The Moment Piano Quietly Took Over
I've been looking back at my booking data lately — and this chart tells quite a story. It shows the instrument share across my ceremony bookings from 2014 to 2026, and the shift over those twelve years is something I find genuinely fascinating to reflect on.
Harp Origins
My very first wedding booking came in 2007, when I was still in secondary school. I was playing harp at my first professional gig in the University of Limerick concert hall when, mid-set, a member of staff came up to me and asked if I did weddings. I hadn’t, at that point — but I said yes, and that was that.
From the age of sixteen or seventeen, I was playing harp professionally at Bunratty Castle and Knappogue Castle — two of Ireland's most iconic medieval banquet venues — and I continued doing so for about twelve years. At weekends, the Bunratty Castle singers would perform as church wedding soloists, and bring me along as their harpist. That was how I learned the ropes.
So it is no surprise that in the earlier years of my music career, harp was almost everything. It was what I was known for, what I had spent years refining, and it was still relatively rare at Irish weddings. I didn't keep formal track of bookings back then — I was a teenager running an accidental business — so the chart above starts in 2014, when I began keeping proper records and had some meaningful data. But even from 2014, you can see that harp dominated. And then, gradually, something shifted.
How Piano Grew
During my twenties, I completed an undergraduate and a master's degree in piano performance, so piano was never just a second instrument — it was something I was studying seriously alongside my wedding career. As the years went on, I started sharing more piano recordings — on my new website, on SoundCloud, on social media. Whether that shaped couples' choices, or whether piano was simply becoming a more popular instrument among a new generation of couples regardless of anything I did, I genuinely can't say. Probably a bit of both. COVID compounded things a little, since piano was easier to record at home than harp, but the trend was already well underway long before that.
By 2023, piano had become the majority instrument for ceremony bookings — something that would have been unimaginable back in 2007 or even 2014.
What the Chart Doesn't Tell You
Here is the thing about data: it shows you what happened, but not what it feels like.
The couples who choose harp today are still choosing something genuinely special. Harpists are more plentiful now than in 2007, but there is still nothing quite like the magic and rarity of Ireland's national instrument, played live and sung alongside. Guests still come over after ceremonies to ask about it. It still starts conversations. It still stops people in their tracks.
And piano, for its part, has earned its place. It is not the default or the easy option — it is the right choice for a huge range of songs, styles, and settings, and couples choose it because they love the sound, not because it's trendy.
The chart tells the story of a business growing and evolving. What it doesn't show is that both lines represent something I am equally proud to play.
Trying to Decide Between the Two?
If you are in the middle of that decision yourself, I wrote a full guide to help: