How long should a wedding band play?

Usually 3 sets of 40 minutes. That is 120 minutes of music, about 27 songs at a median length of 3:53, spread across an evening that runs four or five hours from load-in.

Sets run shorter than a pub gig because the evening has more in it that is not you. A bar wants three 45s back to back. A wedding has speeches, a cake, a buffet and a photographer who needs everyone outside at sunset.

You are being booked for the evening, not for the 120 minutes. Price it that way and say so in writing, because the difference between those two numbers is where every argument about wedding fees starts.

This is the part that separates a wedding from every other gig you play.

Somebody has written a timeline. It has the ceremony on it, the meal, the speeches, the first dance and the carriages. Your three sets sit in the gaps that are left, and the gaps move on the day.

Speeches always run long. An uncle finds a second wind. The meal starts twenty minutes late because the photographs did, and every one of those minutes comes out of the end of the night rather than the start.

Get the timeline before the day, and get it in times of day.Not "after the speeches". A number. If the planner will not give you one, ask the venue instead, because the venue has a curfew and the curfew is written down.

It happens at a time somebody else picked. You do not open with it, you do not warm up into it, and it is often a song nobody in the band has played before.

Learn it properly and rehearse the ending. A first dance that fades out on a record has no ending, and you have to write one. Ask whether they want the full arrangement or a shortened version, because three and a half minutes is a long time for two people alone on a floor with everybody watching.

Then plan what follows it. The floor is at its fullest in the ninety seconds after the first dance. Put a slow one there and you lose the room you were just handed. Have something everybody knows ready to go.

If you are asked to play during the meal, that is background music and it is not the gig you rehearsed.

Quieter, slower, and nothing anybody has to listen to. People are talking, and the band that plays its floor-fillers over dinner is the band the room stops hearing by nine.

Keep it off the count too. A dinner set is usually paid differently or bundled into the fee, and it is not one of your 3 sets. Bands get caught by that one and then play 120 minutes of music plus another forty for nothing.

Every venue has a hard stop. It is on the licence, and the venue does not negotiate with a band about it at midnight.

So plan the night backwards. Take the curfew, subtract the last set, subtract the 15 minute break before it, and keep going until you reach the downbeat of your first set. That gives you a start time you can hold somebody to, rather than a length you hope fits.

Do that arithmetic once, on paper, before the day. It is the difference between cutting two songs from the end because you planned for it, and having the lights come up in the middle of the one everybody waited for. What a break really costs you out of a slot is the same arithmetic on a smaller night.

A wedding is the one gig where elapsed minutes are useless and times of day are everything. The first dance is at 20:30. The curfew is at 23:30.

Enter your start time in Setlists.io and every row carries the time of day it lands, alongside how long each song runs and the running total. Move a song and the finish time moves with it, while you are still planning.

Print one for the band and one for whoever is running the room. At a wedding that is usually a planner or a venue manager rather than an engineer, and they will be the most grateful person there.