Should I play in a wedding band?
For a few years I played in a wedding band. They prefer to be called function bands because wedding bands come with a certain preconception of the lowest rung of the musical ladder, but 99% of our gigs were weddings.
It’s is a solution the world over for musicians who are trying to find a way to fund their creative endeavours until the real money arrives from the original work. It seems simple. Get paid a proper wage for playing a bunch of covers and then spend the rest of the week in focused creative bliss with the financial freedom to build a sustainable living in the music industry.
So for people who fancy dipping their toe in that world, here’s what I learned.
It’s a wage
There’s a rumour that wedding bands are paid well. To a certain extent this is true. If you are used to convincing your band that £20 a head for playing pub gigs is a good wage, then it pays brilliantly. If you are used to being paid above minimum hourly wage, then it doesn’t.
The wages require a small explanation of how it all works. You’re not running a full time wedding band without an agent. The agent has the SEO clout to attract the wedding couples. In return they get 20-25% of the fee and fill your diary. The band are then free to divvy up the cash how they see fit. Usually one person runs the band and is responsible for equipment and van etc. Usually it’s the lead singer. They then pay the band members. The current going rate(check Facebook groups) is about £150-250 per gig.
Much better than that £20 for playing at your local on a Saturday? Right?
Well yes and no.
If you are doing the wedding band thing properly you probably need a practice once a week. Yeah, sometimes the first dance will be that standard Coldplay song that the band already know and you’ve told yourselves that you are good enough to just jam your way through everything but the reality is that you are having a three hour practice once a week.
I’m sure there are places where you just play around your local city, but in Scotland the weddings are usually about 2 hours(often more) away at a country house in the middle of nowhere that calls itself a castle for the American market.
Up and down the A9 to Inverness on the weekly I often wondered why there weren’t any decent wedding bands in Invernessshire. They could undercut everyone.
So before the gig, you are already 8 hours deep before you count your prep at home and the actual gig time.
Standard wedding gig is as follows:
7pm: setup and soundcheck
8pm first dance and first set
9:30 band have a break
10pm second set
Midnight finish
00:30 clear up and back in the van
14 hours work per gig. Before you consider equipment, equipment maintenance, the prices of service station munchies and the cost to dress suitably, at £150 per gig if you are honest with yourself, you aren’t making much more than minimum wage.
Before the pandemic(and presumably after the postponements, cancellations and rebookings) the majority of weddings are Saturdays. It doesn’t take a spreadsheet to work out that there’s a cap to your monthly earnings of £600-800, and if you are lucky you are getting about one wedding a month from October to April. So 6 months a year at £600-£800 a month and 6 months a year at £150-£250 a month. About £4-6k a year in wages is realistic for a pretty successful Wedding musician.
But you enjoy it right?
Playing live is fun. You make people happy. They smile. It makes you smile. Afterwards someone drunk comes up to you and tells you an unqualified superlative about your playing and then explains that their uncle actually played an instrument you aren’t playing. Always an uncle. Always an unconnected instrument to the conversations.
This bit takes up less than a third of your shift. Even less if you are bored with the tunes. You can be less bored with the tunes. Learn new tunes. Improve the arrangements of existing tunes, but then you need to increase the hours that you are putting into the project that is meant to give you hours of freedom to do what you actually want to do. The quandary!
Makes much more sense to just keep on extending the length of the solos in your current set. Who doesn't want a 20 minute version of Mustang Sally?
The majority of your time is spent either whiling away time staring at motorway or moving amps and speakers about. You ever helped a friend move house? It’s just like that, but without the pizza and beer in their kitchen afterwards.
You move amps, speakers and drums from houses into the van. You move them from the van into the venue. This is usually along a rabbit warren similar to the trip to a Wetherspoons toilet, up stairs, down stairs, through kitchens; all in your good wedding clothes. Once you’ve played, you do it all again. The last leg can be at 4 or 5am.
So to reiterate, the good bit is where a drunk man tells you a story about how his uncle once played marimba in his school orchestra.
So why do it?
I kind of fell into it to help out and then before I knew it, it was taking up most of my week. I’m glad I did it, so I know I won’t do it again - that kind of thing.
One of the hardest things I’ve found in a decade and a half in the creative industries is that you can make £5k one month and £50 the next. Weddings are booked years in advance so you know when you can plan accordingly.
The main advantage is consistency and a dates in the diary.
But at about £500 a month if you are doing well, the reality is that it has to be one revenue stream in a folio of projects.
Therein lies the problem…..
The late nights
It’s all fine and well cramming loads of bodies into the back of a van and heading up the A9 to play a gig with your band or go to a festival. The lack of comfort as you trundle along empty roads is offset by the adventure and the memories you are creating. You then get home and spend the next day in your pyjamas eating takeaway and texting the WhatsApp group about all the in-jokes. When it’s your weekly work, you don’t get any of the good bits. You just get the unsociable hours.
