“Ripcord is the best wedding band you could be lucky enough to find at a wedding! They bring such incredible energy combined with a high-end musicianship that creates a memorable experience that will have your guests complimenting you for months. We’ve now been to four weddings soundtracked by Ripcord, but our favorite was our own.
We discovered them in 2017 at one of our best friends’ wedding, and they were such a fun band that they’ve been the first call as everyone in our friend group gets married.
We made sure to book them as soon as we secured our venue (about a year before our August wedding), because even though there are three bands within Ripcord, they get reserved quickly. We knew we wanted a horn section, so we hired the 8-piece (male singer, female singer, guitar, bass, keyboard, drums, trumpet, trombone).
We had a couple calls with our day-of wedding coordinator and Ananda, Ripcord’s incredibly friendly event coordinator, about 4 weeks and 2 weeks before the big day to go over the timeline and details surrounding our first dance and parent dances, and our entrance.
One of the key reasons we chose Ripcord was the extensive song list published on their website, which is not only long but spans practically every genre. This included bands I love but some of which I’d never subject my wedding guests to! (311, Gin Blossoms, and deep cuts from Dave Matthews Band for some reason?) Ananda assured us that they could play pretty much every song we asked for, even ones not on their list. As the bride and groom, we of course missed a few songs but they seemed to hit 80-90% of our request list.
In addition to our first dances, which required them to learn a couple new songs (“Lover” remix by Taylor Swift and Shawn Mendes, and an obscure Israeli tune), Ripcord were happy to let me create one of the highlights of a lifetime by letting me play drums with the band for “Boys of Summer” by The Ataris. Ripcord also provided a keyboardist for our ceremony on the beach, learning two more songs for our processionals and recessional (“You” by Dan & Shay, “Enchanted” by Taylor Swift), which helped create such a beautiful atmosphere.
We appreciated the very reasonable payment timeline (50% when you book, 50% on event day).
One minor issue was that we could not hear the dinner set in the dining area despite our paying to add an extra PA system to do so, but this would probably not be an issue for most couples hiring Ripcord. Because we had a day-of wedding coordinator, we didn’t handle any logistics ourselves on our wedding day, but we heard of no other logistical issues.”