Members Vito Corleone Posted November 5, 2015 Members Share Posted November 5, 2015 Peter Gabriel, Mister Mister, Phil Collins, Toto? Yeah, if it works for the gigs you're doing it works. That's great. Certainly not all gigs and venues are the same and not all crowds need to be worked the same. I'm focused primarily on doing a high-energy show from start to finish. (Other than sometimes one or two ballads because those have their place as well.) Anything I can think of by those acts would totally spoil the vibe we've spend the evening creating and would likely just send people headed to the bar to get more drinks. Love me some Toto, but I certainly can't see putting "Rosanna" or "Hold The Line" in place of "Pour Some Sugar on Me" or...well...anything we do, actually.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members chord123 Posted November 5, 2015 Author Members Share Posted November 5, 2015 "Midnight Rambler" would be a great dance song for sure. How about "My Sharona "by the Knack. number 1 song of 1979. Any cover bands ever do this song? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Vito Corleone Posted November 5, 2015 Members Share Posted November 5, 2015 We do a couple of verses of "My Sharona" in a medley with some other songs. It works well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members jeff42 Posted November 5, 2015 Members Share Posted November 5, 2015 The "classic stuff" we do is the worn out over played stuff... We drop a few of them in an out of our set depending on our crowd. Sometimes its 2 or 3 sometimes 5 or 6. But we don't dig too deep into anything cuz NO ONE that comes to see us comes for a musical education Right now if you come see us you are likely to hear: JennyPour Some Sugar On MeYour LoveAny Way You Want ItJessie's GirlYou May Be RightAmerican GirlDecember 63 Some are full songs some just parts but all are parts of medleys with other pop tunes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Vito Corleone Posted November 5, 2015 Members Share Posted November 5, 2015 Since you guys are just starting out and none of you seem to have THAT much experience playing a lot of gigs, my advice to you is this: Start out by sticking to the standards. The stuff you hear commonly on classic rock radio and keep it upbeat and danceable. Ask your wives/girlfriends/daughters which songs they like best. Search online for lists of most-popular-DJ songs and choose stuff from that. If you're going to stray from that and do things not as well known or as danceable, then do it ONLY because it's something you do really well. If your singer just NAILS the vocal or the guitarist just NAILS the solo. Where there is something so good in your performance of the song that THAT just HAS to be heard. Otherwise, stick to the basics. At first, at least. Then as time goes on you'll get a feel for what sort of stuff works best for the band and for the crowds you play for and you can go from there. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Vito Corleone Posted November 5, 2015 Members Share Posted November 5, 2015 Some are full songs some just parts but all are parts of medleys with other pop tunes. [/color] I've talked about this before, but we just medley the crap out of everything these days. More so with newer stuff than with the classic rock, but even with some of that. Works better for the short attention span of modern audiences, plus it helps to regulate the flow of the set and the energy level better. And it gives us a sense that we're doing something original and unique with the material so we can feel better about ourselves too, I suppose. But doing medleys correctly takes a good deal of work, thought and trial and error too. As I'm sure you know. A song like "My Sharona"--I don't think I'd want to do as a standalone 4 minute song. I don't think it would grab enough of the audience well enough all on its own and keep them engaged through the whole thing. But when we slip it into this medley for a couple of verses, it is able to "pop" and kick the energy level up a notch. It shows up about half-way through this clip which, in and of itself, is just a bit of a longer medley that has probably 3-4 minutes on both sides of it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members ski219 Posted November 5, 2015 Members Share Posted November 5, 2015 LOL... actually if you look at 4min 8 seconds in the video you can spot the lone dissenter. Arms crossed, expression dour.... he is clearly not having a good time and he is surrounded by a sea of drunk party goers who are screaming this song. He must be a guitarist. That was me. lol Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members ski219 Posted November 5, 2015 Members Share Posted November 5, 2015 My modern country band does a medley starting and ending with Save a Horse Ride a Cowboy and going into pieces of Play That Funky Music, Get Down Tonight, I think we do all of Uptown Funk, then back to Save a Horse... Any of you guys play Save a Horse Ride a Cowboy? Seems like that would go over for any party band rock or country or what have you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Vito Corleone Posted November 5, 2015 Members Share Posted November 5, 2015 We did Save a Horse for awhile and it always worked very well for us--especially for crowds wanting a country song---, but we never could get the vocals to sound as good as we wanted so we eventually scrapped it. Sounds like a great medley though! