PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Pop Music

Reminds me of a place i saw in Oregon once, advertised Pancakes, Cocktails and Dancing on a big sign out front. Didn't even have a name that I remember.

I am with Notes on this one. The only songs I don't like to play are the songs that the listener doesn't want to hear. I have played all kinds of music over the years for anyone that would listen.

200-watt amp? Maybe I should bring a crane! My back has trouble with my 50-watt amps already! I'd like to hear and see it though - post some pics/videos!

I have long lusted for the original Countach, and that one is particularly gorgeous.



Mine was a 1986 Subaru GL, the fastback style one. Slick looking for it's time, but considering it's 70-odd horsepower it was about as fast as an octogenarian with ankle weights.



Closest for me was my 1999 Cougar. Nice compact and speedy car, but tons of trunk space since it was a liftback. I very nearly bought a Honda Del Sol before this, but turned it down for it's postage-stamp sized trunk - it would've had difficulty with one average size guitar amp...



Bringing it back to the music discussion! I personally find it more fun to have an audience that enjoys what I do. My main audience these days is my 8-month-old nephew, who seems to enjoy literally anything I play on an acoustic guitar - gotta love an enthusiastic listener!

The point of my frequent ramblings on that topic centers on that exact point. I always ask this question in reply to a comment with that sentiment.

Is it not possible to play music you personally like and enjoy playing and do it SO DAMNED WELL that the audience enjoys it as well as they'd enjoy "that list"? I have watched band after band play "that list" based only on the cliche of "The audience loves that song". Sure they do. They love that song done WELL! I used to date a girl who had a really awful band that was guitar, bass and drums and only her singing. THAT awful band, essentially a base trio with a singer, did "Come Sail Away" (without synth or harmonies), "You Can Leave Your Hat On" (without horns or harmonies), and a few Fleetwood Mac songs (because she lived vicariously through Stevie Nicks - to include dying her hair blond and always wearing all black) (without a keyboard player or harmonies). "You Can Leave Your Hat On", with JUST a guitar??? I have seen SO MANY BAD BANDS butcher "Don't Stop Believing" because nobody can sing it. If you can't, then just don't.

She once asked me to play a show with them for some private party. I agreed pretty much because she was my girlfriend at the time and, well, you know... The other guys hated having me there because it meant a little less money for them, but after hearing the way I filled the sound out with keys and BGV, like adding the horns to You Can Leave Your Hat On on my sampler, the bass and guitar players asked me to join full time. Frankly they were not good enough and I would have been embarrassed to be a full time member of that band. The irony is that had I joined the first thing I would have done was replaced the two guys who asked me to join.

Not all that coincidentally, she dumped me soon after. LOL!!!

You can wow the crowd without playing "that list". They will love anything that you play well enough to where not liking you isn't even an option.

On topic, though ever so tangentially, despite the fact that I really don't like bands that use 70% backing tracks, I think over winter I am going to work up a 12 song set of techno-ish covers from the 80s. Howard Jones, Thompson Twins, Thomas Dolby, Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club kind of stuff. Just me and a bunch of hardware. I have software, all kind of MIDI routing gear, drum machines, synthesizers, 10 guitars I don't need... All it would take is a big dose of unlazification. And I would learn to program drums better. That's the kind of thing I would prepare, play out 3 times in small bars as an opening act, and quit. (It would be pop music, just pop music from 35 years ago.)

Like back in the early 90s when I put together a band called Roxanne that learned 11 Police songs JUST to open 1 show. Or the time in the mid 80s when a club owner I knew asked if I could find him a band to do 45 minutes of original music in front of a fairly avant garde art rock kind of band and I said "SURE!! Let me get back to you in a couple of days after I make some calls." I got some people together. The 4 musicians were all fat guys like me, and the singer was a 6 foot tall string bean type. We wrote 10 songs that were pretty much weird, throwaway songs nobody wanted to claim. I put the singer in a striped t-shirt and a beret and asked if he'd grow a pencil thin mustache. The 4 of us fat guys wore brown robes with white rope belts, and I called the band Frenchie and the Friars. We played our show, made $60 bucks each (decent in 1985!) and never played that garbage again! LOL!! Sadly 2 of those guys are dead now. And I am likely 10 years at most from following them off the stage.

That's just some of the strangeness of me!

PS - I delude myself into believing that if the software is only sending data and clock to the hardware devices then I am NOT using tracks. I only consider it tracks if it's recorded music or voices.

TBH, if audio tracks are triggered by a sequencer, even that is only sending data and clock to the hardware devices. <grin>

It's all good when done right.
And it's all judged in the end by the audience, of which very few know how the man behind the curtain is getting it done.

I saw the Lion King broadway tour (with an orchestra) at a decent venue years ago .. I peeked into the pit and noticed sequenced hardware & computers in use; it's all part of the show.
How it happens isn't as important as how it is received.

I am unabashedly in love of twenty one pilots music. I’m 54 years old my name is Scott nice to meet you

Oh Bruno Mars as well. Everyday.

Per Billy Joel:

He says, "Son, can you play me a memory?
I'm not really sure how it goes
But it's sad, and it's sweet, and I knew it complete
When I wore a younger man's clothes"

I play memories, and I am lucky that I get to make a living doing that.

Mrs. Notes and I started our duo in 1985. The first year was pretty lean, as we had no reputation. So we took a 3-week-with-options contract on a cruise ship. We stayed on that ship for 8 months, and returned on different ships in the same line for 3 years.

We beat the all-time revenue records for the lounge we played in on all three ships. The management in Miami looks at the revenue to determine where the passengers are hanging out. Since they were hanging out in our lounge, we got the bonus of a passenger sized room with a porthole.

How did we do that?

First of all, we are good at what we do. But that isn't all. There was a pianist in the piano bar that wowed all the musicians. She was a monster and played Thelonious Monk, Gene Harris, and dozens of others so well that the other musicians used to hang there. But the passengers didn't. She lasted 3 weeks.

So what else?

We asked for requests on cocktail napkins. We told the audience that if we can't play it, we'd have it by next week (it was a one-week cruise).

Whatever got requested the most, got learned first.

If you last on stage long enough, the people will tell you what they want to hear. If you ignore them, you probably won't last all that long on stage.

Eventually, we even beat the disco in revenue. The disco held 5 times as many passengers and was open all night.

After 3 seasons on the ships, we gave notice. They offered us a raise, but Mrs. Notes' mother was sick with a disease of the elderly and needed care. We had been working the 4 months we weren't on the ship on land, and by then had a good enough reputation to work all year off the ships.

We still collect requests, and whatever gets requested the most is what we learn, as long as we can do a good job covering it.

I know a lot of musicians who hate playing memories. There is nothing wrong with that, as there is more than one right way to go through life. But for me, playing memories is a great way to make a living. Plus, I really enjoy what I do.

When I'm on stage, I'm in that place where there is no space or time, just the music flowing through me. In other words, I'm in my bliss.

I repeat: For me, a bad day playing music is better than a good day at any other job I can think of.

Insights and incites by Notes ♫

I make my own tracks. I play sax, flute, wind synth, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboard synth. I also sing.

Making tracks is time-consuming, but it keeps my chops up on those instruments I don't play on the gig.

Plus by making the tracks myself:

• I can put them in the best key for our voices
• I can leave out the most fun parts for Mrs. Notes and I to play live on the gig
• I can do a custom arrangement for the song
• I can leave room for an improvised solo for the solo hog (that would be me)
• I know the song inside-out, the chords, the substitutions, and everything else so I can play the best solo
• I can exaggerate the groove, rush bridges, and do scores of tricks that a live band does and karoke or purchased tracks do not.
• I can customize the mix to make it sound more like a live band than karaoke.

How do I customize the mix?

When you go out to hear a live band, what do you hear most, even from the parking lot? Bass and snare drum. That's the starting point. High horn stabs a tad sharp. Background vocal parts on synth. and so many, many more.

The object is not to sound like the record, but to sound like a band covering the record. There needs to be more energy than the recording. Even the original artists in concert don't sound like the record, why should we?

There is an art to playing for the audience. There is an art to making good backing tracks. I've learned a lot in all my years doing it, and I continue to learn. That keeps the job interesting.

Insights and incites by Notes ♫

Good, sound advice, Notes. I worked with the exact same approach. Find out and play what your audience wants to be entertained with. They'll keep coming back for more. Fundamentally, it's simple. If you want to do it right, you have to be prepared to listen as well as give. Great story of your experiences.

Same here!

If you read the crowd correctly and play what they want you will get many gigs. Been there - done that.

Also be selective on taking gigs. For example we turned down a few gigs as all they wanted was country songs. We have a large repertoire, had fake books, and could jam but we were not the kind of country band they wanted. We were up front with them and they appreciated that.

