Today we have a guest post by Sam from Music Live UK on how to be a wedding singer. If you have ever been interested in making some money as a singer at people’s weddings, then you need to read this article!

If you are a talented singer with good on-stage presence, then you could consider a career as a wedding singer. Weddings are big business all over the world. By providing quality entertainment at some of these weddings, you can easily build a career for yourself. Yes, wedding singing is a competitive market. But with a combination of talent and good marketing skills, you can earn yourself a very good living.

An Important Note About Wedding Singing

If you are going to pursue this as a career, you need to start considering your voice as your most important asset. Even if you are already a great natural singer, it may still be worth getting a vocal coach to help you train your voice. You may find you are singing a lot week in week out, so looking after your voice is essential. A vocal coach will be able to teach you techniques on how to protect your voice from damage, meaning you’ll be able to take up more singing work.

Even after just few lessons, you may find that there are some simple techniques you can use to improve your control. The last thing you want to do is damage your voice by not understanding how to look after it. If you’re not sure your vocal coach is going to teach you this, let them know you specifically want information on protecting your voice. They should be able to give you some exercises to do.

How To Be A Wedding Singer: Catering For Your Audience

As a wedding singer, it is important that you understand the type of songs your audience wants. Remember, it’s not about what song you’d like to sing at someone else’s special day, it’s about what type of songs THEY want. After all, they are the ones paying for your services right?

Given the occasion, romantic songs are usually the order of the day. You should thoroughly learn a wide selection of love songs, and create a set to suit the job at hand. Practice these songs regularly, and until you are extremely confident about your ability to perform them.

You should also be continually working on new material in order for your set not to become stale. It will also keep things interesting for you, rather than just singing the same songs over and over again. Some couples may want to your perform for their first dance, so you should always be willing to learn new material at short notice. This will make your service more personal, and make it more likely you’ll get more wedding singer jobs.

Sing To A Backing Track Or Live A Band?

As a wedding singer, you can do either. You may decide to perform on your own with backing tracks for music, or you could find a live band to perform with.

Ideally, you’ll want to be able to offer both of these services to couples. This will allow you to cater to all types of budgets, and mean you will get more wedding singer jobs as a result. You will have to charge a lot more if the couple want a live band at their wedding, mainly because there are more people to pay and more equipment to hire. If you’re working with a band, you should make sure everyone knows their roles and each member is reliable. You should also have fail safes in place; If one person is sick, how will you still carry on the show?

Investing In Your Own Equipment

Once you have had a few wedding jobs under your belt and you are doing well becoming a wedding singer, you may decide to buy your own PA system. This can be a significant initial outlay for you, but once you have it, you can hire this to couples for an extra charge. Most wedding venues don’t have their own PA system, so it is advantageous if you can provide one.

An extra benefit of having your own PA equipment, is that you have control over the way you sound. There’s often nothing worse then relying on someone else’s equipment, which often is of poor quality and won’t make you sound great. At least with your own audio equipment you know exactly how your vocals will come out.

Want To Become A Successful Wedding Singer? Then You Need To Market Yourself

Ok, so here’s the real secret of how to be a wedding singer: If you want to be a successful wedding singer, you need to do more then just have a great voice… You also need to learn how to market yourself! But what does marketing yourself entail?

Well, first of all you should record a demo in a professional recording studio. Having a good demo will allow potential customers to see how well you can sing. The better your demo, the more likely people will hire you for their big day.

As a wedding singer, you should also have your own website. It’s easy to make your own music website quickly, so if you haven’t got one already, then set one up right away. The expectation is that you will have a website with a professional recording on it. This will allow couples to hear you perform before they book, and hopefully buy into your ‘story’. Often, having a video of any previous performances on your website is also a good idea. Couples will want to see how you perform, so giving them a full picture of the service you’re offering them will do nothing but good for you. Because of this, it’s also important to practice your on stage presence. If you have a poor on-stage presence, you will lose potential jobs.

Additionally, you may want to advertise in brochures and wedding magazines, or attend wedding fairs to promote yourself. If self promotion is not you forte however, then perhaps you could consider signing up with an entertainment agent. They will of course take a percentage of your fee, but often they can get you much more work than you would be able to by yourself.