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members sventvkg Posted November 5, 2015 Members Share Posted November 5, 2015 I wouldn't replace Pour Some Sugar on Me, Journey, Livin on a Prayer, etc...I'm taking about what the OP was saying he played, 60's/70's Classic...That stuff is DONE TO DEATH and I don't play for any audiences that haven't heard that stuff TO DEATH growing up or are old enough for that to be THEIR ERA. SO..Keep that to a min I think.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members senorblues Posted November 5, 2015 Members Share Posted November 5, 2015 I'm surprised at how few soul tunes show up on these lists. Yeah, I know the OP said classic rock, and that seems to be the default for most bands, especially older ones . . . unless you happen to have a black singer. Then all of a sudden everybody likes that repertoire. What about all those soul tunes Joe Cocker covered? "Take Me to the River" - do people have to access that song in their memory bank as a Talking Heads tune, or will a lot of people remember Al Green's original? Does it matter? How about "Signed, Sealed, Delivered".? The DJ at my daughter's wedding started with that one and the dance floor filled in about 2 seconds. How about "The Way You Do the Things You Do, "Can't Get Next To You?", "Road Runner" . . . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members ski219 Posted November 6, 2015 Members Share Posted November 6, 2015 My classic rock band does Take Me to The River and we do a bit of a cross between Talking Heads and Al Green... and I throw in the Peter Gunn melody during my solo. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members wesg Posted November 6, 2015 Members Share Posted November 6, 2015 Plenty of white bands play Mustang Sally... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Vito Corleone Posted November 6, 2015 Members Share Posted November 6, 2015 Sure....let's talk classic soul music! (Personally, music I love much much more than I do classic rock.) Same general rules apply as do for rock---make sure it's something known to the audience you're playing for and frequent the venues you are working etc etc. One problem with soul music is there is sort of a general cutoff date for the genre around 1980 which means the audience for most of it is getting pretty old and harder to find in a public venue setting. But there are still a lot of old classics that work well. A lot of it is instrumentation dependent. A lot of it needs keys, horns, female vocals, good harmonies, percussion. Or decent arrangements that can get you around that stuff. Mustang Sally, Soul Man, Hold On I'm Comin', Respect, Shout, Superstition, Twist and Shout, I Feel Good are all still classic rock band staples. The BIG 60s Motown classics still get used a lot in TV and movies. My Girl, I Heard It Through the Grapevine, Sugar Pie Honey Bunch, Signed, Sealed, Delivered. etc. Wedding bands still play a good deal of Motown as some of it still has good "all ages" appeal. (Oddly, my band doesn't really do any Motown right now, but we should. I've long been saying we should add "Signed" and a medley of "I Want You Back/ABC" to the setlist but we just never seem to get around to it, but I know they would work very well for us. We do "Ooh Baby Baby" for a cocktail set. Love the harmonies on that one. Also been wanting to add "I'll Be There" for a ballad. I know my girls would knock the vocal out of the park and the Mariah Carey cover was huge in the 90s. Ahhh...the list of things to do!) 70s soul starts crossing over into disco, some of which still works. The "white" stuff like 'Play That Funky Music' and 'Stayin' Alive' certainly does. My band still does well with 'Boogie Oogie Oogie' and 'Good Times'. 'September', 'I Will Survive', 'Car Wash' 'YMCA' and 'Let's Groove' are all still wedding band staples it seems. The big K.C and the Sunshine Band hits are hard to go wrong with. The recent movie "The Martian" had an all-disco soundtrack. Stuff like that never hurts for keeping songs relevant. Love 'Take Me To the River'. (we do it as an instrumental jam thing during cocktails sometimes. Fun to play organ over.) It's the Talking Heads version everyone knows, but it's certainly been covered a lot. Interestingly, the Al Green original was never a hit or even released as a single. And others (Foghat, Bryan Ferry) recorded it before the Heads did. But it's a great crossover tune that is still soulful no matter how you approach it. (Not the most up-tempo tune, but love that chunky groove. Would a medley/mashup of that and "Grapevine" work? Sounding kind of similar in my head right now...maybe I should take that out for a spin later....hmmmm....) Some other Al Green stuff would probably work. "Let's Stay Together" is a classic. "Here I Am" was a big hit for UB40 in the 80s. But unfortunately (for me, anyway) most of my favorite soul stuff --- the early 70s stuff --- is getting lost except with those of us old enough to remember it when it was first released. Would something like "Use Me" still work? Probably not. Also, as I'm thinking through this stuff, I'm seeing that it would be real easy to get too mid-tempo and ballad-y with the material. Depends on the gig, of course, but if you need people dancing---proceed with caution, as always. Joe Cocker stuff? "Feelin' Alright" is still a classic if you've got the piano player. That's probably about it that anyone under 50 is going to know anymore? "The Way You Do The Things You Do", "Can't Get Next To You", "Road Runner" specifically? The first one is kind of a B or C-level Motown song at this point. Too slow to be a dance floor filler and spotty (at best) recognition with younger (i.e. under 50 which is a pretty broad definition of 'younger'...) audiences. The other two I wouldn't go near. All of this is presuming we're talking about primarily rock/white bands playing for primarily white audiences. A full on soul band playing for black audiences would be an entirely different deal, of course. