Dear musicians, You might be on a ship during the christmas holidays and you might be asking yourself if there’s any specific repertoire you might need during those days. Well, the answer is yes, you should definitely be prepared to play some christmas songs and you should definitely have a version of Auld Lang Syne [...]

Dear Musicians, In a previous blog post I wrote about the fact that more musicians apply for cruise ship jobs because they can’t find jobs on land. By now it’s clear that this has created a huge backlog of musicians that can’t get back on ships because the supply is larger than demand and this [...]

Dear Musicians, The economy is down (for those that haven’t paid attention) and the cruise lines are feeling it. Musicians that can’t find gigs on land anymore are flocking to cruise ships for gigs. The combination of both of these facts makes it harder to get gigs on ships. Here are five tips on improving [...]

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 [...]

Dear Musicians, As a musician on a cruise ship you don’t only have to cope with the musical aspect of your job, but also the motion of the ship. While it is true that you’ll get used to the motion of the sea after a while, sea sickness can affect even seasoned veterans.