A question for those in coverbands...

[Stewie26]

Originally Posted by bluewine

Blues/ Rock is not all that enjoyable to me. If I sat around waiting for a cover band that played music I enjoyed, I would be waiting forever.

Blue

Blue, just curious, if you could pick any genre, what would you "enjoy" playing most?

[Biggbass]

in this area there are countless blues bands comprised of white dudes who sound like white guys trying to play blues music. None of them really make any money at it and the ones I've heard are boring as hell. After the 3rd or 4th song you've heard everything they can do.

There is a local disco cover band that's been kicking ars for the past 15 years here. They are so busy they actually make a living at it. And they are really good at what they do.

Classic rock cover bands do well if they can execute the music well.

Personally I think it would be a gas to be in a good Bee Gees cover band. No one that I know of has done it yet and the range of music is great.

The duo I work in plays acoustic covers from America, CSN & NY, Beatles, Fogelberg, etc. And it's surprising how the audience always sings the songs with us. Especially the America stuff. They love it.

[Session1969]

I base my decisions on how good the vocalist is . I'd rather play in a band with good singing within several genres I'm familiar with such as rock,pop,funk,reggae or country.

[kjpollo]

I JUST started in a modern country band. Up here in CT we dont have a whole lot of them and the demand sure seems to be there. Our male lead singer said he saw the band that is supposedly the top country cover band up our way and he said he KNOWS he can put together a better band than them.

I really didnt have much interest in country music before this project and you told me a year ago I'd be playing it now, I'd have fallen over laughing.
We are cherry picking the top current country stuff and we have the luxury of having both a male and a female singer and they are both very good to excellent performers. And our lead guitarist is also a pretty good singer in his own right. But its awfully funny listening to his try to sing with a twang in his voice when he already has a pretty strong NYC accent!!!

[The Mouse]

I've done all-sorts of gigs over the years. Disco bands, Abba tributes, metal, rock, indie. All with costumes/wigs etc. I'm currently playing with an 8 piece Motown/ Stevie Wonder/ Aretha Franklin/ Prince/ James Brown covers band. No costumes this time round. I suppose it's my dream bass covers gig which helps. The band all get-on well and laugh a lot. I think it's important to like the music you're playing and the people that you're playing it with. Especially if you are gonna spent a number of years doing it.

[tZer]

RE: Binder/Notes

Originally Posted by MatticusMania

Its also got to come in handy when woodshedding/practicing on ones own, Id think.

That's where you create your notes - at home when you are learning and practicing your material for rehearsal. You use that at rehearsal to make sure you have your part down with the band. You make notes there too. When it comes to performance, you shouldn't need your notes and your goal should be to be able to do the entire show from memory.

I am not a music stand nazi -and I will have mine off to the side with my notes handy - in order and ready if I should need them. But I cannot stand to watch a cover band perform an entire night of songs with everyone's faces staring down at notes. If you do your job at home and learn your parts and if the band does it's job in rehearsal and rehearses the show - by showtime everyone should have their stuff together and be able to put on a faces-front, everybody smiling, good-time party show!

I (possibly mistakenly) assume that people learn their songs on their own time at home and work on them as a band in rehearsal. That's how all of the most successful cover bands I've been in do things - but I've experienced others who think "band practice" is when people learn their parts and cannot stand the idea of taking time at home to do that.

That's another thing I'd watch for is what I consider to be the professional ethic when it comes to personal practice and band rehearsal time. Bands who say, "We'll just get together once a week and learn stuff" = Run!

As for material - In my experience the most successful bands create a party atmosphere that features almost exclusively danceable tunes that make the ladies wanna shake it. The goal of the band is to play really strong 'party/dance' tunes - get the floor filled and keep it that way all night - with minimal to zero down-time between songs.

[kev b]

We play numbers that might have been in the setlist of a Beat Group of the mid sixties, done in the style of The Animals, early Stones etc, plenty of Vox Continental keyboard, a few Sonics songs. However we pick slightly obscure examples that aren't done to death and we're picking up a lot of work here because most pub bands here play the same forty numbers - Free, Status Quo, Chuck Berry, same songs, different band, each week.
We will never run out of material, I think most guys get lazy about learning new material then get bored, join a new band and then start doing the same old songs again.
We try to play crowd pleasers but never the obvious ones, it seems to paying off and it's very interesting to choose and arrange forgotten songs.

