WELCOME TO FOUR ON THE FLOOR - A LEADING WEST MIDLANDS WEDDING BAND
“So glad we chose Four on the Floor band to play at our wedding. It was just like having our own little summer festival! ” Sarah and Paul, wedding reception, Sutton Coldfield.
Four On The Floor West Midlands wedding band are guaranteed to make your wedding, party or any other event an unforgettable night! We have been trusted by hundreds of brides and grooms at weddings for live band + DJ music hire. Bands for hire in the West Midlands don’t come better than FOUR ON THE FLOOR! As professional wedding musicians specialise in live band entertainment at small to mid-sized functions at venues and other establishments but we have also performed at large open air events in front of 4,000 people.
We call the music we play “dance floor friendly” – which means that you and your guests will want to get up and dance to the instantly recognisable classic and contemporary hits we perform (check out our brilliant playlist here). More than likely, you’ll spend the whole evening dancing and your friends won’t want the evening to end!
Four On The Floor are one of the most popular bands for hire in the West Midlands. As a local band we have gained a reputation for providing superb top quality live entertainment at weddings and other functions around the West Midlands (but you can also hire us to provide live entertainment for your wedding or party in Warwickshire, Shropshire, Worcestershire, Staffordshire, Herefordshire, Oxfordshire, Leicestershire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire). Our live band line up of male vocals, guitar, bass and drums makes every song sound great! We provide a full live entertainment hire service which includes:
- versatile and entertaining live band
- large playlist of classic and modern wedding music
- 2 hours of indie, rock, pop, soul and much more
- your first dance and song requests performed
- additional DJ-style music at no additional cost
- no entertainment agency fees
- professional wedding musicians
- great sound, 100% live – no backing tracks
- sound and lighting system
- public liability insurance
- contract for stress-free booking
- contract for stress-free booking
- compact set up, perfect for small to midsize wedding venues
- a full dance floor!
Four On The Floor provide live wedding entertainment in the local area for just about any private hire event you can think of – weddings, village fetes, charity fundraising events through to summer festivals and large corporate events. In additional to performing our hearts out for your special day for up to two hours of live music, we also provide great DJ-style music, at no extra fee, which means that your whole evenings’ entertainment is taken care of. Excellent! Take a look at our videos, listen to our music, get in touch with us direct on our Contact page or call us on 0796 433 5657.
HOW TO HIRE THE BEST BAND FOR A WEST MIDLANDS WEDDING
Among professional wedding service suppliers, the general consensus is that you will spend at least 300 hours planning your big day, sorting out your dress, flowers, looking at venues, and a million other things, and you will also spend a good deal of time looking for wedding entertainment. But if you have spent more than five minutes searching online to hire a West Midlands wedding band, two things will have become apparent:
there is a bewildering array of wedding bands advertising themselves as perfect for your wedding reception
most wedding musicians pretty much do the same thing
While it’s true that there are many professional, semi-professional and amateur bands advertising themselves as being the perfect addition to your wedding reception, not all of them will be the right fit for your wedding. And while many of us perform a broad mix of classic and contemporary live music, gig regularly and sound and look good, before you do hire a wedding band you need to be sure that the choice you have made to provide live entertainment for your wedding is the right one. Here are a few suggestions you might like to take into consideration.
WEDDING BAND HEADACHE?
Hiring a live band for your wedding doesn’t have to be a headache – it’s just a question of finding the perfect local wedding band from the hundreds of wedding musicians on Google, recommendations from friends and random West Midlands wedding bands advertising their services for your West Midlands wedding. Some venues will also recommend wedding bands.
The problem is that too much choice can be confusing – how are you supposed to know if one band offers a better service than another wedding band? Of course, you can watch videos and listen to wedding band music and tell if the vocals sound in tune and if the band sound and look good, but there will be literally dozens of live bands that will sound and look good, so you will still be left with having to make the difficult choice between multiple local covers bands doing pretty much the same thing. So then you have to look at price – how many of the West Midlands wedding bands you’re looking at come in under budget?
These days the answer is probably “very few”. You may have noticed that band A seems to be charging twice as such as band B for what essentially appears to be the same live wedding entertainment service, and this can make your decision even more difficult. Is there something the cheaper band isn’t offering that is not immediately obvious but will only become apparent when they arrive? Or maybe it’s that the expensive wedding music bands are expensive for a reason – they could be travelling a lot further than local wedding bands and building accommodation into their fee, or there’s an entertainment agency commission as part of the fee that’s making them more expensive. They might be charging extra because they use additional wedding musicians to fill out their sound, something they don’t want to show you on their videos. It could even be just that they want to charge a lot more than other cheap wedding bands.
