If you’ve ever been to a Dueling Piano bar, you probably caught on pretty quickly that it is customary to send up money with your requests. There also might be a “Phrase of the Night” board or something similar where patrons can have something they wrote displayed for a certain amount of cash. Another fun thing is bringing a special person or persons on stage and to participate in a roast of some sort for a special occasion for a “stage fee”.
In the private party sector that we mainly dwell in, tips for songs aren’t as heavily focused on but can still be incorporated. We provide request sheets and put them all on the tables prior to the show. These slips are brought up and set on either of our pianos during our performance, often with money and a song title on the slip. These tips, as with at the bars, actually become part of the show and bring about another unique element to Dueling Pianos that you don’t see with other forms of live entertainment.
First off, they greatly help us prioritize what songs we are going to play and how soon we will play them. If there’s a $20 with it, it’s probably coming up pretty quickly. It’s true that we really don’t have a set list and don’t know what songs we’re going to play until we start getting requests on the pianos. There are even instances where people can outbid songs that we are playing. I might allow that for a particularly long song like ANYTHING by Meatloaf, somebody can bring up more money than we received to play it in order to have it stopped. We might be playing a particular college fight song and somebody can bring up money to switch to another school which could turn into a battle!
As I mentioned earlier, at private parties we generally don’t make tips as big of a deal as it might be at a bar but if we are playing for a fundraiser we offer to split any money we receive with the fundraiser. That allows us to play up the money part of the show a bit more. At the end of the night there have been several times where I have given over $1,000 back to the charity!
Occasionally, usually for corporate events where a company doesn’t want their employees or guests to feel obligated to spend money, we will be tipped in advance and asked not to take tips from guests. We will happily do this but I do know that our performance will be affected. What usually ends up happening is that we are flooded with request slips since it’s free to put them up there. In this case we can usually just pick and choose songs that we want to play and we lose that raw element of “oh geez, I need to play this song next, hopefully I can pull it off”. I think the show misses a little bit of an edge and some of the fun.
I have to share what one client has done that hired us for their company Christmas party. This client, named JT, understood the value of what the tipping aspect can add to the show but also didn’t want employees to feel they needed to tip. He gave every employee $20 along with a ticket number at the beginning of the night requiring that they spend it all on song requests. At the end of the show we split up all of the tip money and did a ticket drawing for the other half of the tips to go to an employee. We have done their event twice as of now and I gotta say, that was a genius move by JT.