[pbass6811]

This is a really interesting thread. I've been playing in the same "cover" band for the last 11 years(I say "cover", because we do play our original music throughout the night). Part of my band(singer, guitarist, & myself)also does "acoustic" shows(I say "acoustic" because I still play electric bass) during the week. We play every Friday & Saturday night, and my acoustic show plays pretty much every Wed & Thurs, unless something comes up, so I play 3-5 nights/week. That's been my life for the last 9 years or so. At this particular moment, it's my only job(I'm married and my wife has a pretty good job, so that helps!). I normally keep a "real" job, just to stay on the grid, but I got laid off a couple of weeks ago, so I'll start looking after Christmas. I've managed to make a really good living playing bass in this band. When we started the band, we went out and checked out all the bands that were doing well and we actually asked bar owners what kinds of bands they would like to have in their clubs. At the time, this was 10+ years ago, almost all of the owners were sick of classic rock bands. Their crowds were mainly older folks who tended to stay calm, but not drink that much. They wanted younger folks to start coming in. We took that to mean they wanted bands that were playing newer stuff, so that's what we did. We got lucky because, at that time, that's exactly what our scene needed/wanted. We had a tremendous amount of success really quickly.

We based our set list on what was big in rock & pop at the time(Still do)and then just sprinkled in some older stuff just for good measure. They're are some songs that we do that I love(Breaking Benjamin-So Cold/Chevelle-Face To The Floor/Billy Idol-Rebel Yell/Eddie Money-Shakin')and a few that I'd rather not ever hear or play again(Godsmack-Keep Away/Disturbed-Sickness/Buckcherry-Crazy Bi*&$), but the crowds like all of those tunes, so we'll keep playing them to the best of our abilities. That's what's kept us working the past decade. I do know that there are some outstanding Funk/R&B bands that do very well as well as some 80's/90's party bands. Another trick we learned was during breaks, our soundguy plays our iPod for break music, and we keep new and classic hip/hop-R&B-Dance music rotating so chicks can dance to that stuff! It's a great lead-in when the dance floor is packed with chicks shakin' it to Baby Got Back or Cupid Shuffle(Egad!), then we launch into Crazy Bit#% or Bad Girlfriend and they just keep dancing!

Fast forward 11 years, and we're still playing every weekend. We've got 2013 totally booked and we still have more places to play than we have available dates! All because we listened. We all know that bar owners are a notoriously shady bunch, but they will tell you what they want if you ask! I'm no expert at this, but that's what worked for my "cover" band the last decade.

[pkstone]

Originally Posted by MatticusMania

Im kind of keen on the idea of keeping some variety and covering lots of eras of music, the whole 50s/60s to Now kind of stuff. Any one in a coverband like that, here?

That describes my band -- it doesn't matter when the tune was (last) popular, if we like it, we'll learn it.

This isn't the most lucrative approach, but to me, it's the most satisfying. I'd say go with your gut on adding in at least some '90s stuff. If you like it, you can make it sound good.

[bluewine]

Originally Posted by Stewie26

Blue, just curious, if you could pick any genre, what would you "enjoy" playing most?

Pop Rock, from the 70s, stuff nobody wants to hear.

Blue

[bluewine]

Matt,

If this hasn't been mentioned, watch out for "red flags " in cover bands seeking bass player ads.

Talk to the bl prior to an audition. Unfortunately there are a lot of these cover bands pretending to be something their not.

Blue

[bluewine]

Originally Posted by kev b

We play numbers that might have been in the setlist of a Beat Group of the mid sixties, done in the style of The Animals, early Stones etc, plenty of Vox Continental keyboard, a few Sonics songs.

Very Cool

Those were the days. Only thing is we didn't use the term Beat Group. We just called it being in a band.

By the way we used a lot of Farfisas back then too.

Blue

[jmattbassplaya]

My original band also acts as a cover band from time to time. We play a huge variety of music ranging from Hendrix, Zeppelin, and CCR, to Bill Withers and the Temptations, to Chili Peppers, Nirvana, and Phish, to Gorillaz, Nsync, and Mute Math. All of it goes down very well on the college scene in my area.

[wrench45us]

This is a pretty interesting thread.

