December 26, 2011
Dear musicians,
Background checks are one of the items on your list of paperwork to be completed before you embark on a ship.
What seemed to be a sporadic procedure is now pretty much a standard amongst all major cruise lines. For some that means having to sign a consent form, giving authorization to a third party company that specializes in background checks. For others it means getting a police record at your local police station. We will be able to tell you more exactly what to do, once we know which cruise line you’ll be working for.
These background checks have to be fairly recent, so you couldn’t use one you have laying around from several years ago. We get asked fairly often what kinds of entries on your criminal history will prevent you from getting a job. This is, unfortunately, not something we can answer as these decisions are made by the lawyers at the cruise lines.
This information is provided simply to make sure you won’t be surprised later when you’re asked for this background check.
December 25, 2011
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
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Dear musicians,
You may already be familiar with Harry Connick Jr’s album “Blue Light, Red Light”. If not, here is a great track to wet your appetite.
Song: Blue Light, Red Light
Album: Blue Light, Red Light
Artist; Harry Connick Jr.
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December 23, 2011
Dear musicians,
I wanted to take a moment to reiterate that anyone interested in working on board a cruise ship must speak English well.
English is the mandatory language on most ships and must be good enough to have conversations with people, to understand technical terms in your area of expertise and to understand safety instuctions given to you during safety drills.
Safety officers on ships can get you signed off the ship if they feel that your English language skills are not strong enough as this may endanger you and other passengers in case of an emergency.
Furthermore, rehearsal times with orchestras are limited so musical directors can’t afford to lose time because of language barriers. Also, lounge entertainers will have to interact with passengers daily so it’s preferred that they don’t have a thick accent.
Some cruise lines make you take an English language proficiency test, so taking some lessons beforehand may be of benefit. Speaking more than one language can certainly be useful on ships as there will be guests of many nationalities, but English will most definitely be the primary language.
Let us know if you have questions.
December 22, 2011
We get asked this all the time. Will I get sea sick?
My answer: Some do – some don’t.
It’s true that the ships nowadays are pretty big, which makes for less movement in general, but the ocean can still shake these ships around quite a bit.
My trick to sea sickness is to not even let it get started, meaning the moment you feel the slightest bit of discomfort, eat some bread and get some sea sickness pills right away. If you wait until your face turns green it’ll be really hard if not impossible to get better quickly.
I suggest to go get a stash of pills the day you get on board and keep them handy. Don’t be too proud to pop them right away. In the end, you’ll be glad you did.
What’s your remedy for sea sickness? Post it below.
Good Luck.
December 21, 2011
It was time for a thorough overhaul of our website and we managed to get it ready just in time for the holidays. Make sure to “like” our Facebook page by clicking on the “like” button on the top right corner of this page. You can also follow us on twitter and stay informed by visiting this blog regularly.
Hope you like the new look.
Marco
August 30, 2011
Dear musicians,
As part of our website re-do, we want to update the media that you’ve sent us as part of your job application. We want to make sure we present the best possible quality videos and photos when we contact cruise lines about your project. In order to do this, we have to have good quality media to begin with.
This is where you come in. If you have up-to-date footage or about to shoot shoot a new demo, we would love to have it. In the coming weeks, we will make available a simple solution for you to get this media to us, so stay tuned. We will publish a separate post with detailed video format and quality guidelines.
Now’s a good time to get the guys together to put some great demos together.
August 21, 2011
Dear musicians,
Your input is needed.
As you may know, we have a discussion forum on our site, that has provided a lot of information over the years. The idea of the forum was to have a place for us cruise ship musicians to discuss all aspects of our jobs and travels and to make available as much information as possible.
The forum is really successful in that people go there to read the information that’s there. We can tell this by the traffic the forum generates. However, we found that musicians don’t participate in the dialogue as much. In other words, they read the information but they don’t post a lot of questions and/or comments.
This is why I’m wondering if the forum is really needed. We have several options to deal with this:
- Get rid of the forum and post some of that information on our blog, twitter, Facebook presences.
- Keep the forum as is
Let us know what you think.
Thanks.
Update!
We have decided to make the forum readable only, as soon as our new site goes up. We’ll keep the forum around for a while in that state and eventually remove it.
We feel that we already have other tools that provide ways for us to make information available and we wouldn’t want people to have to go to many different pages to gather information. In order to consolidate information, we’ll be posting the important information on our blog which will then be announced on Twitter and Facebook.
You can still comment and ask questions on those services.
Marco
Dear musicians, friends and clients of Oceanbound Entertainment Inc.,
Over the next couple of weeks (or months, depending on progress), we’ll be making changes to all of our web presences and this will ultimately affect how you can stay in touch with us. Here’s an overview of what the overall plan is:
- There will be a complete re-design of www.oceanbound.com (also available at www.oceanbound.ca)
- We will add a Facebook fan page for Oceanbound Entertainment Inc., and we’ll convert our followers to fans of that page.
- Our twitter presence for Oceanbound Entertainment Inc. is “oceanbound_com”. Please follow us there as we’ll be posting updates about the changes as we go along.
Thank you.
Marco
November 25, 2010
Dear Musicians,
Came across this beautiful rendition of a Neil Young cover. Enjoy.
Song: Harvest Moon
Artist: Cassandra Wilson
Album: From soundtrack to “My Blueberry Nights”
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