Hiring a student musician for your wedding

There are three very good reasons for considering hiring a student musician to perform at your wedding:

• Professional wedding musicians can be booked well in advance for prime-time Saturday weddings and weddings in popular months. Student musicians are usually available pretty much all the time except exam weeks.
• Student musicians will have enthusiasm going for them. They’ll certainly be pleased you hired them.
• The fee a student musician will charge you may be half (or even less) than what you would pay a professional wedding musician.

If the last point is of most interest, consider that you get what you pay for and student (amateur) musicians come with drawbacks:

• They may never have attended a wedding before, let alone performed at one, and they have no idea what to expect.
• They may not know what the proper attire is for a wedding performance.
• They might not have a repertoire appropriate for weddings (this is a big one).
• They may have a very small repertoire and resort to playing the same selections over and over again (it happens and it is painful).
• They may not own amplification equipment so you will have to hire it for them.
• They may know how to set up and achieve a good sound outdoors. They will eventually learn this, but hopefully not through trial and error at your beach wedding.
• They may ignore ceremony cues and reception cues essential to your wedding timeline. They are young after all and may think it unimportant to follow ‘rules’ too rigidly.
• Playing too loud is the number one problem with young musicians. It could be due to nerves or just an inability to ‘read the room.’ Excessive volume can be particularly distressing for elderly friends and family members attending your wedding.
• They may not know how to behave appropriately at a wedding. Straight-up lack of maturity in young musicians can be embarrassing. Especially if alcohol is involved.

All of the above means the trade-off for saving money on a student musician is that you must teach them what to do at your wedding.

Even though I am a professional musician, I am very supportive of student musicians getting out there and performing. They fulfil a need for low-cost musicians in the marketplace. Everyone has to start somewhere and students who perform at weddings sometimes go on to become professionals.

My top tip is this: the very best way to find a solid student musician is to ask professional musicians who teach lessons (like me) if they have a student to recommend. If they do, they’ll coach the student for your wedding. Why would they bother? Simply because the student’s performance reflects on the competency of the teacher, so they are invested in the student doing a good job!