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IS your band a cover?

Are you in a cover namd or original?

  • Cover band

    Votes: 172 63.0%

  • Original

    Votes: 101 37.0%
  • Total voters
    273
#21
Cover band now... almost exclusively 1980s, although there are some 70s tunes in there which suit the new wave dynamic, like early Elvis Costello, Police, The Cars, Gary Numan, etc.

I'll always be drawn to being part of an original project... but I did it for 10 years, made zero money, and rarely played to a large audience. Now that I'm into my 30s I've sold out and gone practical :)
 
#22
EricF said:
70% covers, 30% originals. Some of the covers we play get our own spin rather than trying to copy the original version. To me, it's just playing music with some people I enjoy playing with.
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This is my take as well.
As I explained to a former guitard during a discussion on whether to do the songs note for note or not, there a many bands that do, and IME, a lot of the audience response was "Great band , they sound just like xxx, what was their name?"
Otoh, if you do the covers in your own style, you will be remembered for that. :hyper:
 
#25
My cover band Soul Sauce plays some originals and sells our CD of originals at our gigs. We play chiefly R&B, Soul & some classic rock. We have multiple gigs every weekend that pay very well. We live in California's wine country with a lot of tourism so we don't need to play bars per se. Hotel lounges have music on weekend but only for 2 to 3 hours so we don't have to play marathon 5 hour gigs. The wineries often have live music during the day so we'll often have 2 gigs on a Saturday.
At 62 I can proudly say I have been in cover bands for 47 years.
 
#26
NoiseNinja said:
No cover band, strictly originals... All though, I admit, do have a few numbers I would like to cover.
As for wether it's a bad thing to be in cover band, it really depends. I must admit that I personally find it a bit on the cheap side. But it really shouldn't matter if you are in it for the music 100%.

By the way wouldn't a poll make this a lot easier?
Click to expand...

Im new hear, I will try to figure out ho to do a poll!!
 
#28
well, just found out that we have another gig the night before thanksgiving, our lead singer owns a popular bar with her husband so we always have a place to play.problem is we are like a set and half short of a full night, so now I am on the hunt for easy songs people like...If I can find a few more that re as easy as Fortunate son we will be all set....What do you guys think of tribute bands? we had one of the best Alice cooper impersonators come up and jam with us and it got me thinking...hummmmm
 
#29
lackthereof said:
I've found that those who disrespect a musician for playing covers,usually have a hard time learning covers. Bad ears? Lack of understanding of common song structures? Whatever the case. Musicians play music, regardless of who wrote it.

Also cover bands are great for keeping your chops, endurance, vocals, etc... in shape.
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Really? Untrue in my world. My originals band has five members who have all done the covers thing. We can play allot of them on the fly and do allot of the time note for note.

We play 3 cover's or so if we do a multi set show and do them well. I have played in other bands that mixed both covers and originals and could do both with ease. I find musicians who move away from covers like myself and my bandmates grow tired or bored with covers or have always written their own music and want to get it out to the public. This means they will make less money,play to less people and work twice as hard but the payoff of doing their own music makes it all worth it.
 
#30
It's not bad to be in a cover band. I'm in a wedding band. All covers from Etta James and Sinatra to Bon Jovi and Black Eyed Peas. I probably cover a wider variety of genres in one night than most cover bands do their whole career! Haha. I can never knock a cover band, or someone wanting to form one. I love playing in mine. It's a great experience with my best friends. We do 3-4 weddings a week in the busy season, and 2-3 a week in the light season. We make a ton of money playing covers! How is that a bad thing? :cool:

But on the other hand I am always writing. My guitar player and I haven't jammed with the guys as an original band since like 2006, so we aren't also in an official original band. But we're planning on recording a demo of new stuff early 2012. The songs are there! I'm thinking a lot of cover bands do this. If they're like us, they play, and can't help but come up with ideas for their own stuff. I sure can't help it. I've always got ideas swimming around after every gig.
 
#31
lackthereof said:
I've found that those who disrespect a musician for playing covers,usually have a hard time learning covers
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No, they just bore me to tears. I've done the cover band thing and I just don't do music for that reason.

I don't disrespect people who do it -- I just wonder how the hell you keep interested. I've seen some really good cover bands. But they have to be super good to keep my interest.

My favorite cover band gig was when one of my bass students had to go to jail for the day and called me in a panic asking me to sub. I got the phone call at noon (this is 1991 or so, no internet, email, text, voicemail, just a casette answering machine). By 3:00 I called him back and said sure, I'll do it. His guitar player turned up at my house at about 6:00 and I went over their 40-song setlist. Most of it was Doors material and I had been on a Doors kick recently so I knew all of it. That movie with Val Kilmer was out. I still don't know why I was drawn to learning tunes from a band with no ****in' bass player, but, whatever. I guess I liked their session players pretty well.