I would have expected more hair/metal bands, but what do I know

a lounge lizard band in southern Jersey -- what could be sweeter than that?
(we all have unaccountable taste)
otherwise the Animals/Yardbirds/Stones would take me back to where I started
'Smokestack Lightning' 'Train Kept a Rollin' (Paul Samwell Smith major influence)
'Under my Thumb' 'Get Off my Cloud' (Bill Wyman major influence)
'Outside Lookin In' 'Boom Boom' (Chas Chandler major influence)

(we had a Farfisa through a Leslie)

oh baby
nothing really to add, but it seems a major plus to be play the music you have some passion for

[tycobb73]

Ask your female friends who go to bars to see a band what they want to hear. If they don't go to bars to see bands ask them what would get them to see a band.

[bluewine]

Originally Posted by tycobb73

Ask your female friends who go to bars to see a band what they want to hear. If they don't go to bars to see bands ask them what would get them to see a band.

If their under 25, the answer will probably be "nothing".

I'm not kidding, things have really changed for older guys like me.

There's a young kid (21) at the local Star Bucks who is always telling me about these bands he goes to see. When I ask him to tell me a little about the band his description is not what or how I define "band". Whatever it is it's not built on drums, guitar and bass.

Blue

[bluewine]

Originally Posted by wrench45us

(we had a Farfisa through a Leslie)

That works.

Our keyboard player ran his Farfisa through 2 Leslies .

That's the way we did it a little further North in Montclair NJ.

Blue

[jmattbassplaya]

Originally Posted by bluewine

If their under 25, the answer will probably be "nothing".

I'm not kidding, things have really changed for older guys like me.

There's a young kid (21) at the local Star Bucks who is always telling me about these bands he goes to see. When I ask him to tell me a little about the band his description is not what or how I define "band". Whatever it is it's not built on drums, guitar and bass.

Blue

That's not always true. Live music is popping in Knoxville. While it definitely doesn't seem as the 'good ol days' that you older guys talk about, it definitely isn't dead. If anything, it has only been growing over the past 5 years I've been on my local scene. Then again, Memphis has only gotten worse over the past 7-8 years.

[Big Brother]

Originally Posted by the yeti

if you really think a "vocalist" finding 40 songs from *any* 10 year period they can "pull off" is something special, we're not only not on the same page, i don't think we're in the same book.

here goes: smells like teen spirit, come as you are, wonderwall, 1979, song 2, closing time, santa monica, all the small things, all star, walking on the sun, story of a girl, one week, ballroom blitz (wayne's world), little miss can't be wrong, 3 am, learning to fly, everlong, bound for the floor, flagpole sitter, you oughta know, just a girl, spiderweb, underneath it all, smooth, good, semi charmed life, basket case, longview, been caught stealing, any other popular song (of that decade)...

here's the thing- if any of us had trouble with any of those songs, would we really be a "bassist"?

That is one heck of a singer you have that can match the range of any song in the time period, Amazing! I am certainly not in your league.

I tip my hat to you sir.

[ChrisB2]

Variety cover band here. We play songs from pretty much any genre that were popular on the radio spanning several decades; 70s, 80s, 90s and a handful of newer stuff. We don't dip down into the 50s at all, nor the 60s except for one or two. Classic rock, pop rock, and country would roughly describe the genres.

Most of the songs were on the list when I joined, although we've added many of the same type. Girls dancing is our goal, not so much what "we" want to play, but it's not tough to find lots of songs that fill both criteria.

IMO, there's a slight "mutually exclusive" aspect to playing songs you like and playing songs that work. If you're dead-set on pleasing yourself, your success will suffer. Conversely, if your only concern is pleasing everyone else, your musical soul will wither. You'll just have to adjust as you go to try to satisfy those two, sometimes conflicting needs. In my band, we probably play 50/50 what I want, but lots of songs I don't like are floor-packers and that's what matters to me. Plus, all the songs are ones that someone in the band likes so there you go... it's not all about me and being in a cover band requires compromise on song selection. Know this going in so you won't be disappointed by having to play songs you don't like.

Working bands will typically send you a setlist as a means of letting you see if you think it will work for you. I often receive them with the first contact from a band.

I wouldn't worry about practicing songs until you get an audition... no way to predict what songs to learn. Unless you just want to learn songs for fun, which I do anyway.

Good luck!!