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Set list too short
- Thread starter basseux
- Start date
Dude as you well know, in a band the number one job is to learn songs, whether they are played ever night or not.
Some bands have 300 to 600 songs they can pull from at any moment to put together a 60 song night.
Your guitar player and the rest of the outfit need to get it together!
Jeez, haggling over learning songs, why be in a band?
Just my thoughts
Sax player proposed it on group chat Friday.
BL ignored it.
He still argued he prefered we stop 20 minutes earlier than do songs we don't master.
That's where I knew he was in some sort of power move to not lose control.
You know that when someone is arguing extremely stupid stuff or promotes lazyness.
That was it for me.
Guys like Hadrien Ferraud played there recently, I saw his name when passing by, Sélène Saint Aimé too.
Jacky Terrasson, Didier Lockwood, Brad Meldo, Pastorius are guys who played there, the list is all names like that, even Miles and Herbie have at least set a foot there if they didn't played.
Even if it's the highlights, that has to be worth something.
The band will be paid, don't know much, and will never know now, but guys not learning songs and wanting to shave 20 minutes off, can't deserve much.
Just glad I bailed, it lifted a weight.
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Correct me where I'm wrong here... I may have missed something.
Were you not satisfied with this project up until this incident?
If this gig goes badly (and you're there) is everybody going to point and shake their fingers at you?
After this gig, train wreck or not, would the band not get back to normal operations, which you were okay with?
Your name isn't on the band, if the show sucks, you get paid the same (zero or whatever), there's no skin off your butt.
Why quit?
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When we started one year ago, I quickly felt frustrated at rehearsals with the band slowly crawling into learning songs.
When addressing the issue, they used as a pretext that it was not motivating that no show was booked.
That's no excuse for me when you pay a rehearsal space to have an opportunity to play with people. At worse you have a good time jamming over the songs.
They were like "yes but this how people are". Are they f-ing childs ? ( That one doesn't sound right)
But anyway show were booked.
At first, 1h shows around January and February.
Despite that it was still obvious people were not understanding the amount of personal work required to fill a 1h set list, and still coming unprepared at rehearsals.
A song with a fade ? "what a stress HO MY GOD, we have to invent an ending", and it took like one hour, and half the rehearsal, to just do a damn ending for one cover, like if it was the priority when you are still 5 songs short.
And BL as a drummer, still managed to miss endings on stage, and said that he knows he was never good on endings, and have to work on it. (Still hasn't apparently).
Even when 5 songs short, some managed to say they found this song didn't sounded well enough and we should remove it. To what I objected that we can do that only when we have more songs than the set otherwise we are stepping backwards and wasting time we invested in polishing the song. ( More like carving a silex for a month).
It was painfully slow to reach 10 songs for 1h set in January, without anyone sweating for it.
It was painfully slow to reach 18 songs for 2 sets of 45 minutes in April.
And despite knowing 7 months in advance we have to do 45 more minutes, we managed so far to prepare only 3 more songs that we didn't dared to do live yet.
Ho about that, 2 months into rehearsing this songs ( work to do, stomp, give it to me baby), guitar player came at rehearsal, saying "sorry I didn't work this songs because I don't work songs we are not sure to play".
I didn't want to stear poopie, and considered the situation spoke for itself, but nobody said anything, like I don't know "Are you kidding me ? That was a joke right hahaha ? No ?".
And the BL to justify not pushing strongly for more, said yesterday "but people don't do well under stress", to which I answered "but how do you think people will do with stress 2 weeks before the show ???"
To that he went back to "I prefer we finish 20 minutes before than do poor quality songs".
I said I wasn't agreeing to that.
I will be busy at work in September, I don't want to have to rush what could have been well prepared and anticipated 6 months ago.
There is no booked show after that one, singer is pregnant and won't make it, a new singer must be incorporated, sax said he will maybe not stay after, and he is the only one that have some consciousness about the situation.
Returning to normal operation would be what ?
Never adding new songs, poopy rehearsals with unmotivated people.
There is no future.
And they are fantasizing beeing professionals.
I am glad for you thinking you could deal with that, it's a skill that I don't have.
It doesn't matter if my name isn't on the sh*t show, I just don't want to be around them anymore.
By the way it was that bandmates that wanted to rehearse in a bar. Bandmates wants to rehearse in a bar
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Add a few simple songs to fill out what you can....even if it's songs like enter sandman, mustang Sally, seven nation army...etc... Do that for the next few weeks, then it's time to prep and get what you can in order. If you have two complete sets by then....well then you're going to have to repeat a few songs to make a third set...but don't stop playing just because you ran out of new material.
Maybe that third set gets finalized during the show, by guaging the audience reaction, or maybe you come in with the repeats already planned...either way, don't stress it. Relax have fun, take every minute you can to tune and allow the front man to tell stories, jokes, announcements...etc. That's about all I got...if you're quitting...be up front and professional about it, understand that you don't always have to be the one to set blaze to a bridge to burn it. As long as you're true to you, don't dwell on the past.
