Is anyone playing current Top 40?

[bass12]

In the 80's I was in my 20's. There were huge crowds of 20-somethings in the bars listening to bands like mine playing was was then current music, which has now morphed into classic rock. The record-buying public wasn't high-schoolers back then; it was also all of us in that generation. Things seem a little different now.

The identification (and exploitation) of the "tween" market has, I think, had a huge impact on the kinds of records that are being promoted these days. In the early '80s the music acts designed to appeal to that age group consisted of a relatively few groups such as, what, the Mini-Pops and... Menudo? Nowadays it's pretty much any pop act that you can think of.

 

[LBS-bass]

That's not a reason to avoid playing new songs, if they fit your sound and your crowd. But it just doesn't seem like contemporary hits translate into cover-band world the same way as one might expect.

One thing I'll point out is that the way music is made today is also vastly different than it was in the heyday of rock bands. There's so much more studio finesse and arrangement layers, with less traditional composition. The songs that I write are sometimes based around samples and loops and there's very little guitar playing. Mostly it's keyboards and layers of keyboards. I hire session players - one song has trumpets and trombones on it. People have asked me why I don't start a band and play my own stuff live. I wouldn't even know where to begin to put that band together. It's not music for a band to play.

 

[OptimalOptimus]

Meh. That last sentence is a bit if melodrama in and of itself. Having "no care" is one thing. But who wants to GO OUT on a Friday or Saturday and be peppered with songs about injustice or breakups? If people are going out, they mostly want to CELEBRATE and have a good time.

What was so unhappy about the 90s? Other than the total downfall of live music brought about by depressing grunge music, of course.

Many wars and genocide especially in Rwanda
A few schools shooting
Bombing of World Trade Center
Bombing in Oklahoma
In my part of the world there was a big school shooting, something that never happened before and never happened since.
In my part of the world there was Gulfs war
We had a flood and an ice storm that took a year to get over if not more and stuff that never reoccurred. People still talk about those events
In the 90s in Canada was the introduction of taxes on goods we buy
Québec almost got independent from the rest of Canada

 

[El Güero]

End of the first set we launch into Come On Pt. 2 by Hendrix

Is the "2" a typo, and supposed to be "Pt. 1?"

If it is Pt. 2, what's it from?

Thanks.

 

[bass12]

None of the songs are the one associated with the artist by cover band.

"ABC", "I Want You Back", "Signed, Sealed, Delivered", "American Woman", "Let It Be", "Ain't No Mountain High Enough", "Thank You (Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin)", "Fire And Rain", "Evil Ways", "Lookin' Out My Back Door", "The Letter", "Travelin' Band", etc.

 

[LBS-bass]

Is the "2" a typo, and supposed to be "Pt. 1?"

If it is Pt. 2, what's it from?

Thanks.

No typo, it's the second part of something Hendrix recorded based on 'Come on Baby Let the Good Times Roll" and everyone has forgotten what the first part was.

Here is part 2 but it is not labeled as such on this video. You can hear how he's coming into it from something else though.

 

[El Güero]

No typo, it's the second part of something Hendrix recorded based on 'Come on Baby Let the Good Times Roll" and everyone has forgotten what the first part was.

"Come On (Part I)" is Track #3 from Side B of Electric Ladyland.

Haven't listened to the video you posted, but will now. Thanks.

Edit: Less than one minute in, I'd guess Pt. 2 is an alternate take from the EL sessions.

 

[LBS-bass]

Awesome. I had forgotten all about that; been decades since I listened to that entire thing.

I had never heard pt 2 until I was asked to play it by this band so I assume maybe it's something he tacked onto pt 1 at live shows? Someone here will know.