Whatever the reason, there will inevitably be some West Midlands wedding bands who fall outside your budget. But don’t worry – just because you receive quotes from bands and they’re all way too expensive, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t reliable, professional wedding bands out there who will be perfect for you and within budget. It’s just a question of where to find them. As professional musicians we say that Google is still the single most effective tool in the search to find and hire a band, as long as you know how to use that tool properly. Beware of using search terms that are too general. A good example of a band Google search is “local wedding band”, which is still a very popular (but misguided) search.
Brides and grooms who search Google for wedding band music using this phrase are making the assumption that “local” has some currency, by which we mean that searching for a local wedding band is somehow advantageous; usually that local covers bands will be cheaper than bands outside the West Midlands. If you have tried this search term, you will probably already have discovered that it doesn’t really help in locating local wedding bands! Why? Because most of the search results on the first couple of pages will be for entertainment agencies – these are not West Midlands wedding musicians but businesses which advertise hundreds of West Midlands wedding bands, most of which won’t be local. And even if Google does show you individual bands for hire in the West Midlands, there’s a very good chance that “we service your local area” means “we are based outside your area but will travel to perform for you and will charge you travel expenses”. Take a look at our videos, listen to our music, get in touch with us direct on our Contact page or call us on 0796 433 5657.
LOCAL WEDDING BANDS
So if searching for local bands doesn’t really assist in your quest for a band, is there a better option? Well, given that there’s no certainty that local wedding bands = cheaper wedding bands, we would suggest approaching your search differently. How? Well, though Google will show you lots of seemingly local wedding bands, it won’t necessarily tell you whether the band will suit your requirements – it won’t tell you if the bands’ playlist suits your tastes and those of your guests. It won’t tell you if the band are not just musicians but entertainers, capable of creating a full dancefloor at venues not just with the quality of music but the quality of performance. It won’t tell you if the local band you’re interested in are happy to learn and perform your song requests.
For any of the above, there’s only one real way of finding the answers you need, and that’s to make direct contact with the wedding musicians, either via email or ideally by phone. In the same way that we think we can tell a lot about what brides and grooms are looking for in their live band wedding entertainment by talking to them direct, you will also be able to get a flavour of the wedding bands’ approach by calling them. If they sound professional, courteous and knowledgeable on the phone then there’s a good chance that the same qualities will apply in person.
SHOULD I HIRE A BAND THROUGH AN ENTERTAINMENT AGENCY?
By the way, here’s something to think about – as we mentioned, there are many entertainment agencies advertising their services online. Sometimes it’s hard to know the difference between a West Midlands band and an agency. This is because some entertainment agencies create individual websites for their wedding bands. This is done for two reasons. Firstly, they know that a website designed to represent a single band will work beneficially in terms of a presence on Google and other search engines. But more importantly, an entertainment agency will set up a separate website for each of its’ bands for hire in the West Midlands because it knows that many people have reasons why they don’t want to hire a band through them. Brides and grooms like yourself want to speak to local wedding bands direct. They want to talk to the wedding musicians they are hiring rather than nameless faces working for an entertainment agency who they will never meet and may not even be wedding musicians.
Savvy brides and grooms looking for bands for hire in the West Midlands will also be aware that if they do hire a band through one of these websites, they will also incur an extra cost – though you may think that wedding entertainment agencies operate like price comparison websites (ie. at no cost to yourselves), they actually add a commission on to the fee normally charged by the band. Whereas some agencies are quite upfront about this and will tell you when booking, others won’t tell you, leaving you to pay the extra fee in advance. This is wrong for all manner of reasons. Not only will you be paying more than if you hire a band direct, but you won’t know that you will be paying more than if you hire the band direct! Nothing beats the feeling of knowing that you have paid more (in some cases hundreds of pounds more) for a service that other brides and grooms have paid because they were able to their band direct.
The flip side of that is that if the entertainment agency have been able to convince the band to discount their standard fee so that the agency takes a commission, the band will actually be performing at your wedding reception for less money than they would normally perform for. If this happens, let’s hope that the band aren’t bitter enough to be tempted to cut corners during their performance, like not playing long enough live music sets or looking bored or irritated on stage! Take a look at our videos, listen to our music, get in touch with us direct on our Contact page or call us on 0796 433 5657.
