THE THATCH GUIDE TO WEDDING MUSIC: PART II

 "Stay away from dances that require actions. No YMCA, no Locomotion, no Macarena..."

Anything that comes in two parts is either a duet... or well worth the read!  Our guide to wedding music is just that... well worth the read, and here's Part II of our awesome guide.  Part I covered wedding music for the ceremony and touched on specific cues and guidelines to pulling off a spectacular and sentimental 'formal occasion'.  Whether you're in Cape Town, Johannesburg, The Drakensberg or some remote tropical retreat, this next bit is where you can let your hair down and break bread with the family.

CANAPES/PRE-DRINKS BACKGROUND MUSIC

The wedding music for this part of the day should be ambient and, in our opinion, light-hearted.  String quartets work fantastically, but so do jazz duos, French chanson, New Orleans, marimba and acoustic folk groups.  Just be sure that they keep their repertoire up-tempo to keep the music lively and not soporific.  Don’t stress about song-lists for this.  You’re going to be too over the moon to even notice what’s going on here.  Even if you don’t go for live music, speak to us at Thatch about preparing a great iTunes playlist for this section of the day!
Some ideas:
Traditional - String Quartet
Classic - 3-piece Jazz Ensemble (Bass, Guitar, Trumpet/Saxophone)
New - Lounge DJ performing remixes of all the classic love songs.

WEDDING RECEPTION MUSIC
A standard reception will usually see the guests leave the canapés at about 18h00 to head for the reception.  Timings differ, but here are our suggestions for the evening:

THE THATCH GUIDE TO WEDDING MUSIC: PART I

Thatch’s Guide to personalizing the music at your wedding.

“There are never ANY rules, as long as you have the guts to pull off what’s on your heart.”  James B

Weddings are a special and rare opportunity for the couple to express themselves as a new and unique union.  As with most celebrations an essential part of this is the song and music selection.  The trouble with wedding music, though, is that the further from the ‘tried-and-tested’ model you wander, the more risk you’ll run of alienating your guests.

Having a friend perform that really cool underground, indie hit of yours at the ceremony might work wonders, but it could also be too disarming for your guests, having never heard the song.  Playing the music that you alone want to dance to may be a fantastic idea, but your guests may also hide from the dance floor in silent revolt at the songs they’ve never heard and can’t relate to.

With a little thought on your side, it’s possible to give your guests a poignant and intimate taste of yourselves as a couple, whilst still being accessible to a guest list that will most likely (in this day and age) span the gamut of age, race, religion and culture.

There are never ANY rules, as long as you have the guts to pull off what’s on your heart.  With that in mind, though, here is a sum-up of our never-fail approach to an unforgettable wedding.  We've split it into two parts - wedding ceremony music and canapes and reception music.

WEDDING CEREMONY MUSIC

GET THE BEST OUT OF EVERY REHEARSAL

Another week and more Thatch Music tips and tales to share!  If you read last week’s post, you’ll know that aside from our wedding music in Cape Town and Drakensberg, we were heavily busy with the first stages of pre-production for the Glo-CAF African Footballer of the Year Awards in Ghana, later this month.

GHANA UPDATE – TAKING YOU THROUGH THE ROPES
Having crossed yellow-fever shots, passports and the guide tracks for the dancers off our lists, we now need to focus on transcribing the tracks to charts for the band and sequencing the percussion and synth tracks that will play behind the band.  There are two procedures that we always follow for this:  firstly, James takes the arrangements from the Logic files and edits them in Sibelius, which is where the charts will be written.  On the flip side, Jay will take the Sibelius files into Ableton Live and start the sequencing for the support tracks.  As a standard, we generally double the horn parts, using Garritan Jazz and Big Band sounds to just thicken and slicken the sound a little more. We have booked a seven-piece band consisting of drums, percussion, keyboard, bass, guitar, trombone, saxophone and trumpet.

Our first rehearsal is on Sunday, so we have to be ready and our musicians need to have had the music to rehearse on their own.  It is expected that they will have rehearsed the parts - using the  pdf charts and mp3 guide tracks that we send them - on their own before the band rehearses together; this makes the band rehearsals less stressful and far more productive.  Here are some tips on how we run a typical practice when preparing for a performance with a solo-artist:

HOW TO GET THE MOST OUT OF A BAND REHEARSAL

CONTRACTS: ALWAYS GET IT IN WRITING

Wedding music, helping out friends, a Ghanaian awards evening and yellow fever shots – whoever says that being a musician is easy and glamorous should be a fly on the wall in the offices and studio of Thatch Music.  BOOM!  This week we’ll fill you in on how we make wedding music memorable for brides in both JOHANNESBURG and CAPE TOWN, plan for a massive performance in central Africa and share from the heart about protecting yourself against bad management…

But first, a snippet from last week.  On Wednesday evening, Jay and Earl were backing one of our artists, LeAnne Dlamini, at the stunning Radisson Blu Gautrain Hotel.  However,  Thatch learned a sizable lesson in following up on booking terms.  In the rush that is this music season, we overlooked that we were booked to perform two sets, which is about 12 songs more than we usually play with LeAnne.  We were reminded to double-check the finer details sooner, rather than later, but with a contract in place, Jay worked overtime, day and night (in spite of a 12 hour electricity cut!) to deliver a knock-out set.  With the limited time available, we used percussion loops, synth and backing vocal tracks to support Jay (keyboards) and Earl (bass).  Huge kudos to Earl, on his first gig for Leanne, for learning 21 new tunes in only a few hours!

Richard Smith, our legendary sound guy, was tweaking the mix and was a key ingredient to a flawless performance.  The engineer gets booked second in priority to the musical director.  It is only after we’ve secured and engineer that we book musicians.  We have found that it’s more important to have an engineer that knows our sound and have one less musician, than to use a technician that we don’t know, is unfamiliar with our sound and the way that we operate.  At every performance, there are new technical people, so achieving uniformity in sound is not easy, which is why we always try to work with the same engineers.  This way, we always have a ‘band member’ on the other side, working with the technical guys to help us produce the best show possible.

CONTRACTS AND CANCELLATION FEES