Maybe that third set gets finalized during the show, by guaging the audience reaction, or maybe you come in with the repeats already planned...either way, don't stress it. Relax have fun, take every minute you can to tune and allow the front man to tell stories, jokes, announcements...etc. That's about all I got...if you're quitting...be up front and professional about it, understand that you don't always have to be the one to set blaze to a bridge to burn it. As long as you're true to you, don't dwell on the past.
We are (we were) doing funk and soul, and it seems most aren't familiar enough with the genre, or ever learned enough songs to be able to quickly absorb new songs in the genre.
Also by the way I don't think Enter Sandman is a simple song. There are many structure subtilites that a band with people used to not prepare rehearsals would struggle on.
Nobody can understand it would be to difficult to add 6 songs or be confident extending with a few jam songs.
I don't either, that's why I am done.
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Thanks for the response, I was wrong in that I thought there was satisfactory gigging before this more challenging one came up...
I agree it's not worth the stress.
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I’ve been in bands that wanted to be in cruise control and didn’t want to put in any work to learn parts correctly. It’s not fun. I say talk with any of the members who you like playing with and look for or put together something else!
Ah, I remember that. Your BL is clueless. It's good to leave now because this guy will be making one bad decision after another.
As I said before and as you are experiencing. If no one wants to learn songs in a band, what's the point?
It's like having a dairy but not wanting to milk cows
Well, all that business you've described - no one will make decisions, having to learn material one.note.at.a.time, endless useless rehearsals, is just what I remember from being 20 years old with no actual experience in actual working bands. I suspect, OP, you're past that. The solution is to join bands that have a single well defined bandleader who makes the commercial decisions, and a single well defined musical director who makes the artistic decisions and runs rehearsals. In most amateur bands these are the same person, but not always. In larger professional bands, especially those with a "name" frontman, they are often two different people. Obviously the dumpster-fire of a band you're describing is not going to magically turn into what I'm describing, but I believe that format is the most effective way to make efficient use of everyone's time and deliver good performances.
Of course the single-strong-leader model can also lead to tyranny and a host of mental dysfunctions, in which case you bail from those situations as well.
Of course the single-strong-leader model can also lead to tyranny and a host of mental dysfunctions, in which case you bail from those situations as well.
BL started well with a set list of like 12 to 15 songs, a bit unoriginal.
Guitar player started to mess up rehersals by wanting to rearrange mid rehersal, which was taking to much time, and we agreed on that with BL who was also very frustrated.
Other newcomers also didn't understand that the playlist was to be practice and played, and often suggested stuff that wasn't really in the spirit, so I guess some of them went passive aggresive after not getting what they wanted.
BL sort of gave up at one point, and though that at least he had a band and people to play with.
I think guitar player was the most toxic, missing rehearsals, beeing late at a show, saying he didn't want to learn songs he was not sure we would play, which made the songs even less sure to be played ...
He revealed in the end that he was passive aggressive about us not beeing more available for shows (we didn't miss many booking opportunities), but with everyone having day jobs, holidays, familly to see, that will never change, unless he manages to push away every one.
I had bands in highschool, college, and issues were more about smoking to much, or guitar player playing too loud, or singer not willing to compromise his soul singing stuff he wasn't feeling, or my damn amp not loud enough.
What I don't get is that the horns all do music schools, and have music diplomas, and are supposed to be professionals, yet I think probably they are to scholar, and can't be rigorous, if there is not a teacher or employer telling them to be.
I was a bit older, but I am pretty sure I would have been pissed off the same earlier.
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Damn it, BL still hasn't removed me from the SMS group he has on his own phone.
He had the annoying habit to send "offical messages" through SMS instead of whatsapp.
I told him to do it 5 days ago.
Even this he can't handle it correctly.
I also don't want my picture on the promotion, I could sound like a dick asking that to either him or the venue ...
He had the annoying habit to send "offical messages" through SMS instead of whatsapp.
I told him to do it 5 days ago.
Even this he can't handle it correctly.
I also don't want my picture on the promotion, I could sound like a dick asking that to either him or the venue ...
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Why would a BL book a gig that you all aren't ready for?!
I also will not embarrass myself and refuse ANY gigs we're not ready for.
I also will not embarrass myself and refuse ANY gigs we're not ready for.
I think impatience was the issue, because the band started well with a list of 15 songs in funk style, with the objective of playing gigs.
Then the difficulty of finding personnel, made us accept people either lazy, not very skilled, or not really funk listeners, or having songs they wanted to play or not play.
All that made us move very slow through rehearsals that were more like practices, guitar was sabotaging rehearsals not wanting to do songs as on the record, BL was disappointed, I was pissed and had problems hiding it.
They said they needed gigs to be motivated, although they booked gigs and yet there was no sense of urgency.
But I guess to them, doing sub quality shows was less a concern than not doing shows at all.
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