Dear Musicians, We get many demos from artists that have a bit of a false sense of entitlement when it comes to cruise ship jobs. Often, this entitlement comes from the fact that these entertainers have already worked on ships before and thus think that what was good enough once will always be good enough. [...]
Dear Musicians, This is an article I was hoping I would never have to write. But here I am, typing away, because common sense is, apparently, a lot less common than you’d think. Wikipedia says: “common sense” equates to the knowledge and experience which most people allegedly have, or which the person using the term [...]
Dear Musicians, Memorizing repertoire is an important part of your performance and can be the deciding factor for cruise lines to, or not to, hire you. This affects literally all lounge entertainers, whether you’re a classical ensemble, cover band, cocktail pianist, piano vocalist, guitar vocalist etc. Now, for some of the above-mentioned entertainers this has [...]
Dear Musicians, Today we’ll take a closer look at the orchestra auditions for saxophone players. For your convenience I’ve listed below all the recent podcast episodes about auditions. Episode 11 – General remarks about auditions Episode 12 – Solo Entertainers and Bands Episode 13 – Piano (orchestra auditions) Episode 14 – Guitar (orchestra auditions) Episode [...]
Dear Musicians, In this episode we’ll talk about the audition procedure for those drummers looking to be a part of the orchestra on ships. If you play a different instrument and would like to audition, check the list below to find the right episode for you to listen to. Don’t forget that we have a [...]
Dear Musicians, I thought I would elaborate a bit on the job opportunities on cruise ships for classical musicians. We do get a lot of inquiries from individual classical musicians and I should say that we do hire existing ensembles only. These could be duos, trios, quartets and even quintets. A classical ensemble usually performs [...]
Dear Musicians, On a recent cruise I noticed that some of the entertainers don’t seem to apply themselves much to their performances and this may be understandable to some degree. Playing some popular requests over and over again could drive anyone nuts. A piano/vocalist rattled down some of the songs as if the goal was [...]
Let’s face it, being or becoming a good musician is tough. Theory, harmony, arranging, ear training, composing, history, sight-reading, instrument related technical skills, embouchure, stylistics, improvisation, ensemble playing… the list seems endless. One can spend several lifetimes and still not perfect all aspects of music. And I don’t believe that it is necessary to be [...]
Dear Musicians, Sight-reading, the ability to perform an unknown piece of music at first sight, is a skill that every musician should master. It is difficult enough as a complete musician to secure enough music jobs in a saturated job market and a lack of fundamental skills such as sight-reading would most definitely make matters [...]
It can be hard to be objective about your own playing. While musicians are often brutally aware of how poorly they might have done on a particularly bad night, it is much harder to identify subtle improvements that need to be made, or realize that there are areas where you might think you are doing [...]
There’re certain things a player obviously needs to know when playing music aboard a cruise ship. For showband musicians, sight-reading ability is a given. For saxophone players, so is minimal ability on doubles — clarinet and flute. When I first committed to join a ship, many veterans gave me pointers about how to do the [...]
When first getting involved as a professional, a lot of previously amateur musicians don’t think too hard about what the future might hold for them. The excitement over passing an audition and being selected as a band member is exciting enough that for the first little while, the novelty of playing consistently and being paid [...]