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members wheresgrant3 Posted November 6, 2015 Members Share Posted November 6, 2015 My modern country band does a medley starting and ending with Save a Horse Ride a Cowboy and going into pieces of Play That Funky Music, Get Down Tonight, I think we do all of Uptown Funk, then back to Save a Horse... Any of you guys play Save a Horse Ride a Cowboy? Seems like that would go over for any party band rock or country or what have you. We play Chicken Fried, Save a Horse and Country Girl Shake it for me all medleyed together. It's one of the bigger hits of the night and a complete left turn from covering 50 Cent, Taylor Swift and anything else on current Top 40. We tend to medley together genres of music. We have a Hair Band medley that covers "Here I Go Again", "Sweet Child", Living On A Prayer, Pour Some Sugar On Me.... and we have a 90's hip hop medley that includes It Takes Two, Humpty Dance, Jump Around, Insane In The Membrane, Brass Monkee. You can easily do the same with some danceable classic rock.... My Sharona, into Jessies Girl, into Just What I Needed into Bang A Gong.... It's all about the transition and flow. BTW... when we are talking Classic Rock... what currently defines that. Cultural definitions usually extend the period between 1967-1985... but most modern Classic Rock stations play rock up until the mid 90's. Our local classic rock station plays Kansas and The Grateful Dead at noon and GnR and Soundgarden after 8pm Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Vito Corleone Posted November 6, 2015 Members Share Posted November 6, 2015 BTW... when we are talking Classic Rock... what currently defines that. Cultural definitions usually extend the period between 1967-1985... but most modern Classic Rock stations play rock up until the mid 90's. Our local classic rock station plays Kansas and The Grateful Dead at noon and GnR and Soundgarden after 8pm Good question. For radio purposes, they are primarily interested in targeting a 25-54 yo male. So every year they are going be adding some newer stuff and limiting the older stuff to just the 'big' hits. At this point, I'm starting to think that ALL rock is now "classic rock". You're looking a genre that has been pretty much moribund since 2000, unless anyone really thinks of Maroon 5 as a "rock" band? "Left turns" are great. Especially if a band is playing 3 or more sets, playing the same type of stuff all night long can get pretty stale pretty quick. Gotta throw in the curve balls to keep things interesting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members wesg Posted November 7, 2015 Members Share Posted November 7, 2015 Well, Power Of Love didn't work as a set two opener. We got applause, which surprised me, but no dancers. Sweet Caroline *killed*. I spotted a couple of stinkers in our set list as well, I wish I had written them down. One song cleared the dance floor first set, "Since When" by 5440. Canadian Content is a bit tricky to sort out, a lot of them work here that wouldn't work in the US because of CanCon rules - way more radio play here than there. "Banditos", right before "Since When" went over okay. "Best Friend's Girl", right after "Since When" got the dancer floor busy again. Another surprise last night, "Losing My Religion", placed late in set 3, emptied the dance floor. Like, they couldn't run away fast enough. But you know what filled it back up again? "Can't Get Enough of Your Love", followed by good old "Mustang Sally". Hey, here's another one nobody ever mentions - A Whiter Shade of Pale. People start running for the dance floor when I play the first note. I'm surprised there is enough social conscience of that tune to recognize it from one note, but there you go. This wasn't a one-off thing, either. It happens every time. It used to be our closer, I've moved it up to mid set 3 and might move it into set 2 next show, swapping with "Every Rose Has It's Thorn". Multiple genre comment above is interesting -- at this venue, we share the night with a DJ. We take longer set breaks than we might otherwise. I think it's a nice change of pace for the folks, AND it helps the venue expand its appeal. Wes Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Vito Corleone Posted November 7, 2015 Members Share Posted November 7, 2015 Hey, here's another one nobody ever mentions - A Whiter Shade of Pale. People start running for the dance floor when I play the first note. I'm surprised there is enough social conscience of that tune to recognize it from one note, but there you go. This wasn't a one-off thing, either. It happens every time. That's a pretty recognizable note and riff for sure! But it also sounds like a testament to how well you must be nailing it. Sounds like a bit of a signature song for you guys. Nice! