Originally Posted By: eddie1261
My Achilles Heel is moving gear. <...snip...>

+1000 to that, Eddie.

Mrs. Notes and I are equipment intensive. She plays guitar and synth, I play sax, flute, guitar, and wind synth on stage, and we both sing. It takes us an hour to set up, and about 45 minutes to tear down.

I tell my clients, we play for free, and charge you to move this gear around.

Another musician, who follows us once a week at our steady gig, gave me his impression of “Musician's Hell”

Musician's hell is having to set up and tear down your gear every day, but never getting to play.

I find it more difficult to memorize songs quickly than I did when I was young. Perhaps it's because I have so many already memorized that there is no room for more. smile Perhaps it's because I'm learning so many so quickly to keep the regular customers from being able to predict what we are going to play. Or perhaps it's (shudder at the thought) my age catching up to me.

Like Eddie said, play them enough times and you get them memorized.

All the songs that we play often enough eventually get memorized.

We learned Bob Dylan's “Like A Rolling Stone” about a year ago. We do it perhaps once a week. Getting the phrasing for the lyrics was the easy part. That came rather quickly. I've gotten to the point now where all I need to do is glance at the first word of each verse, and the rest come along.

Back in the 1970s, I saw the jazz great, “Mark Murphy” at a club. He was great. He asked the pianist of the house band if he knew a ballad, the pianist said, “No”. Mark asked if he would try if he could tell him what chords to play, and the pianist agreed. So Mark sang the song and off mic called out the chords to the pianist. That's a good memory.

But, when he sang Jobim's “The Waters Of March” he pulled out a sheet of paper with the words. He said that he always has trouble with “laundry list” types of songs.

In this day and age, I wouldn't consider the lack of memorization to be an Achilles Heel to live performance. Just a challenge. Read the words/chords/charts enough, and they will be memorized. The people in the audience just want to hear the music.

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