I figured I would share some of the things I’ve learned to do that have their uses. Of course, when you’re trying to play to an audience, the order of the setlist and even the songs written on it get thrown out. This can be for several reasons: size of the audience, requests from the audience, general vibe etc. I very rarely, if ever, have shown up to a gig and just played my setlist straight through start to finish. Nevertheless, I find that it helps to have some sort of setlist set out beforehand. There may be other reasons for this, but I talk about three here; effectiveness of practice, getting the length right, and – perhaps most importantly – smooth flow of the set.
Effectiveness of Practice
I thought at first that I would remember which songs need practice before a show. But I learned several lessons the hard way about how my brain handles being a musician. I recall the very bad feeling of realizing on stage right before I was planning to play a certain song that I am not sure if I can pull the song off. I thought I knew my whole setlist, but my brain skips over some songs when I think about it on a time crunch before the set. The best way I found to remedy this is to practice with my set list. Even though I may not go straight through my set list on stage, I try to do that during a practice session every now and then. Even if I only play a few second of some of the songs and think, ” yep, I’ve definitely got it,” going over the whole set list still ensures that I have looked at and thought about each song and practice it if need be.
Ensuring My Repertoire is the Right Length
I really like my list of songs to be as long as possible. The more songs that I can play, the more I can pick and choose what I play to match the vibe at any given show. Not to mention, I am more likely to have a polished version of the request ready to go. I find it best practice to put all the songs that I could play on my setlist so that I can easily call them to mind if they fit the situation, and so that I remember to practice them as I discussed in the previous paragraph.
Smooth Flow of the Set
When I say “flow” in one sense, I simply mean that the show does not stop. I have had the experience at shows and open mics where I am trying to think of the next song to play, and all of a sudden I only seem to know three or four songs. It’s funny, but I really can’t think of anything. It makes for some very uncomfortable seconds taking my capo on and off my fretboard, hoping it will buy me enough time to think of the next song (it usually doesn’t). Having a set list written out does not completely eradicate this problem. There are times when I really just can’t think of a song that will fit the current vibe. But having several options written out definitely helps.
But the smooth or logical progression also has to do with which songs I play when. Before I had a method behind building my set list, I would skip around my set list to play what I thought the audience would like, but I would run into some issues. For example, I would find that the only suitable songs I had to play were all covers of the same band. Or I would play several slow songs in a row because I thought I had nothing left only to realize that there were many upbeat ones I could have used to bring the vibe back.
So what I started doing was grouping my songs into groups of 4. 4 is sort of an arbitrary number, it just sort of seemed to be the major categories that my songs fell into. Personally, I thought I tended to have folk songs, songs that are hot today, slow songs, and songs that are particularly upbeat. If I feel like a certain song won’t work in the moment I can still bump it back in the set list, and if I feel like a song would be perfect for the moment I can bring it up. But here’s the key – I can bump back or bring up a song along with the other songs in its 4-song group. That way, I cut down on the risk of getting to the end of the night and having only slow sad songs or only songs by John Denver left to play. I honestly do not always maintain the integrity of my 4 song groups, but havign this general method has helped me keep my sets diverse and interesting from start to finish.
Conclusion
I would love to hear your thoughts as a musician or an audience member how you think performing artists should handle their set list. If you want to hear/see more of my musician journey, feel free to follow me. Just a few ways you can follow me are on instagram @bendeariemusic and look me up on YouTube @wildguysongs. Thank you for reading!
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