Edit... thanks for that edit. Makes sense

 

[TheLowDown33]

I am in a corporate/wedding band and we do a decent amount of Top 40...which is pretty much exclusively Dua Lipa and Bruno Mars. The retro disco-funk-made-modern goes over very well for my age demographic (21-30), but I will tell you that a lot of the classics are far from being dethroned. Jessie's Girl, Summer of '69, Livin on a Prayer are surefire hits everytime providing they are played well. IMO younger people actually go nuts for two categories - classic Motown hits and 90's/2000's pop punk. I swear it is the oddest thing seeing people my age getting down to September and then 20 minutes later headbanging to Ocean Avenue. I love it though, because it keeps me from playing more 80's classic rock which bores me to bits.

 

[El Güero]

Awesome. I had forgotten all about that; been decades since I listened to that entire thing.

I had never heard pt 2 until I was asked to play it by this band so I assume maybe it's something he tacked onto pt 1 at live shows? Someone here will know.

Edit... thanks for that edit. Makes sense

I only saw him once, with the Experience, and they opened with Come On Pt. 1. No Part 2. That was the first time I heard it. I figured any Hendrix Part 2 would either be a typo, or something released by Experience Hendrix that I don't know about.

The song was written by Earl King, and youtube has this with his Parts 1 & 2.

 

[hrodbert696]

One thing I'll point out is that the way music is made today is also vastly different than it was in the heyday of rock bands. There's so much more studio finesse and arrangement layers, with less traditional composition. The songs that I write are sometimes based around samples and loops and there's very little guitar playing. Mostly it's keyboards and layers of keyboards. I hire session players - one song has trumpets and trombones on it. People have asked me why I don't start a band and play my own stuff live. I wouldn't even know where to begin to put that band together. It's not music for a band to play.

Also a major factor. I have a friend, young woman with a record contract, not a big name but she was on the X-Factor at one point. There was a point when we were trying to get a band together to gig some of her originals and some covers locally. Didn't work out, but one huge issue was - how would an actual band playing instruments execute her originals? It was all Protools stuff. Could be done, but not in an obvious intuitive way.

 

[LBS-bass]

how would an actual band playing instruments execute her originals? It was all Protools stuff. Could be done, but not in an obvious intuitive way.

I was asked to do a livestream during the Covid shutdown but the only way I could see doing that would have been to use backing tracks. My piano skills are crude at best so even though I usually write using the piano, I hire session guys to make that stuff sound good. I could see getting a good pianist to do some live stuff but because I layer drum loops in some of my stuff it would be hard to impossible to recreate that with a live drummer, unless the drummer plays over loops. And piano players want money, which I could do, but it would be out of pocket since original music pays nothing.

Interesting to think about it.

 

[Altitude]

"Can't Stop the Feeling" is the latest pop hit we do.

Same. Either that or Uptown Funk, not sure which is newer.

Theory is that you want to play music that's current but not too current. If you try to play stuff in current radio rotation, you risk having to revamp your book constantly as songs unexpectedly fall our of the vernacular completely. But if you give them a little time you can better tell which ones you'll be able to keep in your set for years.

As a possible example - think how wasteful it would have been to learn that "Call Me Maybe" song when it was on the radio every 3 minutes. You couldn't really play it now.

 

[Hurricane Jimmie]

So Anyway, wisdom from my guitar buddy Curt...

But you know at my age I know everything I want to know about everything and can’t be bothered with more. ​

I've played mostly Rock and Country over the years. The bands that hired me stopped chasing top 40 hits about 30 years ago.

When I joined a Zydeco band, it got easy...because My Toot Toot and Jole' Blon are the only songs anyone might recognize. Unless you live 'South Of 10'.
Ayieeee!

 

[overit]

I tried to listen to the Spotify Top 40/50 the other day and stopped by the 3rd song, I didn't recognize anything and it was pretty emo, not in a rock way but r&b/rap.

Our most current song is Levitating (Dua Lipa) from 2020, then a few pop songs from 2014-2015.

 

[5andFretless]

I haven't done the bar band thing in a long time, but we never even considered doing anything current (at the time). Now I'm half an acoustic duo that does wineries and background music for special events. The newest song we do is "Somewhere Only We Know" by Keane. We've experimented with Top 40 since there are often teens and preteens at shows but they flopped, badly.

