standard setlist

[toober]

For those of you who do the same setlist every time.... How did you decide on what the best order of songs is? Does it have a theme flow or more of a musical slow-to-fast or more of a .....?

[jeff42]

hmmm. we don't play the same show every time but we do include many if not all of the "crowd favorites" every show. I think about the room we are playing and the crowd we are playing for as far as:

Should we come out swinging or should we ease into the night? 

Some places people are ready to party when we start, some places people are still having dinner when we start so the set list is way more mellow for places that have a late diner crowd.

[SpaceNorman]

We usually create a new setlist for each gig.   It's certainly NOT an exact science. 

Our setlists typically contain 40-45 songs.  Of that 40-45 songs - there are 20-25 that are proven crowd pleasers that get played virtually every night.   Then there are 20-25 songs that get swapped out with other material on our total playlist - in part to give our audience something different from the last time they saw us, and in part so that we keep all the songs on our playlist "fresh".    What songs make the list on a given night takes into consideration what worked last time we were at a venue, what we anticipate the "demographics" of the crowd we expect to see are (i.e., older vs younger, dancing crowd vs more a listening crowd, etc.)

As far as song order goes - we try to swap things around in terms of when a given song gets played in the course of the night - that way our regulars who are there "early" get to here stuff that may have been played during the last set the last time they saw us ... and vice versa for our regulars who are "late" arrivers. 

With any given set - we usually try to start "hard" to grab their attention ... and then go from there.   We typically throw in 1 slow tune per set.   The exact order of the set list also takes into consideration who sings the lead vocals (there's no sense killing one vocalist by making them sing a bunch of tunes in a row).  We also try to consider what guitar changes are required. 

There are no hard and fast rules governing set lists ... the stuff I've mentioned are simply what my projects take into consideration.  YMMV.

[dan88z]

I do it like Norman does- try to tailor the list to the venue and anticipated crowd. Sometimes we ease into it if there is a dinner crowd, other times it's come out hard. Depends on the room. We definitely have "1st set songs" and songs that are better as set openers or closers, but everything is pretty interchangable.