Once you decide you want to go ahead and book, we prepare a booking disclaimer email for you to reply to. This serves as a contract between us and gives us both peace of mind. In the unlikely event that the artist you book becomes ill, then we will offer an equal quality replacement. If that doesn’t suit you, we will return your deposit with no questions asked.
A holding deposit allows us to fully commit to your booking and in general it is non-refundable as we will be refusing other work for the date of your event.
If you cancel within 2 months of the actual event, we do have to ask for the full amount of the booking to compensate for lost earnings. The amount of the deposit is usually around 50%, depending on the scale of the booking.
Yes, absolutely you can. This is easier for you and also for us – fewer points of contact, more efficient and only one account to pay for everything. We can offer set packages or you can create your own package with the acts that most appeal. A flexible and helpful approach means we will do all we can to assist. We understand that sometimes the budget has to rule. You may like the idea of a solo harp, but maybe more realistic would be a solo cello or guitar – cheaper but still a wonderful solo instrument.
Yes – from our set lists available. We can of course look into requests and definitely provide them for an extra fee. This allows professional versions to be created by our arrangers if they’re not available to purchase by our artists.
Since we only work with professional musicians, they have a great range of music to chose from anyway and most of our clients choose music that is already in their repertoire. For weddings, we can offer a good shortlist of ceremony music for you to choose from. For general background music, if you want to make a complete setlist from our music you can. If you don’t have time to do this, you can just scan over the list and then let us know if there are any tunes you don’t want us to play and we’ll sort out the rest.
Our artists are great at knowing what music will suit the atmosphere and tailoring the setlist moment by moment to the live event.
It’s a good idea to check if the venue has any ‘rules’ on live music. There may be ‘neighbours’ that mean no amplified music is allowed – or sometimes only at a soft volume. This extends to decibel limiters in certain venues. Or they may ask to see our Public Liability Insurance (which we can provide upon request).
If you’re too busy, we can do this for you and are always happy to talk to venues about the kind of act that you want to book from us. Once they see how professional and experienced we are, things are usually simple and in fact we’re now recommended by venues that we only played in once because they liked our approach.
Not much – some chairs for certain acts, like string quartets. That’s easily sorted through the venue. As is a power point, usually for any acts that need to plug in a small amp. Some acts ask for refreshments and if you’re able to provide light refreshments/sandwiches for any act that is at your event for more than 2 hours, it always brings out the best in musicians. Of course, water and soft drinks are a basic requirement for all events.
Apart from some DJs, bands and more intentionally informal acts, most event musicians wear suits (gents) and dress (ladies). The last thing you want is someone scruffy lowering the tone of the big day or night, so smart dress is a basic, along with the requisite musical talent.
We find that most aspects of the live music can be sorted out over the phone and by email – however, if a face to face meeting is required, then we will be more than happy to come to the venue and meet you for an additional fee. Should you be booking more than one act and want someone on the day to co-ordinate all the music, then this is a service that we can also provide.
All acts are happy to receive any requests at the event itself and if they know the tune, they’ll be delighted to play it. If not, they’ll try and play something similar.
Yes. We only ever work with professional musicians who are excellent at what they do. Everyone who works for Liquid Strings has studied music and some to an extremely high level. But all play, teach and record music for their living and are therefore truly professional musicians. In the case of our DJs, they are highly experienced and work in events on a very regular basis.
100% yes! We hate technical jargon about music and there’s no need for it. We like to explain and guide when it comes to music – as that’s our field of expertise. Our aim is always to keep everything as simple and clear as possible. We know that music is just one aspect of the event, so there’s no need to complicate it with technical terms.
