Welcome to the very first MusicForaWedding podcast from Will Taylor and Strings Attached. I am Will Taylor and I am here with my wonderful assistant Amanda Cevallos. Hey Amanda!
Amanda: Hello.
Will Taylor: And this is the first podcast to help you figure out the music for your wedding and all the ins and outs you want to make this fun and if you have any questions for us, send an email to [email protected] and put in the subject field ‘Wedding music podcast’ to anything you want to know. We’d love to help you out, love to hear from you. Just send us an email to[email protected], any question you have about wedding music.
Today’s main topic, this is our first podcast and we are just going to talk about the role of music in a wedding. Why should we have music anyway in a wedding? What makes it important in a wedding? But before we get to that I want to tell you a little bit about myself and about Amanda.
Since 1989 I have helped couples realize their wedding music dreams and I have played the violin, viola and guitar professionally in the Austin area for over 24 years, including 20 years with the Austin Lyric Opera orchestra. With my group Strings Attached I have worked with artists like Bob Schneider, Shawn Colvin, P Diddy, _______[1:55], Tish Hinojosa, Carolyn Wonderland, Gary Clark Jr. - we bring a lot of experience to the table in helping the couples figure out what they want for their wedding.
Amanda Cevallos went to college at the University of Montana where she studied dance choreography and performance as well as entertainment management at the U of M School of Business. In 2009 she came back to Texas where she was raised and in March 2010 she joined the team at Will Taylor and Strings Attached.
Your musical event planning needs are her first priority. She knows the ins and out of the Strings Attached repertoire built over our 20-year history in the business. But she also has her finger on the pulse of what’s current and popular culture, which makes her an ideal booking agent and a facilitator.
So welcome Amanda. I am so glad to have her here. She has been with us for over an year now. I think we have a really great thing going on and she has a lot to turn in on and I am just going to invite her to interrupt me when appropriate.
Let me talk about music and let me share a few quotes:
“Music is the shorthand of emotion” – Leo Tolstoy.
“Music is what feelings sound like. Music is the universal language of mankind” – Longfellow.
So what is the role of music at a wedding? When you think of a wedding ________[3:22] that is kind of like planning a major life event, in a way it’s like a movie production or producing a play. It’s not unlike that. This is an event that’s going to happen one time in your life and what would it be like if you went to see a play or a movie and there is no music accompanying it? It’s just people talking to each other.
From my standpoint it might not have as much emotional impact and for me the role of music at a wedding is to help the emotional impact. A wedding is very emotional experience. So music can help the emotion be experienced more deeply by not just the couple but all the people that are attending, and that’s one thing to remember is that as you are planning your wedding, this is for your family and your friends as much for them as it is for you and you want them to have this memorable emotional experience.
Now for most people it’s also a religious experience and music is a big part of the emotional impact of spirituality. So it’s like setting the scene. It’s a soundtrack for a grand production that you are planning. So I’d like to ask you to think in your mind and visualize the scene, like a scene in a movie. What is your soundtrack going to sound like?
At this point it might be nice just to talk about one of the parts of the other wedding where there can be music, the different scenes, like in a movie you have a scene. So you start from the top of the movie, of your wedding. Usually the first point of contact is when the guests are walking into the ceremony location. In some cases it will be a church; in other cases it might be an outdoor wedding. So you set that scene with maybe a string quartet. If that’s not your particular style, maybe you have somebody singing middle-eastern music or folk music or you have a solo singer – something to give the guests maybe a little entertainment while they are sitting down and getting adjusted to the ceremony.
Amanda: Something to set the tone so when they walk into something, they walk into something special. As soon as the door is open there’s this beautiful sound coming from wherever the setting is and it really sets the tone.
Will Taylor: Yeah, so think about what is the first impression musically you want to get your guests. Again, I’d like to focus on getting away from traditional should be’s if you have that luxury. Now you may be doing a wedding where the church gives you a specific list of pieces then you want to follow that and share that with your music organizer, whoever is playing to your music.
