Can we play to any size crowd? Yup! The smallest private party we’ve performed for was for about 20 people and the largest one I can recall was for about 1200 people. I think the sweet spot and most of the dueling piano shows we do are for crowds ranging somewhere between 100 and 300. Both the small and big crowd sizes have their pros and cons but very small and very large can still work and be a lot of fun!
Small Crowd:
I’m going to classify a small crowd as under 100 people for this case. The advantage for having a small crowd is that we can really incorporate the personal touch of dueling pianos. We are very interactive with our audience and in the case of having a smaller group, we can really connect with almost everybody there. I like to view the concept of dueling pianos as hiring somebody to come to your house and play songs on your piano while everybody joins in and sings along. A smaller crowd really helps capture the essence of that feeling.
Large Crowd:
If we have anything over say 500 people things can still work really well, we just won’t be able to have as much of a personal connection with everybody. As I mentioned in a previous blog, a stage is necessary for this size of a crowd. We do tend to get a lot of requests, which can be really good because 100% of the songs we play will most likely be straight from the audience. Sometimes with a small crowd we don’t get quite as many song requests and we are filling in the gaps. I will say, it is pretty awesome to have 600 people singing along to the same song at once. Something to keep in mind when booking for this size of crown is sound requirements. We will most likely need to provide extra sound for up to 600, and if the crowd is larger than that a professional sound company will need to be hired.
The Sweet Spot:
There are great things about a small crowd and large crowd but we can really hit the best of both worlds when we’re performing for a group of somewhere between 100 and 300 people. This provides us with a good amount of requests and a crowd size that we can still connect with while not feeling too small or too big. If we have 80% of the crowd singing along and participating at all times, it will feel like everybody is participating 100% of the time. With a small crowd we really need 90% – 100% with us the whole time. With a really big crowd we might have 50% participation throughout the entire show. If we’re performing for 300 people and 60 of them are not into that particular song, that will be ok, those people can pick up the slack on the next song. I hope that makes sense… I promised myself I wouldn’t come this close to doing math in these blogs so I better stop now.