Cello player hire in Australia: the complete guide

The cello is the instrument people describe as sounding like a human voice, and they are not being poetic. It sits in the same register most of us speak and sing in, which is why a single cellist can hold a chapel or a hall without anything underneath them. Guests feel the low notes as much as they hear them.

Prices below come live from the cellists on this site. Before you get to them, a warning nobody gives you: this is a big instrument in a hard case, and half the problems with a cello booking are decided at the doorway and the chair, long before anybody plays a note.

The live range for each city sits in the table below. At the shorter end you are buying a ceremony: arrivals, the walk in, the signing, the walk out. Adding the drinks hour afterwards lifts the figure, and it is nearly always the smarter spend, since the cellist is on site anyway with the instrument out and settled.

One musician means the fee scales by the chair rather than by the guest list. Thirty guests or two hundred, you are paying one person for one afternoon, which is why a solo cellist is often the cheapest route to genuinely serious music at a formal moment.

A full size cello in a hard case is roughly the size of a person, and it does not fold. Spiral staircases, narrow lift doors, gravel driveways and a hundred metre walk from the nearest legal parking spot are all real obstacles. Players deal with them constantly, and they deal with them better when warned.

So put the route in your first message. Where can a car pull up, how far is the carry, are there steps, is the last stretch grass or paving. Mention if there is no shade at the drop-off point too. A cellist who knows all that arrives calm and set up in ten minutes rather than arriving flustered while your guests watch.

This is the single most common day-of scramble. A cellist needs a firm, flat, armless chair at roughly dining height, and the endpin needs a floor it can grip or a strap to stop it sliding out. Banquet chairs with arms make the instrument impossible to hold properly. Deep upholstered lounge chairs are worse.

Grass and loose sand are their own problem, since the endpin sinks and the whole instrument drops mid phrase. Ask the player what they want under them and get it sorted with the venue a week out. A board, a mat or a spot on the paving solves it completely, and it costs nothing.

Alone, a cello is rich but it carries one line at a time, which suits slow, reflective moments beautifully and suits a lively cocktail hour less well. Plenty of players on this site pair up with a violinist, a pianist or a guitarist, and some work with a backing track for fullness.

Decide what the music is doing. For a memorial, a candlelit ceremony or the moment before a speech, solo cello is close to perfect and nothing else sounds like it. For two hours of background through drinks, ask what a second player would cost, because the texture gets tiring on one instrument long before the cellist does.

Everything that applies to a violin applies here with more at stake, because there is simply more timber and more glue holding it together. Direct Australian sun on the front of a cello pushes it out of tune within minutes and can open seams that cost real money to repair.

Shade is a condition of the booking rather than a preference, and a good player will say so plainly when you enquire. Under a marquee edge, a verandah or a tree is fine. Out on open lawn at two in the afternoon in January is not, however good it looked in the site visit photographs.

How do you get in, and how much time do you need once you are there? What chair and what surface suits you? Do you amplify outdoors, and what power does that take? What is the longest you can play before you need a rest, and where should the breaks fall? And how much notice for a song that is not already in your folder?

Ask to see video shot at somebody's wedding or function, not in a studio or a recital hall. A recital room flatters any string instrument. What you want to hear is how a cello sounds in a carpeted function room with people talking, because that is the space you are actually buying.