WHY HIRE A LIVE WEDDING BAND FOR YOUR WEDDING?
We’re glad you asked! Choose the right entertainment and you will have your guests dancing all night. Choose the wrong entertainment and guess won’t dance, will be bored and will most likely leave early. The right entertainment will engage your guests, play music they want to hear and leave them with great memories of your wedding reception. The wrong entertainment will ensure that your wedding reception is one to forget. There’s a lot riding on your choice, so it’s important that hire a West Midlands band wisely. Broadly speaking there are two options for entertainment for your wedding – a band or DJ. And while it’s true that more West Midlands brides and grooms choose DJs than hire wedding bands, that doesn’t necessarily mean that hiring a DJ is a better option for you.
Sure, a DJ will almost always be more cost effective than if you were to hire a live band, but that shouldn’t be the only criteria for choosing. A DJ will be likely to be able to play a wider mix of music than a band, but will a DJ be as engaging? Will they have the “wow” factor that only a great live band will bring? And in terms of that large repertoire a DJ will play, will they be sensitive to any song requests you may have or will they just play the music they want to play and ignore you and your guests? While it’s true that good DJs are available, week after week we hear stories about wedding receptions where the DJ proved to be the wrong choice for the wedding guests. The wrong music was played, the DJ ignored song requests and wasn’t personable and pleasant.
If you have come to the decision that you want to hire a live band for your entertainment (that’s why you’re here, right?), make sure you hire a local band who can play song requests. When you speak to bands, ask them if they are happy to learn your favourite songs. A simple question, but you would be surprised at the number of bands who actively refuse to learn song requests or who will demand an extra fee for the privilege. FOUR ON THE FLOOR BAND are happy to look at learning any song request you may have, and won’t charge you for it! Take a look at our videos, listen to our music, get in touch with us direct on our Contact page or call us on 0796 433 5657.
EXPERT ADVICE, COMMUNICATED PROMPTLY
Also – and this will become pretty much apparent when you first reach out to a local band you’re interested in hiring – hire a band who communicate effectively. How long have you waited for a reply to your request for a quote or information? A few days? A week? Longer? Ouch. Sounds like the band you’re interested in aren’t too interested in you. Contrary to popular opinion, not all bands are that disorganised. If we receive your email, we will always reply within 24 hours. If we don’t, we haven’t received your email – it’s as simple as that (and we’re also very good at liaising with venues after you’ve hired us).
And here’s our final suggestion – don’t see the band play live. Yes, that does sound counterintuitive, doesn’t it – of course you should hire a band only after see the band play live; how else are you going to get an idea of what they sound like? Well consider this – professional bands for hire in the West Midlands (like Four on the Floor) usually perform at weddings, business events and parties; all of which are private functions often held in wedding venues, whereas amateur West Midlands bands mostly tend to perform at pubs and clubs, but not wedding receptions. The main reason for this is that professional local wedding bands are usually too busy to be able to perform in public on a Friday or Saturday night, so if you DO see a band perform in public in Birmingham or the West Midlands, they are going to be an amateur band, and as amateur bands may not be able to play a broad enough style of band music to suit everyone you have invited, may not be very well organised, may not even turn up, etc, suddenly the choice becomes clear – go professional.
It’s all too common these days when hiring bands for the band that arrives to perform at your wedding party is quite different to the band you thought you had hired. Sometimes it’s just the backing wedding musicians who are different, but sometimes, critically it’s the singer who is different, but it could even be a completely different band who arrive to perform at your function. Or if you’re really unlucky, a totally different band might arrive to perform at your wedding reception! Of course, if you have been made aware in advance that this is going to happen and you’re OK with it then there’s no problem, but if you haven’t been informed, it creates a nasty surprise and not only will the band in question have to work extra hard to ensure that the night is a success, but even if the band are great, play the song requests you asked for and get your friends and loved ones dancing, you may not be able to escape the feeling that you didn’t get what you paid for. After all, when you hire a wedding band it would be nice to actually get the service you were expecting, right?
