I am NOT sailing .....

builttospill

Simon_M said:

Really long days; nowhere to be on your own; sharing a cell with someone else; talking to drunk people every night; away from home for 6 months at a time. Sounds great. ;-)

especially when this happens 

https://abcnews.go.com/US/270-cruise-ship-passengers-sickened-norovirus-royal-caribbean/story?id=60291868

JezWynd

or this...

Dominic

my wife worked as Dance Captain on Cruise Ship for about 7 years......and she loved it but I remember her saying that the musicians were very hard worked and of exceptional standard .......nearly all were Hungarian / Czech just as most of the deckhands are Honduran and the Stevedores are Filipino .

brojangles

My friend does this sometimes as a concert pianist. Trips to Brazil or round the Mediterranean. He gets the gigs through an agent. When there's internet signal - there isn't, often - he posts hilarious accounts of it on his social media, of which the main takeaways seem to be, don't go on a cruise ship unless you're a billed artist, and even then expect a weird time of it.

I imagine being a guitar player in a pit band on one of those ships would be a total nightmare, and for those jobs in general I assume you need a pretty serious baseline of chops/musical knowledge/sight reading fluency. 

boogieman

RandallFlagg said:

A cruise isn't a holiday it's a mode of transport. Count me out for anything that has a dress code for the inflight meal.

I’m guessing you haven’t done a cruise lately? The days of wearing a tux and hobnobbing with the captain over G&Ts are long gone. Some of the posher cruise lines insist on no shorts or flip flops in the proper restaurant but at the buffet there’s usually no dress code and pretty much anything goes. It’s definitely not the middle class holiday it used to be and some of the cruises out of the Florida are dirt cheap. We did one from Port Canaveral to the Bahamas, round trip,  it was £120 for three nights/four days fully inclusive, probably cheaper than staying at home. Some of the ships are absolutely huge, more floating villages than a mode of transport. 

p90fool

Our last singer left to go and do it, she sings and plays guitar. Her first stint was six months and she's coming to the end of her latest four month trip in a couple of weeks. 

She's a solo artist, has a very powerful voice and was happy doing three hour gigs with us every week as the lead and only singer, but the ship gig is something else. 4 x 50 minute sets a day with one day off a week is a killer, especially with air-con.

She does ok and signed up for more and gets paid pretty well, but a guitarist/singer duo on the same boat only get paid the same as her in total because "they're only doing the job of one person", so I don't know what that means for a full band member. 

The nearest I've done is 6 x 5 hour gigs per week on the Euro casino circuit in a guitar trio - after the first week I was having to learn to play simplified chord inversions because my fingertips started to bleed. It's the reason I started playing slide and using open tunings so I could play one-finger barre chords. 

It's a big price to pay just to be able to say "hey man, I'm a pro musician".

hotpickups

p90fool said:

Our last singer left to go and do it, she sings and plays guitar. Her first stint was six months and she's coming to the end of her latest four month trip in a couple of weeks. 

She's a solo artist, has a very powerful voice and was happy doing three hour gigs with us every week as the lead and only singer, but the ship gig is something else. 4 x 50 minute sets a day with one day off a week is a killer, especially with air-con.

She does ok and signed up for more and gets paid pretty well, but a guitarist/singer duo on the same boat only get paid the same as her in total because "they're only doing the job of one person", so I don't know what that means for a full band member. 

The nearest I've done is 6 x 5 hour gigs per week on the Euro casino circuit in a guitar trio - after the first week I was having to learn to play simplified chord inversions because my fingertips started to bleed. It's the reason I started playing slide and using open tunings so I could play one-finger barre chords. 

It's a big price to pay just to be able to say "hey man, I'm a pro musician".

Yep too bigger price to pay for me So gone off the idea now 

octatonic

p90fool said:

Our last singer left to go and do it, she sings and plays guitar. Her first stint was six months and she's coming to the end of her latest four month trip in a couple of weeks. 

She's a solo artist, has a very powerful voice and was happy doing three hour gigs with us every week as the lead and only singer, but the ship gig is something else. 4 x 50 minute sets a day with one day off a week is a killer, especially with air-con.

That is a fair bit for a vocalist to do- she must have to really take care of her voice.

p90fool

octatonic said:

p90fool said:

Our last singer left to go and do it, she sings and plays guitar. Her first stint was six months and she's coming to the end of her latest four month trip in a couple of weeks. 

She's a solo artist, has a very powerful voice and was happy doing three hour gigs with us every week as the lead and only singer, but the ship gig is something else. 4 x 50 minute sets a day with one day off a week is a killer, especially with air-con.

That is a fair bit for a vocalist to do- she must have to really take care of her voice.

It is, she has quite a light voice too, though with good stamina and hidden power.

This is a demo I quickly roughed out with her in my studio which helped her get the gig;

octatonic

Video no worky.

p90fool

p90fool

Any better?

octatonic

'Video unavailable

This video is not available.'

EDIT- looks like your video fell foul of the Singapore censors.
I can view it via VPN but not if I am via a Singapore DNS.
Weird.

shuikit

This guy's videos came up on my feed a while ago.  He talks about being a drummer on a cruise ship

57Deluxe

thought this was about looking for that Sailing/Leslie tone... was gonner chip-in...

geepers0677

yeah I did it - loved it. Was in a duo. We got paid individually about £2000 a month and got full guest access as musicians. Night off per cruise, cruises typically 4 or 5 nights. Have to do some ship duties like drill and sit a few exams about safety and crisis management etc. Was with Carnival out of Texas and then out of New Orleans. You don't really feel the 4 x 45 after a while as you only really play at 60% and learn to sit back on it a bit. Playing at the back end of a hurricane is interesting. Would def go back when the time is right. 

geepers0677

geepers0677 said:

yeah I did it - loved it. Was in a duo. We got paid individually about £2000 a month and got full guest access as musicians. Night off per cruise, cruises typically 4 or 5 nights. Have to do some ship duties like drill and sit a few exams about safety and crisis management etc. Was with Carnival out of Texas and then out of New Orleans. You don't really feel the 4 x 45 after a while as you only really play at 60% and learn to sit back on it a bit. Playing at the back end of a hurricane is interesting. Would def go back when the time is right. 

and it looks like the time is right headed out in the new year.

robgilmo

That Rod Stewart was full of shit!

merlin

I haven't read the whole thread but would say this. Learn every song you've ever heard in most keys. You may get asked to accompany passengers so may need to do that. Learn adequate repertoire to play different material ever set.

Be able to do the above regardless of how much sleep, whether you have flu, whether you feel like shit.... 

Then make sure all your colleagues have the same skill set. 

mbe

More modes of transport should offer employment opportunities for musicians.

Trolley dollies could break out the guitar to calm things down in times of air rage or bus conductors could sing Hallelujah to destress passengers in traffic jams.