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Show me your setlist

#21
TJBass said:
Had a gig in Ramona last night that didn't go very well. We do mostly obscure blues, songs that many people don't really know, and we seemed to "blues them out the door." Not exactly what I thought would happen!

So what I am looking for is to see how your setlist are arranged, what setlists make people get up and dance as well as keeping them in the bar.

I'm not looking just for blues, any type of music setlists would be great, just to get an idea of what we are doing wrong.

Thanx...
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Were you at Cheers or Molly's? The new owner at Molly's is kind of a doof. We play at Cheers fairly often, and the crowd loves our 60's to current pop/rock with a few blues thrown in. They're a dancing crowd, so blues really won't cut it there. Actually, my experience has been that blues bands don't do that well in most bars that have a dance floor. Of course, YMMV.

BTW, we'll be at Cheers on October 1st and 2nd.
 
#24
TJBass said:
We were over at Molly Malone's, just a wierd place altogether if you ask me. But since then we've lost our frontman/singer and are looking for a replacement(s).

I may be out that way on the 1st, whats the band's name?
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Molly's just went through a management/ownership change. (There's a really bizarre story behind that, too.) The new guy called us up and asked if we wanted to play there. Since we played there a lot under the old management, the boss said sure. Then he says, "Well, if you're going to play here, you can't play at Cheers." So she says, "OK, but it'll cost you double what the previous manager paid us." HAH! He wouldn't even commit to paying us our old rate. That's why I said he's a bit of a doof. What he's done is given Cheers an exclusive on us, at no extra charge to Cheers. That, in turn, means that our crowd will only be able to see us at Cheers.

I understand that he's installed a PA system, and a friend of our leader is running the sound. I'm not used to that ... I run our sound, and I'm pretty picky about it.

Anyway, we're Mass Transit, and we suck less. We play pop/rock/blues from the '60s to current. Come by Cheers on the 1st or 2nd of October. It's a lot of fun, except for the feedback from the nightmare stage setup. We won't have our keyboard player, an alumnus will be sitting in, but it should be good.
 
#25
Well I hate to say anything bad about your leader's friend but the sound was really bad on stage the night we played. The sound system was way to big for the venue too, and seemed to be made up of all Carvin stuff so I didn't expect much from the PA. The feedback tho was just ridiculous.

I'll plan on stopping by, are you guys playing anywhere between now and then?

Jay
 
#26
TJBass said:
Well I hate to say anything bad about your leader's friend but the sound was really bad on stage the night we played. The sound system was way to big for the venue too, and seemed to be made up of all Carvin stuff so I didn't expect much from the PA. The feedback tho was just ridiculous.

I'll plan on stopping by, are you guys playing anywhere between now and then?

Jay
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Hey, I said the leader's friend was doing the sound, I didn't say they were good. You ain't hurting anyone's feelings here. I haven't seen their sound system yet. I can identify "the Carvin sound" a mile away. Real boxy. Nosir, I don't like it. I might glide by there on 10/2. That room (a "long tube" as I call such rooms) is extremely hard to mix in because of the feedback in the monitors. The sound just has nowhere to go but back into the mics. Where do they have the FOH mixer?

Cheers is even worse, but I bought a dbx iEQ31 with feedback suppression, and it's working pretty well now that I know how to use it. I do like the size of the stage, though. We use two Mackie SR 1530s and two SWA 1501 subs. It's a lot of PA for the room, but we don't crank it.

Our only other gig before then is a wedding reception in the middle of September. Then on October 16 at Island Sports at First and Orange in Coronado. My country band is playing a private party in Descanso on October 9, if I can round them up (half of Mass Transit is in that band).

Anyway, hope to see you on the 2nd. You can recognize me pretty easily ... I'll be the one playing bass.
 
#27
We've got around 130 tunes to choose from (but only 45 a night), so our lists are rarely the same. In fact, we haven't had an actual "setlist" in like two years. The frontman just picks songs according to what seems to be working.

A typical 2nd set would look like this (we make the 2nd big, cause that's when people are most likely to dance...)

Givin' it Up For Your Love -- Delbert McClinton
Signed, Sealed, Delivered -- Stevie Wonder
Jump Jive n Wail -- Louis Prima
Get Ready -- The Temptations
Hold on, I'm Comin' -- Sam N Dave/Blues Brothers
Vehicle -- Ides of March
Ain't No Sunshine -- Bill Withers
Sir Duke -- Stevie Wonder (find it, learn it, LOVE it)
Mustang Sally -- take your pick
Liquored Up and Laquered Down -- Southern Culture on the Skids
Wonderful Tonight -- Clapton
Some Kind of Wonderful -- Grand Funk (and the most boring song ever written)
Soul Man -- Sam N Dave/Blues Brothers
Black Cat Bone -- take yer pick
You and Me and the Bottle Makes Three -- Big Bad Voodoo Daddy

15 tunes would just about cover an hour +- 3 minutes...

A couple ideas we've found to work.

1. Don't stack "traditional" blues songs, if you're not a true Blues band -- people who aren't true blue blues fans will get bored in 20 minutes.
2. Change Keys or You'll get bored in 15 minutes
3. Extended solos are boring for dance crowds.
4. Unless you're a classic rock band, try to stay away from classic rock tunes, unless you want to play Creedence, Skynard, and every Doors song ever recorded every night.
5. People like to be entertained, and most clubs are full of people who don't appreciate true musicianship, so you have to play "down" to their level, and entertain THEM, as opposed to entertaining youself. The trick is to figure out how to do both at the same time.
 
#28
I don't have a set list with me at the moment, but here's a few that we do that seem to go over well.

Ah Leah--Donnie Iris
Fly Me Courageous--Drivin & Cryin
Gin And Juice ---Remake, don't know who does it
Breakup Song--Greg Kihn Band
Brown Eyed Girl--Van Morrison
Authority Song--John Mellencamp
Hurts So Good--same
Sober--Tool (hey, you'd be surprised)
Wynona's Big Brown Beaver--Primus
Fishin in the Dark--NGDB
Copperhead Road--Steve Earle
Pussy Control--Prince
Darling Nikki--Prince
Let's Go Crazy--Prince
American Girl--Tom Petty
Jenny--Tommy Tutone
Figured you out--Nickleback

We do a pretty wide variety of music, enough to keep most crowds happy. A lot of nights, we'll judge what kind of crowd we have and call em as we go.
 

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