Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A great resource for wedding professionals!, July 1, 2009
Anne Roos' book provides excellent tips for both beginning and veteran music professionals. Her book captures the essence of professionalism and how that applies to career wedding musicians. Many of the common sense pointers are particularly useful for performers new to the field, such as maintaining collegiality with wedding coordinators, booking agents, and other musicians. This book also includes a wealth of information about how to get started, how to set fees, and how to promote your business. "Musician's Guide to Brides" also stays current by addressing appropriate uses of technology for communication and promotion, and includes a caution about using social networking sites such as MySpace. As Web 2.0 tools and other technologies change and evolve, it would be good to have an online companion resource to the book, to stay abreast of these "eTrends." Veteran musicians can also benefit from the updated insights this guide provides!
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5.0 out of 5 stars
An absolute "must-have" for any musician interested in playing for weddings, October 7, 2008
Written by Anne Roos, who has played the Celtic harp at weddings for more than twenty-five years, The Musician's Guide to Brides: How to Make Money Playing Weddings lives up to its title with solid, practical advice on everything from creating a wedding-friendly musical repertoire to writing a performance agreement, advertising one's services, exhibiting at bridal fairs, closing a sale with the bride, working with the mother of the bride/the wedding coordinator/booking agents, avoiding common problems and pitfalls, dealing with difficult people (or "bridezillas!") and much more. Of especial value is the chapter that details how to ensure one is promptly and properly paid! Emphasizing professionalism above all - particularly the importance of a having a contract that spells out one's obligations, being honest about what one can or can't do, and maintaining one's cool even when the environment at a wedding may get rambunctious - The Musician's Guide to Brides is an absolute "must-have" for any musician interested in playing for weddings.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Manual For Someone Wanting To Break Into The World of Wedding Gigs, October 1, 2008
If you are a musician and your looking for another avenue of revenue, you may want to pick up a copy of Anne Roos' The Musicians' Guide To Brides: How To Make Money Playing Weddings. Although, I have not done any extensive research on the subject, I doubt if there is any other manual on the market that is as comprehensive as this one pertaining to wedding gigs.
Roos commenced in her musical career in 1983 playing the Celtic Harp. Her initial gigs were with Renaissance fairs where she became quite popular and this led to receiving many requests to perform at weddings and corporate events. She has been performing at weddings for more than twenty-five years and she also regularly appears on radio and television. In addition to her music career, Roos has served on the Board of the Lake Tahoe Wedding and Honeymoon Association and is a member of the Association of Bridal Consultants. As a professional musician and arranger, she has served on the Board of Governors of the San Francisco Chapter of the Recording Academy.
Roos carefully divides her three hundred and twenty-one page manual into fourteen chapters and also includes three appendices where she discusses a repertoire to get started, netiquette for wedding musicians and suggested further reading.
The gamut of topics covered run from creating the right mindset to perform at weddings, to what it takes, your wedding music inventory, setting your fees, performance agreements, promotion and advertising, exhibiting at bridal fairs, selling your services to the bride, dealing with various intermediaries as booking agents, wedding coordinators, mother of the bride, the groom or other family member and friends, relations with the bride and avoiding problems, preparation for the wedding day, hiring a roadie, and following up with clients. In addition, sprinkled throughout are various worksheets and other documentation that will no doubt prove to be of great assistance such as the equipment inventory worksheet and checklist, the wedding music inventory worksheet, a sample performance agreement, what to include in your promotional materials, bridal fair worksheet and checklist, sales call checklist, and the wedding day timeline and checklist.
All are presented in a user-friendly, step-by-step format that will help you tap into a fifty billion dollar industry where opportunities are overflowing when you consider that there are over 2.4 million weddings performed each year in the USA alone.
It should be pointed out, as Roos mentions in the Preface, her own experience performing at weddings is diverse, but by no means complete. Consequently, in putting together her manual she has received input from various individuals who are tied into the wedding event business such as coordinators, booking agents, celebrants, and ceremony reception managers.
Throughout the manual, Roos underlines one vital facet of playing at weddings and that is that it is important to have a clear communication between the bride and her musicians. After all, it is her big day and unlike other gigs where you can just about play anything you feel like, it is important to realize that she is the one who is in charge. She gets to select the special music that will make her wedding day magical. Wedding musicians are an important member of the team that participate in the wedding, however, they should keep in mind at all times that their role is not to upstate the bride.
Easy to use, clearly laid out, and very well-written, this is a superb manual for anyone wanting to break into the world of wedding gigs or for that matter any gigs, as many of the principles explored can be adapted to most musical engagements.
Norm Goldman, Publisher & Editor Bookpleasures
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