How To Be A Wedding Singer Conclusion

Becoming a wedding singer allows you to earn money from doing something you already enjoy. As a wedding singer, most of your engagements will be at the weekend. Because of this, singing at weddings is something you could fit around another job if you so desired. However, even if you do decide to only do wedding singing as a second job, that doesn’t mean you should become complacent with your duties. You will still need to provide the highest quality performance, as that’s what will get you a lot of your customers: Word of mouth recommendations! I bet you’re glad you read to the bottom of the article to read that tip.

Participating in a couples special day and providing quality entertainment is a really satisfying career. There is certainly a lot to consider when becoming a wedding singer, but if you are serious about making it in this profession, you really could have a fulfilling career ahead of you.

If you want to hire a great wedding singer or wedding band for your big day, you can visit Music Live UK.

Shaun: If you have music business knowledge and want to share it with our readers, you can check out our requirements for guest posters. Thanks again to Sam for this great guide on how to be a wedding singer.

As a independent musician,  you’ve probably at one point wondered how to get gigs for your band. Doing live shows is an important part of anyone’s music career, it’s a great way of meeting your fans face to face and allowing them a different kind of contact with you. It’s also a great place to make CD sales and build up life long fans, as if you impress with a performance you’ve got a lot of power at that moment.

A problem many musicians face however is being able to get gigs to perform at. If you’ve never performed at a show before, what proof have you got to show venues you’re worth hiring? Thankfully there are ways around that, which is what I’m going to share with you in this article. May I say though, if you’ve never done a show before and are nervous about the whole thing, check out our post on dealing with pre gig nerves. There’s some good tips in there about getting shows to practice your live performances too, so have a look. But anyway, here are how to get your band booked (Also works for solo musicians).

Find Suitable Locations To Perform At

If you want to get gigs for your band or yourself, the first thing you need to do is compile a list of venues you would be willing to perform at. This may be because the venue has acts that play your style of music, or because you think it would be easily obtainable. Whatever the reason, list down the venue and the reason why you’ve chose it. It’d be easier if you categorise this list straight away, as this list will be one that you could potentially use throughout your career (Adding as you go along of course). You don’t want to make your list of venues too unrealistic, for example you#re not going to get to play the biggest venues in your country straight away. It is however realistic to play at popular local venues if you approach the venue right, so note them down.

You’ll want to note down all different types of venues, from clubs, to venues that run showcase nights, and maybe even raves. Places that do themed night and pubs also accept live acts sometimes, so don’t narrow your vision and only think about approaching the standard venues everyone else plays at. The good thing about thinking outside the box is that some of these places will actually pay non established acts where the ‘bait’ venues won’t. This is because these regular venues are over saturated with acts trying to perform there every week, so they don’t need to pay to get acts. Non conventional venues sometimes do.

Once you have a nice list of places you can potentially play at, the next stage is to find out how to get in contact with them.

Find The Venue’s Contact Details

This stage can be done while looking for places for your band booked to gig at. It’s best to get as many contact details for the venue as possible, you’ll be needing their name, their address, their phone number, and the email addresses for the people who take bookings (Or a general one if you can’t find that). Once again, add these to your files about venues you can get gigs at. Now we’ve got a selection of contact details, and we hopefully know who to talk to, we can approach the venue.

Approach The Club Or Venue

When it comes to approaching the venue, remember that you’re approaching them with a business proposition. That means you have to approach them in a professional manner, looking neat (If you’re meeting them in person) and talking to them in a respectful manner. Now I’m not saying you have to turn into something you’re not, you don’t have to meet them dressed in a suit if your look is more casual (You’re an independent musician after all, not a city worker). However, you should be aware that if you look a mess or act in an unattractive way, there’s very little chance they’ll want you to perform at and represent their venue.

So, what’s the best way to try to get shows for your band? I’d always advice ringing them first. If you phone them up and tell them you’re a musician who’s currently willing to perform at venues you can usually tell whether the venue is looking for performers or not. If they’re not, they’ll usually let you no very swiftly. If they are but is open to select people, you’ll have time to get in your sales pitch. If you impress with that, they may offer you a chance to come in and give in your demo or audition. If you fail to impress with your pitch, they’ll probably let you down.

Not all venues you ring will lead to anything else, in fact a lot of them probably won’t. But even if only a few do it’s been well worth your time. Getting your first few shows are the most important, as once you’ve got a few shows under your belt you’ll have leverage. You can then quote having performed at these venues when applying to do other gigs, and each time you do a bigger venue you can get a bigger one of the back of that.

Those venues that don’t want to let you perform, don’t scrub them off your list. As you get more well known, there’s a chance that these places will book you for gigs then.