Mario.
spot on. give the people what they want.
read up sometime how the world hit "takin care of business" came about. its a fascinating story the way randy B tells it. i dont have space here to recount
the story. but its fascinating how this big hit came about.

years ago i used to hang around with musos way way more technical than i or my fellow rock buds.
they were heavy into advanced jazz and chamber music/chord theory/structures. nice blokes too.
but they were always complaining to us "you stoopid rockers with your stoopid 3 chord songs...
how come you get gigs with those easy chords C5 or D5
or whatever." many comments in that vein.

but we said "we just give the people what they want.
often they have boring jobs and just want to party at the weekend".
personally i love music in all its genres, includeing jazz as long as its melodic jazz.

right now i'm looking forward to see what surprises pg has for us in 2022 versions of biab and rb.

best
om

Back in the 70's a band could learn 50 "pop songs" that everybody knew from the radio, and play anywhere, and you could feel relatively certain you were giving the audience what it wants. Not so true anymore. There is a worldwide glut of music, both pro and hobbyist. Spotify and Pandora have exposed people to so much music that there is no common denominator that appeals to "most audiences". A band would have to know thousands of songs in multiple genres to even stand a chance of playing enough gigs to make money.

In my opinion, that's one reason why DJs took over the wedding gigs. Not many bands know enough songs to entertain 4 generations... but a DJ can show up prepared with exactly whatever song list the bride requests.

And on top of the huge diversity of musical taste, there is also music snobbery. Who wants to invest years of practice and untold thousands on gear, only to receive disdain from every audience because your music isn't THEIR music?

AT least online streaming lets a musician use his/her gear without having to move it, and the audience is free to click away if they don't like it... so the people who stay tend to be appreciative.

Around here the biggest reason DJs took over was money. They charged a lot less than bands charged.

Yes music changed over the years and became more diverse so it was hard to be that versatile but cost was the biggest factor. It was much cheaper to pay 1-2 DJs then a 4-7 person band. YMMV

You know, in the legal arena, a common objection made by the liars, er, lawyers, is "Calls for conclusion". Which is liar-ese for "I know what someone else is thinking".

Nobody knows what the audience wants. You CAN know what every other band in your city plays and follow suit. So to that point, let me ask you this by way of example.

I used to have a friend, let's call him Dave (since that's his name) who would book these bar level gigs playing "that list" and then start assailing everybody he knew on social media to drive 50 minutes to that bar level gig to hear him play "that list". I finally once asked him "Dave (since that's his name), why would I drive WAY across town to see you play Learn To Fly, Everlong, Wonder Wall, American Band and the same 45 songs the band that is playing in the bar at my corner is going to play? I mean MAYBE to hit on that cute wife of yours, but we all know THAT is a dead end!" And we had a laugh and let it go, but that is at the root of the topic.

On the rare occasions I go out, I go to songwriter night. Mustang Sally is Mustang Sally no matter who plays it, and which, by the way was originally called Mustang Mama. Unless Wilson Pickett comes back from the grave to give it one last go for me, I am not interested.

Music is an art form, folks, not a sporting event. There are no runs, points or goals here that define a clear cut winner. You want to play covers and never even TRY to write a song, to express your thoughts and feelings to your audience, you forge ahead, do what you love, and love what you do. I am currently in a GREAT Southside Johnny tribute band, and I pretty much don't like it at all. We do what we do at a very high level, but the applause we get when we finish Without Love (Did you know that was an Aretha Franklin song originally?), I Played The Fool or The Fever isn't as rewarding to me as 6 people offering up polite golf clap applause after hearing a song I wrote if only because they appreciate that I am trying.

I mean, do you want to debate who the winner was in an art contest between Van Gogh and Rembrandt? Monet didn't invent the canals of Venice. He only painted what he saw. Thus, Le Grand Canal is actually a cover painting, right? I prefer Bob Ross and his happy little clouds because he created his own scenes.

Much like all these services that are the rage with the millennials that send you food with instructions to cook them. That is cover band cooking. You are just the hands cooking someone else's recipe (playing someone else's song). When I cook, I come up with my own meal ideas (I write my own recipes). And if I had 35 more recipes I'd put out a "Single Guy Cooking" cookbook. The rules are that you NEVER make a meal that will take longer to clean up after than it takes to eat, and you never use more spices than the number that Paul Simon names in Scarborough Fair.

I find it sadly ironic and funny that people who claim they do it for art then brag about how much money they make. What a contradiction. Money is NOT the way you keep score in art. It IS, however, why I play anymore, and the only reason I am in this band I am in. This isn't my art. It's Southside Johnny's art, and his whole catalogue is covers anyway. Solomon Burke is a favorite of his, and even the stuff not covered from other people was written by Steve Van Zandt. So I don't delude myself into thinking this band is more than what it is, a really good copy band that targets the outdoor festival season. The music is not challenging, not meaningful and not rewarding, but my days of dreaming that I will be the next Diane Warren are long over. So I just take the money and go home.