You’re working a minimum wage job that requires you to take a day off after each shift. The deal is just getting worse and worse. If it’s a four hour gig on the drums there’s an added physical exhaustion.
It’s in this environment that you have to try and make the wedding work financially viable, because you have to get up and do your more creative endeavours that the wedding work is meant to be giving you the freedom to do.
At about £500 a month across the year, you are missing about £1000 a month to meet minimum wage(even more to meet living wage).
You have two options. You can get a day job or you can use your well practiced and honed music skills.
The day job option is a false economy. Chances are it’s 9-5 when you are messing with your body clock at the weekends. It also seems pretty pointless to work a minimum wage 9-5 job so that you can afford to go up the A9 every Saturday to play Proud Mary to some drunk bridesmaids.
Instead most wedding bands opt to fill in the gaps by playing cover gigs in pubs midweek to top up the coffers. They don’t pay well though, so your hourly wage for the week is now less than the price of a pint. The really unscrupulous agents will take a cut of these gigs, so before you know it you are playing for £60 per head and providing your own PA.
You are working a 60 hour week. You are sleep deprived. You aren’t making minimum wage and the whole reason to do it is to give yourself creative time and freedom.
Once you start doing the maths, you realise that anyone that can create something creatively meaningful and get out of that cycle is a superhero.
To compound this, if you can finally perform the impossible and get your ducks in a row to put on an originals gig, you’ll struggle to sell tickets when anyone who knows you knows that they can see you for free in a pub of their choice 5 nights a week.
All Weddings are the same
The happy couple don’t want to know this, but from a band’s perspective all the weddings are the same.
There’s this fantasy that you are going to far flung parts of Scotland and seeing castles and mountains. After 100 weddings, I’ve never played a wedding in the west highlands. It’s all A9, then you turn off onto a single track road and drive for 40 mins till you get to a country house that’s called a castle for marketing reasons.
All the weddings then roll into one. First dance 8pm, buffet 21:30, ceilidh 22:00, Runrig or Caledonia at 11:50. Add to this that you start playing the same venues again and again and it becomes Groundhog Day.
The bands all make claims about bespoke set lists and reading the room, but in the vast majority of situations the classics are the answer so the set lists don’t change.
You could switch it up and go the extra mile, but only at the expense of using your creativity time to learn more songs.
It’s a young man’s game
The recovery time from the 5am finish definitely gets worse with age and as life responsibilities kick in it gets harder and harder to justify the low wages. Despite all this, I actually recommend it for young musicians hoping to start a portfolio career in music. You really get rid of your stage fright. You get those hours and hours of playing under your belt. Only the laziest of people can get through hundreds of weddings without learning how to work a mixing desk and solve problems. After a wee while at the coal face, you’ll tackle your actual music career with more confidence.
You just have to know when to get off the boat. I start to see where certain characters and cliches who have been a mainstay of music my whole life come from. The average age of marrying couples isn’t going up any time soon, so the wedding work can’t last forever, so inevitably as the band develop grey hair and sair backs the bookings ease off.
That’s where the disgruntled, ageing musician in the bar comes from. You know the one; increasingly young girlfriends and the increasingly garish car telling anyone that will listen that no one is interested in “real music” any more and that’s why they don’t play many gigs.
The time their band played a support gig at King Tuts gets dressed up as a “career on the cusp. touring up and down the country”. The weddings were always the retirement plan.
The job was never a stopgap to support creativity. It was always a life ambition to play Proud Mary to a single drunk, crying bridesmaid on a dance floor. The truth is that they were unable to take in the life lessons and build something with some meaningful creativity which could be a legacy and retirement and could be easier on the knees.
The musicianship must be excellent though
Well yes and no. The band get so good at playing their set that they can do it in their sleep. Almost literally. It’s back to the lack of growth thing.
The band quickly realise that how well they play has very little relation to whether or not they get to do it next Saturday, because they already have a booking and there are only so many weddings in the world.
Corners start to get cut. Without bothering to listen to the originals, the songs evolve to meet the needs of the sleep deprived band.
I once knew a wedding band that I would see on the pub circuit. They would play the three chords of a well known AC/DC song in the wrong order. Who knows when it had happened it just gradually ended up that way and no one has noticed or cared since.
Another plays a well known song without playing the chorus. Dance around the verses. Guitar solo. Finish. All because page 2 of the chord sheet got lost some years back and no one noticed.
The singers often strum away on a guitar. While not being the most musically gifted in the band, they become the de facto leader. The rest of the band have to follow. The rest of the band(even the drummer) would smile at each other as we knew we’d have to go to a B7 any time there was an off piste chord that wasn’t in the key. No matter the key :)
In this environment the band play a first dance every week. A cherished and special moment for the couple.
