Original Recipe Band

The Original Recipe Band… We have really mixed feelings about our experience with them. Unfortunately, more negatives than positives stand out, which is our reasoning for the 2 stars instead of the neutral 3 stars.
We were recently married in Hill Country, and felt very strongly about having a live band rather than a DJ at our wedding, mostly because all of the weddings that stood out in our memories had awesome live bands to make the reception memorable. We did a lot of research on bands, which definitely took a lot of time. Getting married in the Austin area leaves a ton of options to sort through! What originally attracted us to the band is that they were large, seemingly flexible in accommodating our wishes, offered a great price, and despite not having many online reviews, they provided us with a list of emails to previous clients who we were able to email us references.
While the «booking» process what relatively easy, once we did book, our impression of the band manager, James, started to decline. While he was initially quick to respond to us when we were scouting them, once we booked he took months to get our signed contract back to us. I had to email and encourage him multiple times. I come from a family of lawyers and have always had the mentality that nothing is final or confirmed until it is in writing, so waiting so long to see our agreement in writing made me uncomfortable. James often commented that he was preoccupied with moving forward with other endeavors professionally and home repairs, and that this was the reasoning for his delay, which I found to be unprofessional.
Let me throw in some positives: They were accommodating of our song choices for special dances. We arranged to have one of the band members play guitar for our ceremony. His name is also James (a different James than the manager) and he was very prompt at responding, kind, and his ceremony performance was excellent. The jazz/​piano music for the cocktail hour were appropriate.
When it came to the reception music and orchestrating the order of events, the manager, James, seemed to have no idea what was going on despite having had been emailed a timeline for the evening and order of events. He initially kept coming up to me (the bride) and asking me what was next, etc. Keeping him organized and on schedule was the last thing that I wanted to be doing at my own wedding. We had two wedding coordinators and he didn’t even think to go to them first with questions without my prompting.
When James was speaking and introducing speeches, etc. he was very mumbly and difficult to understand. After the first dances were over and it was party time, instead of playing music that would get people out on the dance floor it was still a lot of jazz and swing music… not exactly what’s going to get 20 and 30 something’s out on the dance floor. After asking our coordinators to have them step it up a bit with the music, things did get better. Another thing of note was that the transition between songs felt like it took forever. A song would wrap up and guests would just be standing and waiting for the next song. It made it difficult to keep the momentum going. A few guests would even shout out, «Come on! Let’s keep it going!»
Overall, it was not the experience we were hoping to have with our band. I feel like the band really sets the vibe for the night and it wasn’t exactly the upbeat party atmosphere we had in mind.
We had amazing experiences with all of our other vendors, but we would not work with ORB again.