At Strings Attached we can handle the music from the beginning to the end and we are very experienced in handling these kinds of things. We have done music for up to 20 years. So you want to lean on your provider, lean on your wedding coordinator. We have done anywhere from 100s to over a thousand of these and so we are going to know things about putting together the music and we are going to be able to save you time and effort, so lean on your professionals.
And if you are the asked scenario [7:02] check out stringsattached.org. We love to help organize and make your wedding dreams come true. Amanda will answer the call. You can call her directly at (512) 944…
Amanda: 8407 or you can email me at [email protected] and just very quickly before we go I just want to be sure to mention our wedding reception band because I think that’s we get calls for above. We get calls to play strings but we also have a wedding reception band that is fantastic.
And we have another thing called ‘TheClassicRockSeries.com’ and it’s a series of tribute shows and we use a lot of the songs from these tribute shows for the wedding band but we also have other tunes on that website.
Will Taylor: We’d also like to mention, like I said in the beginning of the podcast, Strings Attached can handle the music from the beginning to the end of the reception, the very last note. We are sort of a one-stop shopping source for your live music or live wedding music needs here in the Austin central Texas area.
So we talked a lot about the ceremony music and the cocktail music and we also have a really versatile, exciting, dynamic wedding music variety band and it’s about a six piece ensemble. We can do anything from 60s Motown to 80s pop tunes to Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, a bit of country music, a bit of folk music…
Amanda: Swing, Jazz…
Will Taylor: Pretty much everything that you can imagine we can do at really exhaustive song list online and you can check and see that variety right now. We provide really beautiful lighting systems. We also have a sound system that is high quality and bring our own sound man. We come early and setup and make sure everything is ready to go way ahead of time. We will also MC your event if you have special announcements that you like us to make. We are able to do all that.
Amanda: We’ll create the scripts based on your schedule.
Will Taylor: We’ll create a script based on your schedule and everything will be taken care of – the high quality, it will be dynamic, and if you have any creative ideas we can customize it to your event.
I had a wedding in 2008 where I had a 9-piece band and the client picked every single piece of music. Now we did have to charge for that but we made it happen for them and they had four sets of music and they picked every single piece of music and we worked with them and made it work. So we can go from the extreme, working out every little detail or we can also help you and design with suggestions.
Amanda: We have a client right now that loves us and hired us because they came to our tribute shows and they know what we are capable of. They also have their own ideas too so they are allowing us to be creative and then they are adding a list of songs that they just can’t live without and so we have added eight tunes through our set list for them for a fee of course, but that’s an option. So don’t rule anything out with your wedding band.
Will Taylor: Exactly, and if you want to hear us live we have a monthly residency at the Nutty Brown Café here in Austin, Texas. If you just look up ClassicRockSeries.com you will see a schedule of shows. Our next show is coming up on July 30. Again, that’s ClassicRockSeries.com and also I want to mention that a lot of this information we have talked about, our Frequently Asked Questions, our worksheet – all that is available at celebratewithstringsattached.com or you can email us and we will send you any of this.
If you have any questions, again, just email [email protected] and we will mention these on the podcast in the next episode. If you’d like to record yourself saying the question we will have you on the podcast.
Amanda: If you have a booking inquiry just email [email protected] or you can call me or text me at (512) 944-8407 . I am available after 5:00. I have a lot of clients who work all day and can’t really plan their wedding until after they get off work and I make myself available for those clients. So just keep in mind from about 5:00 to 8:00 I am open to texting, calling or emailing.
Will Taylor: Well that’s it. We are going to sign off for now from MusicForaWeddingPodcast with Will Taylor and Strings Attached. Subscribe to this podcast by clicking one of the buttons over there on iTunes. There will be more episodes coming up when we talk more about choosing the music for your wedding and what we do. So we will talk to you and we will see you in the future on the podcast.
Free music for this podcast is available on iTunes. Search for ‘A Bridezilla’s Guide to Classical Wedding Music’. That’s on iTunes at ‘A Bridezilla’s Guide to Classical Wedding Music’.
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