If the venue’s local to you and you want to perform at a specific night, another option is to turn up at the relevant night with a demo. The night’s promoter or manager should be there looking over things, so find them and let them know you’d be willing to perform at their night. Give them your demo along with contact details and see what the response is.

Auditioning For Shows

Some venues will ask you to simply to give in a demo as an audition, and you should give them a copy of the tune you want to perform. In fact, you may want to give them a look at a few songs you could potentially perform and let them choose which ones are most suitable for the event they’re going to put on. Some places will want you to actually do a live audition to perform.

If you get a live audition, always make sure you go prepared. Make sure you’re punctual to the venue, and have all the material you need to carry out your trial successfully. Make sure you’ve rehearsed fully, and are ready for anything.

Once your audition is finished, they should usually be able to tell you if you were successful straight away. Sometimes however they may need to contact you at a later date so make sure they have your up to date contact details. Try and find out when they’re likely to contact you buy, and if you haven’t heard from them a day or two after that make sure you chase them up and find out what’s going on. Don’t harass them however, as annoy them and you’ve little chance of getting booked for the gig.

How To Get Gigs For Your Band In Your Local Area

The methods listed in this post covers how to get gigs for your band in all areas. A lot of independent musicians seem to think areas affect your ability to get gigs, but it really doesn’t. What matters more when trying to get gigs for your band is the size of the gig and whether you are big enough to play at that venue or not. Keep building your way up and one day you will be.

How To Get Gigs For Your Band? Your Band’s Got A Gig

And that’s that’s how to get gigs for your band. As always these are just guidelines, and things can vary from situation to situation. Follow these tips however and (Talent permitting) you should be able to get your band booked for gigs and live shows. You’ll never again wonder how to get gigs for your band, good luck in getting them!

Suffer from gig nerves? Then this is the article for you…

Public speaking is seen to be a fate worse then death for some. The process of standing in front of a room full of people delivering a speech can make even the most bubbly person shake from head to toe. If you want to take your music career to the next level however, most likely you will have to speak in public at some point. And not only will you have to speak, but you’ll also have to perform your music and get on an elevated stage so everyone can see you CLEARLY. Sound fun? Well actually, it can be once you get used to it! Some people truly believe performing live to fans and connecting with them in person is one of the best parts of being a musician. If you’re one of the people who suffer from pre gig nerves or performance nerves however, we’ve created a guide to minimizing pre-performance nerves, and getting you comfortable with performing shows once and for all…

Practice Your Performance

This is the obvious one, yet the one a lot of people seem to miss out. You should already be practising and developing your music anyway, but even more so if you’ve got a performance coming up and you’re nervous about the whole thing. The main benefit of getting to know your performance inside out is that at one point your performance will become second nature to you. This means that it’ll be harder to freeze on stage as you only have to remember the beginning. Once you get the beginning part done, everything else should just flow out on auto pilot. Another benefit of practising is it can reduce nerves. While you still may be nervous about performing the show, you will feel a lot more nervous if you wasn’t sure what you should be doing and would have to ‘wing it’ on the night.

Perform In Front Of Friends (A Home Performance)

Performing in front of friends and family can be helpful in more ways then one. First of all, it gives you some experience performing in front of people. If you can’t perform in front of them, remember that performing in front of strangers will be harder. So get them on your ‘I’ve performed well in front of them’ list as soon as possible, and get rid of some of those first gig nerves. The great thing is they should be understanding and patient if they know you’re practising, and messing up lines or forgetting parts in front of them won’t matter. You can also have multiple goes at performing in front of them, so you’ve time to build your confidence and performance up gradually.

Performing in front of friends and family means that you can also pick up useful tips about your performance. Having an outside view can be very handy as you can’t always see what you’re doing wrong. They can let you know the parts you need to improve on and anything else that they noticed. It’s important however that your friend is honest, as without honesty you won’t learn and improve on any mistakes you’re currently making. If they tell you everything’s perfect but your movement or delivery isn’t up to scratch, you won’t learn. You’ll also end up giving a performance with these mistakes, mistakes that could’ve been put right with constructive criticism and a tweak or two.

