Covered

Covered's own marketing leans on one name harder than most Swiss wedding acts dare to: Börni Höhn, the singer who came up through Swiss television's SRF MusicStar and signed an artist deal with Sony before her albums reached the Swiss charts. A band built around a recognizable TV face risks turning into a solo act with hired backing, where everyone else on stage blurs into the background. Covered's site avoids that trap by naming everyone. 6 musicians make up the regular lineup, each with a photo and a role tag on the band's own roster page: Joni Müller on guitar, Stephan Vonwiller on bass, Höhn on vocals, Andreas Hauser on saxophone, Sam Schwalm on drums and Manuel Halter on piano. 3 more specialists are listed as bookable extras rather than folded quietly into "the band": classical tenor Raphael Höhn, violinist Barbara Studer and aerial artist Svetlana Wotschel. Rather than pitching the whole night around Höhn, the booking pages state she performs solo, voice and piano, for an intimate ceremony, or with the full ensemble for a bigger one. The TV credential gets the enquiry in the door, but what's actually for sale is a formation a couple assembles, from a 2-person duo up through the full 6-piece.

The repertoire runs wide rather than deep in any one decade. The site names genres spanning the 70s through current charts (pop, rock, jazz, swing, blues and disco-era hits) and lists specific tracks rather than just genre buckets: Wham and the Bee Gees sit beside Aretha Franklin's Respect and Think, Abba's Dancing Queen, Michael Jackson's Billie Jean and Thriller, Britney Spears's Baby One More Time, and Ed Sheeran's Shape of You. For the ceremony itself the sample list turns slower and more specific: Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful World, Christina Perri's A Thousand Years, Bette Midler's The Rose, Celine Dion's Amazing Grace. Covered says it plays no fixed set list and adapts to the room in real time, though it asks for a specific ceremony request at least 1 month ahead.

At the ceremony, a couple picks up to 5 songs, for the entry, the vows, the ring exchange and the exit, and the FAQ recommends narrowing that to 3 to 5, often shortened so the service doesn't drag. Those are sung live by either Höhn or classical tenor Raphael Höhn, backed by piano or guitar, with violin or saxophone added on request. The site says it coordinates directly with whoever else is running the day (a celebrant, a pastor, a wedding planner, an organist), and names 3 formats it plays for without drawing a line between them: a church service, a civil registry ceremony, or a free-standing symbolic one. For the reception it sketches a template evening rather than a fixed one. Aperitif music runs about an hour as one 50-minute set, and a full evening from 7pm to 1am splits into a quieter 50-minute set over dinner plus 3 more 50-minute party sets, with recorded music filling the gaps between live ones. Past 1am the band can keep going hour by hour at a flat rate the site doesn't print. A couple who wants something shorter than a full night can book a single 90-to-120-minute concert block instead.

The local-vendor pitch turns explicit when the site argues against booking a band from abroad: it cites the delays a foreign act's travel and gear can cause, and claims a Swiss band already knows the venues, the power supply, stage sizing and lighting, plus multilingual MC-ing between songs, without saying which languages that MC-ing actually covers. On the songs themselves the site is more specific: repertoire spans English, German, Swiss German, Italian and Spanish, and it will learn a new one on request.

2 PA systems, chosen by room size

Covered names its own gear rather than describing it generically. For bigger events it brings an HK Audio Linear 3 system, built in Germany, with 2 tops and 2 subwoofers rated at 4800 W, enough for a crowd up to around 300 people. For a ceremony, an aperitif, or anything smaller, it swaps to a Bose L1 Model II rig with 2 B2 subwoofers and a digital ToneMatch mixer, chosen for even coverage at lower volume rather than raw output. Either system, plus lighting and a digital mixing desk loaded with venue-specific presets, is part of a standard quote. In return the band expects a venue to supply either 2 220V/10A circuits or 1 220V/16A circuit, and its footprint scales with the lineup: 1 by 2 metres for a duo up to 2.5 by 4 metres for the full 6-piece. A wireless microphone stays available throughout for speeches, and a couple can play their own file or phone playlist through the system during breaks. If a separate DJ is booked for later in the night, that DJ can plug into Covered's own PA instead of bringing one.

A published price band, and what it leaves open

Unlike most wedding suppliers on this tenant, Covered names an actual figure. Its FAQ states there's no fixed price, but frames CHF 3,500 to CHF 7,500 as a fair range for a genuinely good Swiss wedding band, depending on how many musicians play and how much of the day they cover. That range appears word for word on the site's general events page too, so it's a house rate rather than something written specially for weddings. A standard quote covers the PA, lighting, instruments and arrival; a surcharge applies only for a very long drive, and an overnight stay for the band is discussed case by case for a late finish or a remote venue rather than priced upfront. The FAQ recommends booking 4 to 6 months ahead for a popular date, though it says a late booking is possible if a slot happens to be open.

Payment terms are less clean. The site's own wording has half the fee due 10 days before the event, and the balance settled 10 days after the booking. Read literally, that puts the final payment before the wedding has even happened, which points to a copy slip somewhere rather than a real term. It's worth confirming directly rather than assuming the page means what it says.

15 years, no cancelled show, and the backup behind that claim

Covered claims 15 years without a single cancelled show, a specific claim rather than a vague one, and backs it with redundancy rather than luck. Every position in the lineup has at least one trained backup who can step in, 2 independent PA towers run in parallel so one going down doesn't kill the sound, and a second full PA system is available on short notice. If a booking is still lost to genuine force majeure, the site's own contract terms promise either a refund or an active search for an equivalent act, at the couple's choice. Seeing the band live first is harder to arrange: 95% of its work is private functions, so a public preview is rare. It points to one video from a Pride festival set and a newsletter that occasionally flags a public date, a thinner proof point than the rest of the site offers.

That gap is a fair trade for what the rest of the page delivers: a named lineup instead of a faceless act behind one famous voice, 2 PA rigs sized honestly to room and budget, a repertoire running from Wham to Ed Sheeran without pretending to be a locked playlist, and one of the only published price bands in this whole category. Covered is also, unusually for a wedding band, a working act outside weddings entirely: it's the credited house band for Das Zelt's touring 80s tribute production, which is a harder thing to fake than a testimonials page. For a couple planning a Swiss wedding from abroad, that combination, a locally based band making its own case against flying one in, plus a written argument for what a live band does that a DJ playlist can't, reads like a supplier that has made this exact pitch to a lot of couples already.