Search tips

The search engine works slightly differently depending on whether you are searching for musicians or groups. Select from the list below to see appropriate examples.

Contents:

Searching for Musicians

Have a look at these examples to get an idea of what searches will work best:

  • organ

    Find a organ teacher or performer.

  • organist or flautist

    The search will understand most words like this and look for an "organ performer" or "flute performer" respectively:

  • viola player or viola performer

    Search for a viola player.

  • flute teacher or flute tutor

    These two searches are equivalent.

  • You can make a more general search for a woodwind teacher and, through the magic of "query expansion", you will automatically find teachers of all the instruments in that family:

    woodwind teacher

    Searching for "brass" or "string" works in the same way.

  • "bass guitar" or "tenor horn"

    Putting quotes around a phrase will sometimes make your results more relevant.

  • accompanist

    Search for an accompanist.

  • RCM or RNCM

    The search does not index words that have only three letters so a search for RCM will not bring up anything but searching for RNCM might.

    The exception is where the word is a recognised keyword such as "sax".

  • Joe Bloggs

    New feature! Due to popular demand, you can now search for people by name.

  • If you search for an instrument that is unrecognised by the search engine you might get unexpected results. For example, the word "sackbut" is currently unknown and so this search instead finds all teachers:

    sackbut teacher

How it works

There are two searches going on here although this should be transparent to the user.

First the search engine finds musicians by keywords, for example to find anyone listed as a flute teacher.

Secondly the search engine searches the musicians' resumés for matching text and includes any matches in the results.

The results are listed in order of relevancy with keyword matches judged to have higher relevance.

back to top

Searching for Groups

The group database doesn't use a keyword system because groups and ensembles are harder to categorize than an individual musician. Instead it does a text search of the group descriptions.

The most relevant results will appear at the top of the results page but you might get more irrelevant results than for the musician search. Have a look at these example searches to get an idea of what is possible:

  • brass

    Find a brass group.

  • string quartet

    Find a string quartet.

  • jazz

    Find a group that plays jazz.

  • bar mitzvah

    Find a group that plays for bar mitzvahs.

  • Search for a group called the Electric Banana Collective:

    electric banana collective

    (i.e. group names are indexed)

  • Like the musician database, words of three letters or less are not indexed.

back to top

Searching by location

Musicians and groups are encouraged to enter their postcode when they sign up, so when you search by location the search engine can find musicians in your area.

The distances are accurate to the postal region, so in more remote areas of the British Isles you should only use the distances as a guide.

If you search by location and don't find anyone you can increase the radius or select "no limit" to search the whole database.

To see the area covered by the musician database have a look at the map at the bottom of the 'about' page.

back to top