Anyway I went on with the band at 9:00 having had nothing but a 90-minute go-over-it session with the guitar player. They asked me to drop out on a couple of tunes that they hadn't even shown me, but mostly if I didn't know the tune cold I had chords in front of me and I improvised.

I just found the entire thing not very challenging and not very rewarding. The band was called Hyperkarma, and as I recall we played at a bar in Denver called the Wooden Nickel. There was a very weird woman who looked like she'd escaped from the casting for the Doors movie . . . and the bartender was serving some riotously-named drink that was everything left over poured into a shot glass. We played for 3 hours or so and it was fun, but I didn't want to go back and do it again and again and again.

The most recent show I have played (about 2 months ago now) was 90 minutes of my own music, and the crowd was spread across the BBC (Bluegrass Brewing Company) and the hookah place across the square from it, and after EVERY SINGLE SONG we got a hearty roar of approval.

My songs. I was loving it. It is very hard to come down from that and sit there and play a bunch of old classic rock tunes that people politely applaud at.

Once in a great while we'll open with a cover tune but they don't last long in Boojum. I write a new song every couple of weeks. I give it to the guys, they do their thing, and pretty soon we've got a song. Our last cover was Pork and Beans by Weezer. Haven't played it on over a year.
 
#33
Ayce said:
This is my take as well.
As I explained to a former guitard during a discussion on whether to do the songs note for note or not, there a many bands that do, and IME, a lot of the audience response was "Great band , they sound just like xxx, what was their name?"
Otoh, if you do the covers in your own style, you will be remembered for that. :hyper:
Click to expand...

I think it really depends on the song and audience expectations. In my rock band we rearrange - to some extent - about half of the setlist. Anything from just speeding the song up a little or tweaking the rhythm to make it danceable to completely making it over so that it sounds almost nothing like the original. Right now we're working out an arrangement of Norah Jones' "In the Morning." It won't sound much like the original but since it's not a very well known tune you can get away with it - assuming it actually sounds good that is.

Can't do that in my Motown band. People expect the harmonies and the horns and all that. They expect "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" to sound like "Ain't No Mountain High Enough."


maxgrant said:
No, they just bore me to tears. I've done the cover band thing and I just don't do music for that reason.
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That's cool. For me I enjoy the playing part. I'm glad someone else has written the music so I can concentrate on playing and improvising over it which is what I enjoy.
 
#34
We are a tribute band.

When we play a Cheap Trick song, we are a Cheap Trick tribute band.

When we play a Led Zeppelin song, we are a Led Zeppelin tribute band.

Etc.

We do have songs that have our own spin, like our version of the Bette Midler version of "Beast of Burden" by the Rolling Stones, or our version of the Beatles version of Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally," but we have a lot of songs that are pretty dead on.

We don't just do it because it's easier to get gigs.

We really like the material we're playing.
 
#35
mellowinman said:
We don't just do it because it's easier to get gigs.

We really like the material we're playing.
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I can respect that. I had a really good guitar player leave my band because he couldn't see making money doing originals.

So instead he's a human jukebox, playing identical copies of the recorded songs to a (very) disinterested audience. I mean, they draw a crowd. Only because they don't suck. But I noticed when we opened for their band that the crowd doesn't have any real interest in them. They're just a very loud, expensive jukebox.

If I were to cover music I would do something along the lines of stylistic parody/mishmash.
 
#36
I think some of you are mistaking "disrespecting" and "would rather not" from that post.

I'd rather not do covers, but I play in two cover bands (one radio rock, one an AIC tribute) because they help fund the gear I buy for my original band. If some of you are burnt out on covers, I totally hear you.

But that's hugely different, to me, from the drooling idiots that obstinately refuse to do covers. I, too, have found that most of those are they types that are simply unable to learn music and rationalize that by copping an attitude about covers and cover bands with the "why would I ever want to play other people's music?"
 
#40
Covers Classic Rock, Blues, Southern Rock, Metal, Pop, Hard Rock, Most of which we too put our on spin on them. We add parts that never were on the original recordings, Sometimes lead parts where there were none. extra bridges, extended endings different bass lines. Live endings we create to take the song to the next level stuff like that.
The lead guitarist and myself both wrote our own songs for our original bands and we take from that experience to make the songs our own. It makes us different from the other bands in our area and has kept them coming back for more since 2005 and has kept us working at least 4 or 5 times per month and we only play Friday and Sat nights. Oct we played 6 shows a lot of Friday and Sat back to back
 

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