Minimize Stresses, Minimize Pre Gig Nerves

You want to make sure there’s as little stress as possible before your shows. If you’ve got a show coming up and you’re not prepared, it’s easy to get stressed. And stress will bring on even more nerves, so it’s not ideal. One way of minimising stress is to make sure you’ve got everything planned out. You should have a check list of things to do and bring to your performance, as forgetting your CD or a crucial instrument is the last thing you want to do (Having to run back home to get it will defiantly pile on the stress). You can also minimise stress by making sure you know how to get to the venue you’re playing at, and giving yourself enough time to get there. Being early and knowing the full details of your performance (If possible) can also help, as can having a meal and plenty of (Non alcoholic) fluids before your performance. While it may sound weird, making sure you’ve gone to the toilet can help too. As you get closer to your performance time, you body can start playing up in all sorts of ways. You may find yourself suddenly needing to use the bathroom as you’re going up on stage, so going before will ensure it’s just nerves and you’re not actually going to make a mess on the stage.

All these mentioned points can help reduce stress, and will make sure you have less on your plate on the day.

Start By Performing At A Small Venue

After performing in front of your friends, the next step is to start performing shows in front of strangers (Aka potential fans). If you get pre gig nerves and are nervous about performing in front of people, I’d advice you to start performing in small venues. Some local venues only have small audiences which get even smaller on certain nights. A good idea is to approach these venues and tell them you’ll play for free. If they accept, they get a free act for the night and you get to practice performing your music in front of a small audience. Now the reason you tell them you’ll perform for free isn’t because you’re not good enough to charge this venue. It’s because they’re more likely to give you regular shows if you’re unpaid, and you need multiple shows in quick-ish succession to really get rid of your nerves. You want to be comfortable performing gigs, and the main way to do that is by doing them more often. It’ll soon hopefully become standard procedure to you, and first gig nerves won’t effect you as much (If at all).

One thing I’d say when it comes to getting a venue to do your first live performance, is open mike nights aren’t ideal. While they’re easy to get in terms of you just having to turn up and put your name down, they’re too easy to bottle out of. Where as with a booked show once you’re there you know you have to perform, with open mike nights you can choose whether to go up or not. And if you’re really that nervous, there’s no ‘strings’ that are stopping you from walking out and going home.

Hanging Around Before A Show Can Increase Nerves

While it’s important to be punctual to a show, it’s not always a good idea to hang around waiting for your performance. This is when the real nerves can kick is, sometimes that wait can be very long and uncomfortable (Butterflies in your stomach and nausea anyone)? So it’s often a good idea to keep your mind as occupied as possible. If you’re at the venue and have an hour before you’re due on stage, it may be a good idea to leave and quickly check out the local attractions for 40 or so minutes. Though you may still think about the show, you mind will be a lot more occupied if you’re looking for a shop or getting something to eat (If you’re not to nervous to eat). This will make the time till your show go a lot faster then if you were just sitting waiting at the venue. If you do go out though, make sure you leave yourself enough time to get back and set up for your set.

Motivate Yourself Before Going On Stage

When it’s time to go on stage, it can be a good idea to motivate and psyche yourself up. Telling yourself “I’m here now, I can do it” and “To hell with it, let’s get this show on the road” can give you the temporary burst of confidence you need to get yourself up on to the stage. Even if you’re more nervous then ever, tricking yourself into being confident for just the beginning of your show can be the difference between getting on stage to perform and the announcer calling your name only to realise you’ve escaped through the back door. If you need more motivation, why not ask yourself what your favourite musician would do in this situation? Or the opposite, think of someone you don’t rate very highly that performs live and think “If they can do it, I should be able to too”. Use whichever form of motivation that gets the job done.

Final Word About First Gig Nerves And Performance Nerves

Performing gigs can be very nerve racking, but it’s also very important for most musicians to be successful. You wouldn’t be reading this article right now if it wasn’t an important part of building a successful music career, you must want to be able to perform. So next time you going to do a show and get nervous, remember why you’re there. Who are you doing it for? YOU. Why are you doing it? Because it’ll help give you the music career you’ve always wanted!

Even if you get performance nerves, remember that they won’t necessarily be there forever. As with most things in life, the more you practice, the better (And less nervous) you’ll become. Who knows, you may even end up enjoying doing live shows. Don’t go on stage one time, have a bad experience and vow never to do shows again, learn from those mistakes and become a better performer for it!

We’ve mentioned many ways to counteract performance nerves and gig nerves, but there are bound to be more methods that we haven’t mentioned which you may use. If you’ve got any good ways of counteracting performance nerves, please let us know below in the comments section below. If you’ve used any of the above methods before to good success, you can also let us know. Now that you know how to get rid of pre gig nerves and first gig nerves, why not learn how to get gigs for your band? Good luck dealing with your pre gig nerves!