste of time or not, and we may not see anything from it for months. After having talked to a lot of people about this, I'm starting to cool off on the idea. I don't think I'd turn down a wedding gig if it fell in my lap, but I don't think I'll play another 4 hour expo again.

[Doug Elliott]

I've done several wedding shows. The only gigs that came from them were from other vendors, for their own kid's wedding.

[andym]

We had a quartet play for our reception. But it was a string quartet made up of musicians from the Syracuse symphony. They were very good. After lunch, they played a wide range of jazz standards, broadway, and some pop. They were a good dance band. Best part was during the meal they played serious string quartets. One thing they did was ask us for a couple of requests they could prepare. That was a good touch.

Worked perfectly for us. Good music and no one had a microphone to make announcements. Kept things low key as we wanted it. A brass chamber group could have done the same.

[Crazy4Tbone86]

I've done several wedding shows. The only gigs that came from them were from other vendors, for their own kid's wedding.

For my brass quintet, going to wedding expos has been a mixed bag. Some expos yielded only 2 or 3 gigs. Other times, we really hit the jackpot. There were a couple of wedding shows that gave us 15-20 gigs each back in the early 2000’s.

Wedding shows can be very interesting. It seems that at some shows the brides come in with a laser-focused mission, like……they all want a balloon vendor and a cake maker. Other times, the brides come in with an empty palette and they gather information with a very open mind. Those are the shows that a brass quintet can do very well at.

Another thing about being a live performing group at a wedding show…..you will need to “sweet talk” the vendors around you because they will probably be concerned about the volume of your music as you play small excerpts. Usually, the neighboring vendors discover that when your group plays, people gather in that area and it attracts people to their business as well.

[hyperbolica]

Another thing about being a live performing group at a wedding show…..you will need to “sweet talk” the vendors around you because they will probably be concerned about the volume of your music as you play small excerpts. Usually, the neighboring vendors discover that when your group plays, people gather in that area and it attracts people to their business as well.

The organizer of our show put us outside of the main vendor area, but where they were serving food. So we weren't disturbing anyone, no one to sweet talk. Brides were naturally hanging around in our area, or at least had to pass through . We didn't play excerpts, we played full tunes. Even ceremonial tunes, which felt a little funny. Plus a few appropriate pop tunes. We cycled through about 17 pieces twice in our 4 hours. But we cut out 30 minutes early because they had a raffle drawing, and people's attention was not on us at that point.

It will take some time before we know for sure if anything comes of it. Regardless it did help us put together some things we needed to do anyway, so, win, right?