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How many songs can you play?

#21
Thousands. If you can play a I-IV-V and I-VI-IV-V you can get through most '50's rock'n'roll gigs without rehearsal. Folk can throw you some curves, as well as traditional country. You better know what you're doing for jazz, fusion or classical. Blues usually can be figured out with little trouble (unlike the lyrics would lead you to believe). After playing for close to forty five years I've had to learn a lot of material. Forgotten a lot of the "flavor of the month" hits but remember my favorite songs. To make a list at this point would serve no useful purpose.
 
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#24
Well lets see:
I play in 6 bands (here and there, 2 of them I am a hired gun, so I am on a revolving list when they need a bass player)
3 of the bands do 4 hour shows (covers) and none of the bands do the same songs. 2 are rock/metal and the other is blues/rock ( think SRV)
The other 3 are all originals doing a set or set and a half each. Again, no repeating songs.
And also the many songs that I have forgotten over the years of playing in many other bands.
 
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#27
I'm going with thousands.

When you consider blues songs, old rock-n-roll songs, old country songs, etc, if you tell me what key we're in, I can play em.

Lots of songs come and go of course... you learn em for a band or for a gig, and then forget em. Thinking about things like being the back up band for a Neil Young hoot night one time - I probably had three hours of NY music down for one show. Could I pull out all three hours of NY right now off the top of my head? No, but at one time I did.

The list I'm working on right now is four sets, about 25-ish songs per set. This is for a country band that I'm hoping to join. I've probably played about a quarter of them on other gigs.

I used to do many, many regular gigs where you would play for 3-4 hours and have no song list. The singer (or multiple singers) would just call a song, tell you the key, the feel, and you would play the song. If you were lucky, you were familiar with the song - and if not, listen and react, but play the song.

When you start to think about songs - as in a chord progression, melody, and words - and stop thinking about them in terms of a particular performance by a particular artist - things can really start to open up.
 
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#28
Also in the "no idea" camp. I've been playing about ten or eleven years now, and the wife gets a good laugh out of counting the number of projects I've been in over that time, mostly cover bands. Fifteen or sixteen of them, I think. There have also been a couple of sub gigs I had to learn sets for.

Considering that most had a set list of 40 songs or so, give or take, but also that there's been a fair amount of overlap, plus some tunes I learned just cause I hoped to play them out but never did... I've probably learned 300 or 400 songs or so, at a conservative estimate.

But that doesn't mean I have that many all brushed up and ready to play smoothly tonight. Maybe half that many I could just go ahead and do. Of the rest, some would need a little brushing up, and some I would probably need to go back and learn all over again.
 
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#29
I really can't say. If you mean completely from memory with minimal mistakes, I'd say probably 80 or 100? Maybe? I learned to play by plugging my bass into the mic input of my stereo receiver and playing along with and improvising over records, radio, cds, and mixtapes. Then I REALLY learned how to play by jamming with as many people as I possibly could for ten or fifteen years.

If you mean songs I could fall in with after a verse/head after having been told the chords and such, I can't think of many in recent memory I wasn't able to play relatively successfully.
 
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#30
Oddly said:
Honestly, about 100 right now, off the top of my head.
Maybe not completely 100% note-perfect, but certainly very close.
I can probably fake another couple of hundred, if I've heard them before a few times, and you tell me what key you're in.
After that, if you give me notice, I'll learn it in a day or so.

I've several folders of songs from various bands/projects, and I'm trying to get it all organised into one efficient system.
I'll try to spend at least an hour every day working on tunes.

Now I'm talking standard bar-band stuff, blues, soul, classic rock, pop, folk-rock.
I don't do jazz, or Jaco, or Rush. (ie. the hard stuff:))
Click to expand...

What @Oddly said, under the assumption he meant without chord sheets and such.
 
#31
I can only keep about 200 memorized at a time. After that, it starts to push out old ones. I mean, after that I need a serious refresher on older stuff. Luckily, I can learn or relearn most stuff pretty fast.
 
#32
I am also in the no idea camp, stopped counting and listing when I passed the 400 mark about 15 years ago (rock, reggae, soul, pop, funk), since then I learnt a ton of jazz standards (as in songs with lyrics), bebop tunes, latin jazz and a bunch more other styles. So I really have no idea.
 
#37
I can play whatever songs I'm hired to play. I don't collect them though. Over the course of my life I've surely forgotten more songs than many people will ever know. I'm good at working up sets/shows and committing them to memory as needed. But once the gig is over, they slip away pretty quick. Lead sheets are my friend these days.
 
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