It’s the source of much hilarity as a band of four 40 something Metallica fans make it through a Harry Styles song they’ve never heard of via a flawed chord sheet someone printed off the internet and then practiced during the soundcheck.
So while the musicians can definitely put in a shift, stagnation is the enemy and the working conditions practically encourage laziness and a “that will do” attitude. You’re also doing all this with a PA and equipment that was bought to be portable and keep the costs down. Inevitably you sound better just about anywhere else you play.
The musicians aren’t daft. The classic anxiety of the creator means that they are all fully aware that they aren’t where they want to be.
The solution is that there’s is an ongoing agreement within the wedding band industry to just big up everything involved. Superlatives across the board.
“He’s the best guitarist in the country”
Yeah. That’s why he’s playing a tapping solo on Wonderwall in the East Kilbride holiday inn for £100 on a Wednesday night.
“These are the best mixes of anything. Ever!”
For a 45 second Kings of Leon cover with midi drums.
“These are the best front of house speakers that have ever been made”
You’ve seen stadiums? Right?
The agents. The bands. An ongoing circle jerk to let everyone believe that they are at the top of their game. Ignore the wages and the hours and the stagnation. It doesn’t get better than this.
Add more sparkles and glitter to the videos and photos and keep pushing.
The beginning of the end
Once the pandemic turned off the wedding tap I was able to see how much work I was able to do when I wasn’t recovering from a 5am finish. I was also able to look at the finances. I only started the weddings to help out, but they were taking up so much of my week that I was better off before I started them, and I was better off after I stopped them. If I looked at the hourly rate, they were a very tiring and time consuming means of earning not very much.
This was compounded by the fact that I couldn’t network at all. No one ever came up to me after a wedding gig and asked if I could do a music video for them.
If I did a guest spot at a friends gig in a public venue, the next day I’d wake up to plaudits and requests for work. None of the plaudits involved an Uncle’s marimba.
I gig regularly, but I haven’t carried a bass amp or drum kit through a kitchen for ages.
Wedding work can make you forget what a real audience looks like. I’m back to playing music venues with crowds of people there for the music. Often sold out.
Wedding work is essentially 6 months on 6 months off. The busy stint is in the summer when it’s not that hard to find work as a performing musician. If you want it, there are months of music festivals and adventures to be had. The wedding work essentially disqualifies you from this wonderful slice of musical life. So you are recovering from that 5am finish while looking at photos of your friends playing on well lit stages with big festival crowds singing along when you’ve just played in a wee side room to the three people who had kept up the pace after the rest of the wedding had gone to bed cos they started drinking too early.
What you need to know
So if you do choose to do it, here’s what I’ve learned. I bring you big beardy Neil’s top tips for surviving being a wedding musician.
Your transport is your lifeline
The easiest way to turn a 14 hour shift into a 20 hour shift for the same wages is to travel the country in a dodgy van. Successful construction companies I know lease vans. Good stress free Wedding bands that I know lease vans. Your costs may be more with a lease, but your costs are fixed. The lease comes with breakdown cover and replacement vans if something goes wrong. When a dodgy van breaks down before a gig, you’ve got to rally to fit all the equipment and bodies in two or 3 cars. The petrol cost for that gig has just gone through the roof. When it breaks down on the way to a gig you’ve ruined someone’s wedding. When it breaks down on the way home, you’ve ruined the musicians’ week.
Your equipment is sacred
It’s a constant battle to have working equipment that can survive 100 gigs a year in a badly packed van, but also limit how much it impacts your hourly wage. You should be aware of what your back up plan is if something isn’t working or someone forgets something. The drummer is used to repairing things and building things out of gaffa tape. The guitars can usually be repaired. If a speaker or monitor breaks, you can get through the gig with only one. My conclusion was that for the size of the mixing desk, you should have a backup. If the mixing desk goes, the gig is over.
Find some space in your budget and van for flight cases. There’s nothing calms the nerves quite like listening to your microphones roll around the back of the van as you try and work out how to get back on the correct single track road to make it to the wedding in time to play the first dance from a dodgy chord sheet.
One of my stipulations of getting involved in Wedding work was that I wasn’t going to be the live sound engineer. Inevitably my request went unheeded and each wedding would start with us arriving late and me trying to set everything up on my own in double quick time. Band members would help by plugging their acoustic guitar into the headphone socket and complaining that it didn’t work or suggesting that they should be on Channel 1(which had packed in during month 2) because they were the most important. We’d start late with me a hot sweaty mess knowing that in 90 minutes I could get a break. Make sure everyone in the band has a basic knowledge of how to work the equipment. It will be better for everyone if the singer isn’t shouting at the drummer to turn his monitors up mid song.
