Old Gore’s PA is not a pair of mains beside the stage throwing sound down the room. The venue runs its own Funktion-One rig built as eight small satellite speakers spread around the walls, all aimed in towards the middle of the floor, with the sub hidden in a wooden box near the centre of the room. There’s no front-of-house stack as such. It means you mix the night differently here - more goes through the system than we’d normally push, more snare and top end fed out so the energy reaches the people at the back as cleanly as it hits the couple on the dancefloor.
Old Gore Barn at a glance
Old Gore Barn sits at Fosse Cross on the A429 just north of Cirencester, part of the Cripps & Co collection - the same family of Cotswold barns as Cripps Barn and Stone Barn, both of which we play. It’s a fire-and-feasting venue: an open kitchen with a proper pizza oven and an Argentinian asado grill at the heart of the catering, a fully stocked bar, and a late licence to midnight. Civil ceremonies are licensed for up to 150 in the barn or out in the woodland glade, with the wedding breakfast seating the same number. There are no bedrooms on site - the venue pairs with two nearby pubs, The Stump and The New Inn, ten and fifteen minutes away, for the wedding party to stay over. Postcode for the sat-nav is GL54 4BZ (what3words: shout.regrowth.same).
Setting up at Old Gore Barn
Band access isn’t the main entrance. The goods entrance sits slightly further along, directly opposite the Gloucestershire Fosse Cross household recycling centre - if you’ve reached the tip you’ve gone the right distance. The crew van comes in there for a flat carry to the stage. The unusual part of the load-in here is the PA: at most weddings we bring and fly our own system, but Old Gore’s distributed Funktion-One rig is good enough and built into the room, so we mix the band through the house system rather than stacking our own. Our engineer comes anyway and runs the desk - the speakers being scattered round the walls rather than fired down the room from one end changes the whole approach, so it’s not a plug-in-and-go house mix. We bring our own lighting and run in-ear monitors throughout, never floor wedges, which keeps the stage quiet and leaves the engineer in control of what the room hears. That matters more here than usual, because the system also feeds the adjacent bar - guests who slope off for a drink still get the band, and they tend to drift back to the floor rather than settling in the next room.
Recommended band size at Old Gore Barn
This is a 150-guest room, intimate by barn standards, and with the venue’s own PA carrying the sound there’s no need to over-scale the lineup to fill the space. The 5-piece Brotherhood - two vocals, guitar, bass, drums and keys - is the natural fit, and keys earns the fifth chair over a second guitar in a distributed system like this, where the mix wants warmth spread evenly rather than a wall of guitar at one end. A 6-piece adding another vocal or sax lifts the bigger evening crowds without crowding the stage. We’d rarely push past that here; the room rewards a tight, well-mixed band over a large one.
How a wedding day flows at Old Gore Barn
Couples marry either inside the barn or out in the woodland glade, then drinks and the asado-and-pizza feasting carry the afternoon while the room is turned around for the evening. We set up and line-check during that window so the floor is ready the moment dinner clears. The opening half-hour stays soft and carries the first dance and any formal dances; the two fifty-minute sets after it are where the Funktion-One rig earns its keep, with playlists over the joins. Live music runs to the midnight licence. The Cripps & Co team here are quick to sort whatever the day throws up, so the run order tends to hold without anyone chasing it.
Load-out in the dark, and beds off site
Once the night winds down the barn is only softly lit, which is lovely to be in and no help at all when there’s a stage to break down and a van to load in the dark. We keep one bank of our own lights running through the packdown, which matters if you’re coordinating other suppliers clearing at the same time.
With no rooms on site, block-booking The Stump and The New Inn early matters more here than at a venue where guests can stay put; the nearer rooms go first on a summer weekend.
The Brotherhood are one of the South Wales wedding bands on the circuit, and the Funktion-One rig here changes how we mix the room. More on what we do as a Cotswolds wedding band, or check our availability for your date at Old Gore Barn.