DEFINITELY!!!

I remember, decades ago, I was in a quartet. We were in a disco band, working with a booking agent.

In Florida, New Year's Eve used to be the day when the demand for live music far exceeded the supply.

Although a booking agent gets paid commission from the band, his/her loyalty is to the venue, not the band.

So to save one of her clubs from going dark on NYE she booked us from Ft. Lauderdale, FL to Ft. Walton Beach, which at the time was known as "The Redneck Riviera".

Disco was a big no-no and country was in. We didn't know enough country to make them happy, and that was probably one of the few gigs in my lifetime that I actually disliked. The audience didn't like us, and they had every reason not to like us. We were mis-booked.

Notes ♫

I don't know what the audience wants, but when I get to the gig, I look at them, how they are dressed, how they style their hair, what kind of shoes do they have on, and a few other cues.

A couple of easier examples: Cowboy hats = Country music. Women's shoes with T straps = ballroom dance music. And so on.

This gives me a good idea of what song to open with. Usually with something that has broad appeal and also fits the genre of music the audience looks like it wants.

With years of experience, I'm pretty good at this.

Then, when we play our first song, I see how the audience is reacting and that helps me call the next song.

We don't do set lists, I react to the audience to try to give them the right song at the right time, song after song after song. It's my job as the professional to know what they want, even if they don't.

I choose from our 'list' of over 600 songs spanning multiple genres.

To tell you the truth, I have no idea what my competition plays. I've never looked at their 'list'.

I know what my audiences like, and I plan to play what they want. Choosing the songs is an art form, and playing any music can also be artful.

And remember, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Prokofiev also composed and played what their sponsors demanded. The "list" of their day.

Notes ♫

notes....re t straps.
very clever the way you gauge an audience.
om

A band I once joined was trying to be one of those "so we can play anywhere" bands. I explained while the concept is good, how they were doing that was not. Your genre "swing" can't be so wide that you go from Patsy Cline to Metallica. With that attitude, 50% of your audience is going to hate you on EVERY song. So I sat down with their set list and started marking things off with an indelible laundry marker (so they couldn't ever be seen again!) and started building a fresh list. Here's how I explained it, and what we all agreed to.

Right down the middle you have your "middle" group. That would be songs like "Peaceful Easy Feeling". Those will sell in a rock room or a country room. There were 25 songs in that group. Then down the left side (country) we had "On The Road Again" and "I Fall To Pieces". We had 20 of those. Down the right side (more toward rock) we had stuff like "Old Time Rock And Roll" and "You May Be Right". We had 20 of those. So on our plate was 65 songs we could use. We played the entire middle list every night. Then based on, as Notes said, whether or not we saw cowboy hats and big belt buckles shaped like Peterbilt truck cabs, decided how heavy to lean left or right. We kept exactly 65 songs in our current memory bank, and for example when we learned "Every Breath You Take" something would come out of the "middle" list. That way we could keep some air of freshness without having to rehearse twice a week to do it. And this was before email so we couldn't be sending song files back and forth. It was back in the time of cassette tapes and cheap players that could play between keys so I always had to specify the right key. But like so many low profile bands there were huge internal problems so it didn't last. Like one night nobody could find the drummer. We called his house and nobody had seen him all day. Turns out he went to a bar at 2pm and got so hammered he fell asleep laying on the front seat of his truck and when someone finally saw him and woke him at 11pm it was obviously way too late. Then we had one get his 3rd DUI and as part of his plea he was not allowed to be in a bar, so HE had to go. One moved to Florida, etc... I got tired of that professionalism deficit and just let it die rather than recruit and have an emergency "on call" list.

There was a band here that lasted about a year. It was a bunch of metalheads that wanted to recruit a girl singer I know and in fact had brought her into a Fleetwood Mac tribute I put together (and never played live with). They wanted her to be the heavy metal high screamer in front of this band. Part of her leverage was that they would have to do a set of Mac and Nicks music before they did their set of hard and thrash metal. Can you imagine the kind of crowd that would hang around to hear Landslide and Whiskey In a Jar? The players were so inflexible about the orchestration that the guitar player never set down his Ibanez with the dirty pickups or play without his pedal chain, so everything was dirt and grit behind those sweet voiced Stevie Nicks songs. They didn't last long. That girl had a great voice, plays keyboards and guitar, and does a solo act, and I knew her well from those tribute band rehearsals, and she was FAR too good for them. I actually want to get her into the thing I am in now. That will be part of the off season discussions.

Notes, I ran my wedding band exactly like your run your duo!