HIRE A WEDDING BAND FROM THE WEST MIDLANDS DIRECT
There will of course always be reasons for changes in band personnel – wedding musicians aren’t superhuman and nobody can escape falling ill. If this does happen and the band you have hired or entertainment agency you have contracted your band through does rotate in another musician to cover the illness, on one hand that’s a good thing, because the alternative is that you hire a band, they cancel and you are stuck in the position of having to find other bands. But if the replacement musician is not of the same standard of ability as the original music you hired, you will still feel disappointed.
At the other end of the spectrum, if a completely different band does turn up, it could be because multiple musicians are ill, but the number one reason for this happening is that you have hired a band through an entertainment agency and rather than rotating in another musician to cover illness, agencies generally elect to send one of their other West Midlands wedding bands. This is because it’s easier for them to ask one of their other wedding bands to perform the function rather than spend time trying to source wedding musicians. And there are also some unscrupulous agencies who may allow you to hire wedding bands on their books that either no longer exist and the booking is fulfilled by wedding musicians who may not even have met each other before and have to play some hastily thrown together music with each other for the first time on the night. If you have hired your band through an entertainment agency then this is something that can happen, and it’s something you won’t have control over.
So the best option for brides and grooms looking to hire a band for a West Midlands wedding is to hire a band direct. One of the great things about FOUR ON THE FLOOR is that we are a real band – by which we mean that the band you hire is the band you get.
WEST MIDLANDS WEDDING VENUES
It’s true to say that West Midlands and Birmingham wedding venue managers love FOUR ON THE FLOOR BAND! This is because we are very easy to deal with – no big rock star egos here, just four down to earth professional musicians who will ensure your night runs smoothly and without a hitch. From an administrative point of view, by the time of your big day, we will have liaised with both yourself and the venue so that we all know what will happen on the evening. We will have talked to you about timings, song requests any other special requirements you might have, but just as importantly, we will have talked to your venue about our arrival and set up time – how we load into the venue, where in the performance room we will be setting up, what volume the venue manager requires us to perform at (something that professional bands know is increasingly important at modern venues), whether the room has a sound limiter in place, what time caterers will be serving evening food, any announcements that we need to make (eg. calling last orders), and the cut off time. All of this background information is something we will have taken care of in advance so that you can concentrate on your wedding evening, getting yourselves dancing and enjoying our wedding music!
Some of the West Midlands venues FOUR ON THE FLOOR BAND have performed at include:
Curradine Barns, Worcester – a lovely central performance room with plenty of space for your everyone to dance
New Hall Hotel, Sutton Coldfield – featuring a dedicated marquee with its’ own sound system
Mill Barns, Bridgnorth – a sumptuous venue with an impressive long gallery room
Redhouse Barn, Bromsgrove – a modern function venue in a traditional barn setting
Grand Central Hotel, Wolverhampton – a choice of two rooms depending on the number of your wedding invitees
The Old Library, Birmingham – central to the the city but specious and accommodating
Hundred House, Telford – a rustic and intimate traditional venue
Ansty Hall – another traditional wedding venue just outside Coventry
Hogarths, Solihull and Kidderminster – both venues have great acoustics for live bands
Highbury Hall, Moseley – if Victorian opulence is your thing, this venue is for you!
Fairlawns Hotel – an old favourite situated near Walsall
Moxhull Hall, Wishaw – a secluded gem
The Belfry, Sutton Coldfield – the ever popular upscale wedding venue
Pendrell Hall, between Wolverhampton and Telford – one of our absolute favourite rooms to perform in!
Take a look at our videos, listen to our music, get in touch with us direct on our Contact page or call us on 0796 433 5657.
BEST WEST MIDLANDS BAND
Wow, that’s a lot of information to take on board, isn’t it. But while it might feel like choosing the perfect local band for your West Midlands wedding just got more complicated, we’re sure you’ll agree that it’s a mixture of common sense and good advice from experienced professional West Midlands wedding musicians. Like most brides and grooms, this is probably your first time planning to search for a band, there are going to be elements that are new to you and questions you probably didn’t know you need to ask, but hopefully this has given you a better idea of what to look for in your search for the perfect local band.
FOUR ON THE FLOOR BAND play at lots of weddings every year. You’ll find that we are more cost effective than the majority of professional function bands and live wedding music bands, and when you contact us via our website you will come through to the band direct. For a quote, information or just an informal chat about hiring Four on the Floor to perform at your wedding reception, call us direct on 0796 433 5657 or email us at weddingbandpartymusic@hotmail.co.uk . We look forward to hearing from you!
