jive1
Commercial User
I don't consider any gig to be a no-prep gig. I've been prepping for decades to be able to pull off any gig.
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I haven't been in a band that rehearsed in, I don't know..at least 15 years or so. I'm in three right now and we pretty much don't even see each other between gigs.
It works out fine. You just don't do Steely Dan, Kansas or anything else that needs to be rehearsed. You pick from two million tunes you can wing and the crowd loves
It works out fine. You just don't do Steely Dan, Kansas or anything else that needs to be rehearsed. You pick from two million tunes you can wing and the crowd loves
Last summer I gigged with a bar band that was absolutely horrible about communicating everything.
I had to triple check gig dates, set lists were wrong, Wrong keys, wrong versions, two or three phone messages with no response, gig calendar was set up by mass text with both guitar players arguing IN the group text.
It always worked out and I always had a blast flying by the seat of my pants. The constant jabs between the guitar players on stage was like a comedy and the money was decent. I kind of miss it actually..
I had to triple check gig dates, set lists were wrong, Wrong keys, wrong versions, two or three phone messages with no response, gig calendar was set up by mass text with both guitar players arguing IN the group text.
It always worked out and I always had a blast flying by the seat of my pants. The constant jabs between the guitar players on stage was like a comedy and the money was decent. I kind of miss it actually..
Nearly all the gigs I have with my current band are low-prep. Yesterday I get a setlist for this weekend's gig with 3 new songs and 5 we've played once in the last year. He does this occasionally and I try to roll with it. I'll do my best to cram and throw together charts, but it always seems to go better than I expected. Best part of playing dive bars... audience is not too discriminating!
Had something similar happen to me once. A friend called me at 6pm once and said "What are you up to tonight?" I said nothing and he dropped the bomb. "Can you sit in with us tonight at 8?" Set was top 40 dance tunes and R and B stuff. I had played about 10 of the songs before, but about 5-6 years before. I knew everyone in the band so I stood by the keyboard player and he told me keys and the changes if I couldnt figure it out on my own a few bars ahead of time. I went pretty well. I listened to a couple of the songs on my phone on youtube on the breaks.
I played a wake for a friend a few weeks back where it was just a bunch of local musicians who got together in her honor and just jammed. The drummer and I had played together for a couple of years but the rest of us were friends but had never played together. It went ok. The guy singing just started a song and we went with it. Some songs went better than others.
A couple of times my band has thrown a song into the set that we had never played together before. The first time we did Night Ranger's Sister Christian, we had never practiced it as a band. I had worked out my parts on my own, the guitar player had done his the same way, and the drummer remarked before the show "Yeah, I've heard it before." It went pretty well. Later, we actually worked on it. We've done that a couple of times with different songs.
Overall, I like to prepare beforehand tho.
BnB
I played a wake for a friend a few weeks back where it was just a bunch of local musicians who got together in her honor and just jammed. The drummer and I had played together for a couple of years but the rest of us were friends but had never played together. It went ok. The guy singing just started a song and we went with it. Some songs went better than others.
A couple of times my band has thrown a song into the set that we had never played together before. The first time we did Night Ranger's Sister Christian, we had never practiced it as a band. I had worked out my parts on my own, the guitar player had done his the same way, and the drummer remarked before the show "Yeah, I've heard it before." It went pretty well. Later, we actually worked on it. We've done that a couple of times with different songs.
Overall, I like to prepare beforehand tho.
BnB
IMO lacking the willingness to rehearse as a group to make sure everyone is on the same page and work out the inevitable details that make a band GOOD is simply laziness and a cop-out. Sure, a very few very competent high end musicians can pull it off but the vast majority will sound obviously under rehearsed to anyone with even an average ear. To say that an audience isn't that discriminating is disrespectful not only to the audience but also to the music AND to the rest of us who have to hustle extra hard to overcome the poor reputation of live bands in general who give us a negative connotation because they're too damn lazy to rehearse. Of course the upside for those who do rehearse is that it's pretty easy to look (sound) good in comparison.
