Your set list is essential to your short and long term musical and financial goals.
Dirty Little Secret #1: it is not YOUR set list; it’s the audience’s set list as well as the club owner’s set list.
In our wedding band, all anyone had to say was “Tune selection . . .” and everyone would respond with “is crucial”.
You can win over a room of people with the right song at the right time just as easily as you can lose them with wrong song.
On a typical three-hour gig, I’ll go through approximately 45 songs.
That means the set list I have designed for the gig will easily have 150 songs in it. I always over-prepare.
My set list is designed for the clientele that I will be expecting at the gig as well as the expectations of the club owner. It has NOTHING to do with songs that I feel like playing.
I am always modifying the set list in real time to accurately reflect the BEST songs I can do in the moment dependent on who is listening to me.
I play in a wide variety of venues and that is reflected in my set lists.
As a result, the set lists I design for venue#1, venue #2, and venue #3 will often contain NO overlap in tunes.
That means I need to know and be able to access 450 tunes on a second’s notice.
Knowing and acknowledging the vibe of the venue is important when developing a set list.
A set list has to accommodate spontaneous requests from the club owner as well as the customers.
For example, the first time I played at an Italian restaurant in lower Delaware, the manager had light instrumental opera playing in the background as I was loading in – that was a first for me!
Staying with the vibe, I added intros and outros to some of my songs that were based on light classics: “Girl With the Flaxen Hair”, “Clair de Lune”, "Nessun dorma", “Moonlight Sonata”, Chopin's Prelude in Em, Op. 28 #4. Every time I played one, I got a big smile from Marco, the manager.
At one point, he came up and in his thick Italian accent, said, “Your piano sounds fantastic! You gotta play my favorite classic – but I forget the name!”
I ran through the opening bits from some Mozart, Beethoven, and Mendelsohn but none of them was the one he wanted to hear.
Eventually, he said, “You GOTTA know it, it’s a CLASSIC! It starts . . . “ and then he breaks into full-throated song.
“Don’t go changin’!”
At that moment, I realized that he was correct. Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are” is a classic!
I started the intro and immediately Marco started dancing table to table and singing to his customers. Everyone smiled and raised a glass of wine, saluting him as he came by.
It was a moment, a moment we repeated every time I played at his restaurant.
Picking the right songs and creating the best set list you can is part of a musician’s win/win mindset.
Sure, it requires that you learn a lot of material – but in the long run, it’s worth it!
Dirty Little Secret #1: it is not YOUR set list; it’s the audience’s set list as well as the club owner’s set list.
In our wedding band, all anyone had to say was “Tune selection . . .” and everyone would respond with “is crucial”.
You can win over a room of people with the right song at the right time just as easily as you can lose them with wrong song.
On a typical three-hour gig, I’ll go through approximately 45 songs.
That means the set list I have designed for the gig will easily have 150 songs in it. I always over-prepare.
My set list is designed for the clientele that I will be expecting at the gig as well as the expectations of the club owner. It has NOTHING to do with songs that I feel like playing.
I am always modifying the set list in real time to accurately reflect the BEST songs I can do in the moment dependent on who is listening to me.
I play in a wide variety of venues and that is reflected in my set lists.
As a result, the set lists I design for venue#1, venue #2, and venue #3 will often contain NO overlap in tunes.
That means I need to know and be able to access 450 tunes on a second’s notice.
Knowing and acknowledging the vibe of the venue is important when developing a set list.
A set list has to accommodate spontaneous requests from the club owner as well as the customers.
For example, the first time I played at an Italian restaurant in lower Delaware, the manager had light instrumental opera playing in the background as I was loading in – that was a first for me!
Staying with the vibe, I added intros and outros to some of my songs that were based on light classics: “Girl With the Flaxen Hair”, “Clair de Lune”, "Nessun dorma", “Moonlight Sonata”, Chopin's Prelude in Em, Op. 28 #4. Every time I played one, I got a big smile from Marco, the manager.
At one point, he came up and in his thick Italian accent, said, “Your piano sounds fantastic! You gotta play my favorite classic – but I forget the name!”
I ran through the opening bits from some Mozart, Beethoven, and Mendelsohn but none of them was the one he wanted to hear.
Eventually, he said, “You GOTTA know it, it’s a CLASSIC! It starts . . . “ and then he breaks into full-throated song.
“Don’t go changin’!”
At that moment, I realized that he was correct. Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are” is a classic!
I started the intro and immediately Marco started dancing table to table and singing to his customers. Everyone smiled and raised a glass of wine, saluting him as he came by.
It was a moment, a moment we repeated every time I played at his restaurant.
Picking the right songs and creating the best set list you can is part of a musician’s win/win mindset.
Sure, it requires that you learn a lot of material – but in the long run, it’s worth it!
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