The Size of Rocking
What size of band is right for my wedding or corporate event?
Side One gets over 700 inquiries a year and it usually goes something like this:
“We are getting married/having a corporate party/having a gala/etc. and you’ve come highly recommended. Our event is on date-x at location-y and there are around 200 people coming. We wanted to get some prices and see if you’re available. Thank you!!”
You’ll then hear from Margaux (we love Margaux and you will too) with some options. 90% of the events we play involve our dance bands and that’s generally what most people that are interested in hiring Side One are looking for when they inquire.
Our FULL dance band is our 10 piece but depending on budget and space, we can expand or contract this to some other configurations. Let me drill down on this a bit:
The Beatles are John, Paul, George, and Ringo. That said, there’s a horn section on songs like Got to Get You Into My Life, a string section on Elenor Rigby, Eric Clapton played guitar on While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Mick Jagger sang backups on All You Need is Love, and Billy Preston played the keyboards on Get Back while George Martin piano on In My Life.
The George, Paul, John, and Ringo of Side One is our 6 piece band and our dance band repertoire was built around this as the skeleton but then we can dress it up (or down). Our 6 piece is made up of these instruments:
Male Lead Vocalist
Female Lead Vocalist
Guitarist
Keyboards
Bass
Drums
Occasionally a client will be shopping around and notice that more band members cost more money, and perhaps a band they came across is advertising a 5 piece dance band (or less) and wondering why we can’t do the same. Fair question!
First off having both a male vocalist AND female vocalist allows us not only to cover the full spectrum of music out there as accurately as we can, but secondly with 2 singers we can bounce back and forth between singers without wearing either of them out. Band breaks are the enemy of the dance floor and while most bands do 45min sets and then take a break, the 2 singer alternation allows us to extend our sets up to 90 mins without a break and in fact if you want us to do only 1 set, we can extend all the way to a 120 mins without taking a break (the Power Set!).
Another trim that some bands make is to not have a keyboard player and the band plays to pre-recorded tracks that have keyboards, background vocals, and sometimes even lead vocals (gasp!). Please know that Side One plays EVERYTHING live and one of the things that set us apart is that we use no pre-recorded tracks. Believe it or not, this is a rarity in the cover band world these days and we have always felt passionately that music should be played live by musicians and that our clients shouldn’t be playing thousands of dollars to a band that’s essentially air banding for you. Check out some of Paul’s magic HERE or check out Tristan:
Speaking of keyboards, in the 6 piece configuration, any of the horn parts are played by the keyboard as you saw in the Uptown Funk video. If your budget allows, adding our horn section (tenor sax and trumpet making the 6 piece into an 8 piece) really takes the sound of the band (and look) to the next level. Here’s a video of a wedding classic with the hardcore folks hanging around at the end and features the horns:
And come on, who doesn’t want the horn side step ….
Some people have asked about having just the trumpet or just the sax but our arrangements are written for the minimum of 2 horns as the sound of a horn section is exactly that: a section. Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band was able to get away with just one horn as Clarence on the sax was used more for the occasional improvised solo rather a parts player throughout each song like our horn section is. We also offer a 4 horn option by adding another trumpet and baritone sax that is a HUGE sound and incredibly powerful visually on stage. If you have the budget and room on stage, this is the full classic horn section experience.
Background vocals are handled in the 6 piece by the lead vocalist who’s not singing plus two of our talented instrumentalist who can sing and play at the same time. If you want to step up to the next tier, you can add our 2 dedicated female background singers making the 8 piece into a 10 piece or what we call our full dance band. This is our marquee dance band and if you budget allows, this is Side One at its best. Here’s our 10 piece rocking some Lizzo at Westjet’s holiday party:
When events have limited guests or space, we offer our smaller “acoustic” bands. They replace the drummer playing a full drumset with a percussion instrument called a cajon (kah-hone), the electric guitar with acoustic, and remove the keyboardist. The entire spectrum of the Side One dance repertoire is still playable but more in the style of MTV’s unplugged series.
This is also an ideal configuration if you expect your party to be more chill and unsure if people are going to dance or not. For dancing you should have percussion, acoustic guitar, and 2 singers at the very least and bass is more likely to help the dance floor if you have the budget and space. Some of our singers play percussion, so depending on the singers that we have available for your event, they maybe be able to a trio instead of a quartet or quartet instead of quintet.
If you’re not expecting any dancing or there are certain parts of your event that don’t have dancing (cocktail hour or ceremony), we have a bunch of different options available depending on the mood you want to create, the repertoire, and your budgets. You can have solos or duos, string quartets, jazz combos, etc. I’ll leave you with one of our favs from Matt with our Seattle team: