Journal
Notes on music, rooms and running a night well — written for the people who book us rather than for anybody else.
Notes we write for the people who book us, mostly because we were tired of saying the same four things on the phone. No industry news, no round-ups, nothing written to be found by a search engine.
Journal
Notes on music, rooms and running a night well
What an eleven-piece actually costs you
Musicians, transport, rehearsal, the extra hour nobody budgets for — written out in cedis so you can see where a quote comes from.
Read the note
Why your venue's ceiling decides your sound
Hard ceilings, glass walls and marble floors are why the same band sounds glorious in one hall and unbearable in the next.
Read the noteThe archive
Everything else we have written down
Choosing a first dance a band can actually play
Tempo, key and whether the recording you love is held together by a string section nobody is going to hire. Four questions to ask before you fall in love with a song.
Read the noteOutdoor sound in Accra between June and September
Humidity, sudden rain and a generator you did not budget for. What we cover with tarpaulin, what we refuse to put outside, and why the answer changes after eight o'clock.
Read the noteWhere the speeches should sit in your running order
Almost every timeline we are sent puts them after the main course. Almost every night runs better when they do not. Here is what we have watched happen four hundred times.
Read the noteWhy we still open every set with highlife
It is not nostalgia and it is not a house style. It is that a room of three hundred people, half of whom have not met, needs something everybody's aunt already knows the words to.
Read the noteBooking drummers for a ceremony, respectfully
Which ensemble suits which occasion, what should never be played at a funeral, and why the family elder — not the planner — should be the one who signs it off.
Read the noteThe case for a quieter dinner
Guests who can talk over dinner dance harder afterwards. We have the same argument with a planner about twice a month and we have not lost it yet.
Read the noteTell us about the night
The date, the room and roughly how many people. We will come back with what we would put in it and what it costs — in cedis, on one page.
Laurel