Have a bath when you get home
The most depressing part of getting home at 5am sober is that you are either too wired to sleep cos you have been driving or you are too wired to sleep cos you have been living on Coffee and Haribo since 4pm. You stare at the ceiling till 7am, sleep till 11am, and then try and make something meaningful out of the next day. Sitting up and drinking while the sun rises is a slippery slope, so I found a bath got me to sleep by 6am and let me sleep till noon.
Make sure you are having fun
I’ve made it pretty clear that you aren’t getting paid loads for this job and it’s an absolute slog, so make sure you are enjoying it. If you have to be a bit niche, you will get less bookings, but it should be clear from the above that it’s unlikely to be your full time job anyway, so if you have to only play 8 weddings a year to fellow Metallica fans whose spouse is okay with Metallica covers at the wedding then so be it. If you can make yourself more Scottish with kilts and bagpipes then even better. You might be looking at a long weekend in a foreign country, but it’s likely to be a lot more fun than a Holiday Inn on the Edinburgh ring road.
Drumming is cardio
Drumming is cardio. I’m far from the most economical drummer, so my Fitbit says I’ve done 40,000 steps and 3 hours of active minutes in a gig before. I was feeling truly awful the next day. Like I’d been on a three day bender, but without the good times. I was sweating my salts out through a three piece suit. I started to carry various combinations of recovery drinks with me. Have a google on what runner’s do to rehydrate. Lucazade sport is quite a good combination of sugar and caffeine.
Write down the best stories
I would love to write a blog of my favourite wedding band stories. Disasters. Errors. Cringeworthy activities. Wrong First Dance. Wrong Venue. Egos and personalities and crimes to musicianship that surround this bizarre cultural ritual that we insist on, but I suspect there could be a sitcom or a book in it, so I keep my powder dry. Write down your best stories, cos I know there will be plenty. It’s quite cathartic. I think I’d call it either ‘Can I get more of me in this monitor that doesn't work?’ or “I loved the saxophone solos you played on that trombone. My uncle actually played Clarinet”
Learn to say no to bookings
If you accept that you’re guaranteed bookings on most Saturdays for the middle 6 months of the year, it becomes a sellers market. Treat it like one. If someone wants you to drive 4 hours to the middle of nowhere on a Saturday in July in 2 years time, the chances are you can find a gig in that two years to fill that spot in your diary that is less of a pain in the arse.
The same goes for dodgy venues. If a venue has 8 flights of stairs to climb and no lift, say no. If the owners of the castle who rented the space to the wedding company complain about the noise(much more common that you think) then say no next time.
Schedule time to create
Personally I don’t think it’s possible to be in a successful wedding band and find time to maintain a career in creativity. If you really want to try, there’s a great book by Jeff Tweedy called ‘How to Write One Song’. Schedule time to create. Mark it out in your diary. Don’t be tempted to fix a mic stand or to learn Saturday’s Rhianna cover on your Flying V. Just do the thing you set up the wedding band to do. I also think it’s possible that if you stick at it long enough your creativity won’t be music. Take up watercolours or something.
Go and see some ‘real’ music now and again
It sounds so disparaging, but when you are surrounded by the shiny videos and the circle jerk of superlatives from your peers and agent you can struggle to see the wood for the trees.
When you do manage to create some original content, it is shoved through the same saccharine lens as the wedding work.
Touch base with where you started every now and then and remind yourself what original bands sound like in small clubs. I’m not talking about going to see a wedding band play AC/DC with the wrong chords on the night when you aren’t. Try to avoid judging the band for not finishing with Proud Mary or playing B7 for anything outside the 1st, 4th and 5th.
Be aware of the economies of scale
If you are playing 200 gigs a year with the same setup and you can save yourself a ball ache somewhere in the process of setting up - then do it. If looking at the bigger picture can save you 5 minutes a gig, then that’s 16 hours a year. £150 flight case costs less than a pound a gig. If you are going to do it, do it properly.
Stop pretending it’s working
I think the worst part of playing weddings was that everyone was pretending it was sustainable and that we should be planning for holidays in the Bahamas based on our bookings for next year. Presumably that’s the next year where July is 12 weeks long and has 3 Saturdays a week. The problems that I raised in wedding one were brushed off as being something we will deal with later. Now is not the time. They were the same problems I was raising during Wedding #200.
It’s such a horrible waste of life to be dishonest to yourself about something not working and not being sustainable. “Let’s all just muddle through and something will somehow change”. This is all on the promise of creating time and space for creativity.
*No offence is intended to Metallica or Metallica fans. I tried it with about 5 other bands and it looked like I was deliberately offending people I knew.
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