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Vito Corleone Posted November 7, 2015 Members Share Posted November 7, 2015 Well, Power Of Love didn't work as a set two opener. We got applause, which surprised me, but no dancers. You know your crowds and venues best, but getting people to dance first song of the set isn't always the easiest thing to do. We often work gigs where people gravitate to another room or outside during the break, so I will sometimes open the second set with a ballad just to let people know the band is back on and draw them back in the room rather than burn a great dance tune for nothing. Sometimes people want to wait out the first song, or no one wants to be the first ones out on the floor, etc. And then, other times, you want to open the 2nd set with full guns-a-blazing. As always, the answer is "it depends". And it's always more important how you finish rather than how you start. If they are on their feet yelling for an encore at the end of the night, no one is going to remember or care that no one danced at all to the first 3 songs of that last set. The real key is being able to read audiences and rooms and having the flexibility in your set list to take advantage of it. Which is not something that can be taught. And we can talk back and forth all we want on a forum like this about which songs work best or not, but the truth is there are going be so many songs that work great for one of us that would be complete fails for someone else. Which is how it should be. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members wesg Posted November 7, 2015 Members Share Posted November 7, 2015 You're right about the first song being hard to get people up for. It can also be tough keeping them up, they leave fast if you have any space between your songs... I try to cover sometimes by talking, but that doesn't always work. I had a mic boom malfunction last night and explained that my drooping microphone need some Cialis ... that stopped them in their tracks long enough to let me fix it. It couldn't wait, I needed two hands and vocals right away on the next song. Another one that hasn't been mentioned, I don't think, that works well for us is "Twilight Zone". You're right, we can talk about this stuff ad nauseum forever. Wrt AWSOP -- I do do a pretty good job on that, if I do say so myself. I had an L111 and a Leslie 147 at the gig last night, which means I can nail the tonality and ambience pretty well -- and (some) people are paying just a little bit more attention to the keys than usual because they are no longer used to seeing an organ on stage. And I don't sit at the back. I even used the Power of My Organ to convince a couple of dinner-hour guests who watched me load in to come back for the show. Here's a couple of short clips from last night's show for fun: Wes Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Vito Corleone Posted November 8, 2015 Members Share Posted November 8, 2015 Looks like a fun night! Nice organ work! I've been trying for years to figure out a way to work "Don't Dream It's Over" by Crowded House into our set. In part because it's one of my favorite songs EVER, but also because I really want to play that organ solo which is basically a rip off of Whiter Shade of Pale. Maybe now that we're making some vocalist changes and re-working our cocktail set, I can shoe-horn it in there somewhere. Maybe I could even medley the two songs up? Hmmmm.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Vito Corleone Posted November 8, 2015 Members Share Posted November 8, 2015 Yeah, dead air is a killer. The best cure for that is just have songs you ALWAYS do back-to-back and just run one into another. If you don't, there will always be someone in the band waving his finger and saying "Just a minute!" while he takes a swig of water or whatever. 5 seconds can easily turn into 15-20 and at 30 you're dead. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members AJ6stringsting Posted November 8, 2015 Members Share Posted November 8, 2015 Seems like the crowd, especially the gals up front, really got into the song .... winner. Looks like a good time was had by all !!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members MDMachiavelli Posted November 8, 2015 Members Share Posted November 8, 2015 To add to what quido said we always try to do a few "mashups" (I guess that's what they are called). That's were we would take two similar songs with similar grooves and mix them together. It kept us going for a while and people love it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members AJ6stringsting Posted November 8, 2015 Members Share Posted November 8, 2015 I played in a few Classic Rock / Hard Rock / Metal bands. When we noticed that we played to people for people from the 1960's to 1970's era, we played some Free, Zep, Beatles, Bad Co, Hendrix, Deep Purple, E.L.P. Toto, U.F.O., Thin Lizzy and others from that era.When we played for folks from my age group, I got to play some faithful renditions of Van Halen, Malmsteen, Vai, Satriani and early Ozzy (which I love) and of course, we would throw in some pop ditties like some Talking Heads, U2, Journey, Dire Straits, Bon Jovi and others.My Sharona and I think I'm turning Japanese was always a foot stomper for folks too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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