Cocktail Hour Guide

Songs

I usually gauge the audience and choose as I go; making sure I do a varied mix of songs I know always go down well. If you’d prefer, you are welcome to select all of the songs I sing from my various lists (find them here) or you can just pick a few of your favourites and leave the rest up to me.

I personally prefer the freedom of choosing songs myself and it usually works better if I play to who is around me at the time as people obviously move around and mingle a lot during cocktail hour.

If you do want to pick all of the songs, we need roughly 30 to cover 90 mins.

Vibe

I like to start on guitar for cocktail hour to give it an upbeat vibe but still making it background enough for people to chat and catch up on the day. Then as your evening guests arrive, I like to switch to backing tracks to build up the party atmosphere. If you’d prefer it more lively from the get go or if you think a more mellow background would suit your guests, let me know and I can totally do this for you instead.

Preferences

It’s really helpful for me to know any songs or artists you don't like or don’t want me to play so I can make sure to steer clear of them. This includes the songs I perform and the songs I play on the background playlist in between my sets.

Duplicates

It’d also be great to know your first dance song or any other meaningful songs you’ve chosen for parts of the day where I’m not there so that I can avoid them and they don't get repeated.

Learning Songs

I am, of course, happy to learn songs for you if there is something meaningful to you that I don’t already know.

It obviously takes a number of hours to learn, practice and perfect a new song to the standard that I would be happy to perform it and so I may ask for a small fee to cover my time. I also have to cap learning new songs for cocktail hour to no more than two.

Please feel free to ask me any questions you have at any time by email or Instagram DM, or we can arrange a call if you prefer.