Kinmara · Roaming Folk Set
The band comes to your guests
A fully acoustic set played on the move through your drinks reception. No stage, no PA, and no polite background music.
The hour after the ceremony is the quiet one
Everyone plans the ceremony and everyone plans the evening. The stretch in between tends to look after itself, and it is the part of the day where the couple are away having photographs taken and half the guests have never met.
A roaming set is built for exactly that hour. Because Kinmara are acoustic and on foot, the music goes wherever your guests happen to be standing rather than asking them to gather somewhere and face the right way.
How it unfolds
One set, three moments
The roaming set is not one thing played for an hour. It moves, and so does the room around it.
The ceremony has just ended
We start before anyone notices
No introduction and no announcement. Guests are still filing out with a drink in hand when a fiddle starts somewhere behind them, and the first thing most of them do is turn round to find out where it is coming from.
Drinks and canapes
Then we come to you
The band moves between groups, playing to six people at a time rather than to a room. Small clusters that have run out of things to say to each other get something to point at, and the couple stuck having photographs taken can hear it from across the lawn.
Somewhere around the second drink
And then a circle forms
This is the part nobody plans for. The tempo lifts, people stop pretending they are not watching, and at a good number of weddings someone starts dancing on grass at four in the afternoon. It is the bit guests bring up again at the bar later.
What the set is made of
Half of it is classic upbeat trad folk, the sort of fiddle tune that sounds like good times and old friends whether or not you have heard it before. The other half are curveballs nobody sees coming.
Trad folk, played fast
Instrumental reels and jigs at the tempo they were built for. Nobody needs to know the tune to feel what it is doing, which is the whole trick of this music: it lands as good times and old friends on first hearing, and it is what makes the set feel like a live thing happening rather than a playlist.
The curveballs
Thunderstruck and Seven Nation Army, rearranged for fiddle. Guests spend about four bars working out why they recognise it, and that is usually the moment the phones come out. It is the part people describe to other people afterwards.
Modern folk
Little Lion Man, I Will Wait and the rest of the songs that made people want a folk band in the first place. They also sit right next to what Kinmara play in the evening, so the day joins up.
Nothing to plug in, nothing to set up
The whole set is acoustic. There is no power to find, no cabling across a lawn and no sound check in the middle of your drinks reception. It is the reason the band can be in three places in an hour.
It also means the set goes where a staged band cannot: a walled garden, a courtyard, between tipis, or split across two rooms so nobody is stuck in the quiet one. If it rains we pick up and walk inside.
What it costs
£1,500, and it brings the early arrival fee down with it
Booking the roaming set means Kinmara are on site from the afternoon anyway, so the early arrival charge comes off your quote entirely. Tick it in the calculator and you will see both numbers move at once.
Roaming folk set
£1,500 added to your booking
Early arrival
Included, not charged
Questions about the roaming set
Including the ones about rain.