Candle Light Strings

Like other brides have mentioned, the music was beautiful and the group are total pros. But we also had challenges communicating with Bette. She's not super savvy with technology and communicating lists of songs back and forth was a little tedious but in the end it all came together. The strangest part was that she asked me if she and the other musicians could have appetizers and cocktails, except that I had only hired them to play for 30 minutes pre-ceremony and 45 minutes during our cocktail hour. In the end, our guests enjoyed their music, they arrived on time and there weren't any major issues so... no harm, no foul.

The reality was that the music was amazing and the guests were wooed by gorgeous strings overlooking the ocean. We are so thankful that everything was great for the ceremony.

But the other half of the story is:
Wedding planning is so stressful and vendors should make things easier, not cause more stress. Candlelight strings, unfortunately, was one of those vendors who stressed us out at the last minute.
We can't speak to the entire quartet because all of our interaction were with Betty Byers. She's a long-time professional, but a little tough to communicate with sometimes.
- She asked us a few times prior to the ceremony if she and the crew could have a cocktail. No problem... I get it (but we didn't have cocktails at the ceremony).
- We asked her for a specific song. Instead of saying that she didn't have the music for it, she took it upon herself to write a beautiful arrangement for it and then wanted us to pay her extra for it. I don't like to renegotiate contracts after the fact and it would have been nice to know that ahead of time - she backed off and didn't charge us for it. I appreciate that.
- We had a mixup regarding final payment. As brides and grooms can attest to, making vendor final payments can be tough to organize. In the course of events, we forgot to make final payment to Candlelight. Mistakes happen and we had no intention of stiffing them for their great service. I guess Betty did not figure it out either until right before the event. After the ceremony she actually followed the wedding party and interrupted us during our family pictures to ask us where her check was.
First of all, we were really upset that she interrupted our family photos.
Secondly, it's probably pretty obvious that it's hard to carry a checkbook on your person during the wedding ceremony - we had no way to pay her right on the spot.
She didn't like having wait for 2 days for us to get back to get home.
In that time she called the mother of the groom as well as we got 3 voicemails from her looking for the money. The mother of the groom actually offered to pay her to get her off our backs.
Knowing that these things happen, we were shocked that she was hounding us during the rest of the day, instead of calling the week before.

In summary, the actual music was great and we have no regrets. However, if there were 3 other quartets who were also exceptional, we would have picked a different group.

Candle light strings did an excellent job at our wedding. They played for our ceremony and during our cocktail hour. They worked with us on what songs we wanted to play for the ceremony (you can listen to variety on their site and Betty played on the phone a verse on the piano if it wasn't online). The sound was beautiful and they were very professional during our wedding. Everyone enjoyed our music and it transitioned beautifully into the DJ set for the reception. One thing to note is that communicating with Candle Light is typically thru phone, this was a little challenging for us since we both have full time jobs and worked with most vendors thru email. However, they were very flexible and took phone calls later in the evening- one night we spoke past 9pm. I'd highly recommend them for your wedding.

Wow, there are NO words to express the sheer elegance and ambiance that Candlelight Strings brought to our wedding ceremony. So graceful and beautiful. What was even more wonderful was that they were more than willing to learn new music just for our ceremony.
Working w/ them was an absolute delight and they are far worth their weight in gold. I HIGHLY recommend listening to their sampled music on their website. It absolutely speaks for itself.
Definitely 1oo stars ++++

I have heard nothing but compliments about our string quartet! They looked very professional and sounded even better! Bette was very helpful in getting all the music choices done. Overall I wish I could have heard more of the music...as the bride I only really heard the processional and recessional and during everything else I was off busy with other things...