So now we stick the John Denver, George Harrison, the Eagles, James Taylor, and others in that vein. People know the songs and the words. That stuff makes them happy.

 

[Bunk McNulty]

The issue of how hit songs are made has been mentioned tangentially. They aren't made by bands; they're made by producers. This is an excerpt from a story called "The Song Machine" written for the New Yorker by John Seabrook back in 2012. I especially enjoy the part where two different singers make two different songs out of the same backing track, and nobody really notices.


Most of the songs played on Top Forty radio are collaborations between producers like Stargate and “top line” writers like Ester Dean. The producers compose the chord progressions, program the beats, and arrange the “synths,” or computer-made instrumental sounds; the top-liners come up with primary melodies, lyrics, and the all-important hooks, the ear-friendly musical phrases that lock you into the song. “It’s not enough to have one hook anymore,” Jay Brown, the president of Roc Nation, and Dean’s manager, told me recently. “You’ve got to have a hook in the intro, a hook in the pre-chorus, a hook in the chorus, and a hook in the bridge.” The reason, he explained, is that “people on average give a song seven seconds on the radio before they change the channel, and you got to hook them.”

The top-liner is usually a singer, too, and often provides the vocal for the demo, a working draft of the song. If the song is for a particular artist, the top-liner may sing the demo in that artist’s style. Sometimes producers send out tracks to more than one top-line writer, which can cause problems. In 2009, both Beyoncé and Kelly Clarkson had hits (Beyoncé’s “Halo,” which charted in April, and Clarkson’s “Already Gone,” which charted in August) that were created from the same track, by Ryan Tedder. Clarkson wrote her own top line, while Beyoncé shared a credit with Evan Bogart. Tedder had neglected to tell the artists that he was double-dipping, and when Clarkson heard “Halo” and realized what had happened she tried to stop “Already Gone” from being released as a single, because she feared the public would think she had copied Beyoncé’s hit. But nobody cared, or perhaps even noticed; “Already Gone” became just as big a hit.

A relatively small number of producers and top-liners create a disproportionately large share of contemporary hits, which may explain why so many of them sound similar.

edit: one more juicy bit--

Whereas rock is about the sound of a band playing together (even when its members aren’t actually together) and features virtuoso solos played on real instruments, today’s Top Forty is almost always machine-made: lush sonic landscapes of beats, loops, and synths in which all the sounds have square edges and shiny surfaces, the voices are Auto-Tuned for pitch, and there are no mistakes.

 

[dbsfgyd1]

Is your band playing a set list of mostly current Top 40? I don't mean hits from the 1990's, which is still WAY newer that most bands setlist, but current hits.

No, but one from 1968…LOL…

 

[LBS-bass]

Whereas rock is about the sound of a band playing together (even when its members aren’t actually together) and features virtuoso solos played on real instruments, today’s Top Forty is almost always machine-made: lush sonic landscapes of beats, loops, and synths in which all the sounds have square edges and shiny surfaces, the voices are Auto-Tuned for pitch, and there are no mistakes.

You're 100% correct about how most popular music is created these days. What you say above is one of the biggest reasons I hire session players to play live tracks on my songs. I can create music using loops and so forth, but I don't like the sterility when it's all being regurgitated back through a sequencer and audio loops. So, as appropriate, I will play percussion and/or bass guitar, and I will hire real people to play piano and horns and other parts that I feel I can't do justice to. To me, live feel from good players who have (usually) been given license to do what they want is more important than recapturing the original vision of the song I gave them in demo form. Only once did I tell a session guy to play exactly what was on the demo and that was because it was part of an arrangement I had paid someone else for .

 

[el murdoque]

I just had a look in my countries top 40.
I know one song and four of the artists (at least by name).
Phew, that's a way to make one feel old.