Encores, cheese, striking a balance

[ParlourMan]

Encores, firstly let me say they're incredibly cheesy but also a bit of an inevitability really, so my question would be how much material do you normally hold back?

 

On Friday night we played, seemed to go pretty well so we knew the "one more" thing would happen... now a first for us was this ended up in 3 encores in total and 5 extra songs. So normally we'll save one of the more lively numbers for these occasions, but there's the conundrum you've saved one or two of the decent ones just in case, the rest of the stuff more decent stuff you've already played... everything else is either being rested for a while, not rehearsed, new and not polished etc.... nobody wants to finish off with extras that are 'lesser' material and what's the point of holding the best ones back and maybe not getting a chance to use them at all, you see where I'm going with this? your last few songs tend be the big hitters, so playing stuff afterwards without the same momentum could be a dampener.

 

The owner of the bar we played on Friday is a MMA world champion too (so they wont be getting robbed anytime soon ;) ) cops came again, we were getting ready to play Jackie big T*ts again, turns out the bar owner was one of the cops MMA trainer so a bit of chat outside and we were fine to continue

[Del Nilppeznaf]

Fortunately..or unfortunayely...I can never follow a set list...it drives the other fellas in the band crazy...haha

 

i just play what ever comes to mind...and I frequently refuse to do more than one encore...leave em wanting more

 

its a good idea to have a taxi waiting tho..cos drunk folk can get a bit rowdy... sounds like a cool bar PM

[EuroAussie]

Yep, know well where youre coming from PM.

 

We have 3-4 songs in the backpockets specifically for encores which we otherwise would not play in main set list. Its usually Born To Be Wild, Creep, Wonderwall or Champagne Supernova, and probably 80% of the time we'll pull them out and do an encore of normally two extra songs.

 

You dont want to do too many as one lesson I learnt from old time giggers is the art of knowing when to finish a show. Striking the balance of genuine appreciation but still leaving them asking for more, which hepefully will convert them coming to the next gig.

 

 

And in terms of set list we always prepare one, but depending on the mood of the audience might change the song selection mid set, this probably happens about 60% of the time.

[blindboygrunt]

It can be a good opportunity to play the stuff that needs a bit more rehearsing... With an explanation to the punters. They feel like their getting something special , first ones ever to hear it. The mistakes won't be noticeable at that time of night. Sometimes playing one you did earlier that went down very well , a bit of BS about someone asking you to don't again while you were on yer break or whatever.

I know what you're saying though, its a catch 22 . the encores should be the belters but if you don't play the belters , you might not get an encore haha.

Surely encores are a fairly safe bet for you guys in a bar though PM ?

 

I'm with del a bit also. Set lists don't really work for me either. If I gig its usually an afternoon thing , and can depend on the folk there . sometimes they want a bit of peace really and sometimes a few rowdies will dictate the craic.

 

But I can see how a set list would work for you guys , lots of variety there for different stages of an evenings proceedings.

[ParlourMan]

We normally do two sets...

 

First set usually about 10-12 songs, arrangements wise, we dont linger about, so we can squeeze a lot of tunes in to an hour. The second set is a bit longer and has more of the thumpers in it to build it up a bit more... we'll always keep 1 or 2 in the tank. But as was mentioned above one of the key things is to know when to end a gig... nobody wants to have clock watchers while you're playing so keeping it to the right amount is one of the best things a band can do.

 

It's flattering to get a decent response at a gig, but we were running out of stuff that's worthy of an encore, a slowie at this point is going to kill you off, so the lesson of the night was that we need a few extra four-on-the-floor face-punchers, so some of the current ones can be rested a bit, and dragged out if need be.

[zombywoof]

Thinking back on it all - one of the main differences between electric and acoustic gigs is that there were no encores with the electric band. You pretty much had to play until last call or if it was a private club until the last drunk wandered out.

 

We never really used a set list for either the electric or acoustic band other than we knew what the first song of each set would be. Encores with the acoustic band tended to be a free for all. I guess we just preferred the now for something completely different than something that we knew would go over well or show the band at its best. Sometimes we would just dig up some old standard from the rock band like "Dirty Water." We were also known to take requests and end up faking "Hello Dolly" or "North to Alaska" or something we could basically get together in a couple of minutes. Mind you this was with a blues band. Not saying it sounded all that great and the lyrics were often made up. But it was fun and helped us from taking ourselves too seriously.

 

I think the thing though is with the acoustic band we always seemed to have a lot of the same folks show up who knew the band and knew just what to expect. I would think the strangers out there might have left scratching their head. But again, it was our style.

[ParlourMan]

We never really used a set list for either the electric or acoustic band other than we knew what the first song of each set would be.

 

Quite surprised with the setlists and how few use them (it would seem), I think half the value of a setlist is you can see the overall flow of a set much better than pulling them out the air, a bad choice can really kill any momentum you've built up. We have been known to kick a song out of the set though, or make a last minute change, but I do prefer to have a rough idea listed beforehand. My wee singer fella is capo crazy as well, so for some songs I've no option but to get the capo out as well.

 

But it was fun and helped us from taking ourselves too seriously.

 

We have a few of those types of songs. The daft stuff, a bit light hearted etc... I like to lob in at least 1 or 2 somewhere so folk can see it's not serious.

 

Had a couple of hours on spotify there looking for new material, so fired off a few suggestions to the singer. Including this.... love it.

 

[EuroAussie]

 

 

Had a couple of hours on spotify there looking for new material, so fired off a few suggestions to the singer. Including this.... love it.

 

 

Admit it PM, behind the grey hair and acoustic sensibilities deep down youre still a pill popping clubber ... not that there's anything wrong with that ..

[ParlourMan]

Ha, no, just a nod to the renaissance men out there.... Honest Gov

[zombywoof]

Quite surprised with the setlists and how few use them (it would seem), I think half the value of a setlist is you can see the overall flow of a set much better than pulling them out the air, a bad choice can really kill any momentum you've built up.

 

 

I agree that walking in pretty much unprepared showed a certain lack of professionalism. But that was how I was. It is also what eventually broke up the electric band as well as the acoustic blues band as not only myself but both the singer (who in my opinion is what set us part from all the others - this lady could really sing and had that Etta James thing going on) and bass player were in both groups. Half the folks wanted to take it to the next level while the other half (which included me) did not.

 

With me though the acoustic band was really more of a break from it all. I wanted to put together something where I could play the music I loved and get a chance to plays some blues fiddle. It also gave me a chance to play with somebody who was so good she was able to sit in and hold her own with the likes of Woody Mann and David Bromberg. The fact that she happened to be my girlfriend at the time didn't hurt. I wanted the thing to be as pressure free as possible. We rarely played for money - did benefits or just played for free food. We once played a gig for a used washing machine as one of the folks in the band needed one.

 

But it is now one of those what might have been things. I will always wonder what if . . .

[Rambler]

Quite surprised with the setlists and how few use them (it would seem)

Besides the show being random, there's the danger of that dead air moment when "what do we play next" draws a blank. And this: It's one thing if you are playing simple changes, but Im playing lap steel/alt tunings with a singer who ventures beyond the friendly confines of I-IV-V, so its a comfort to me to not have transcribe "live."

 

As for the encore, up here in the NE we have some reliable and commonly known favs, Wagon Wheel being the consensus number one. If its my own gig (blues), something light and uptempo, like Police Dog, or from the r&b bag, like Mercury Blues.

[onewilyfool]

We rarely played for money - did benefits or just played for free food. We once played a gig for a used washing machine as one of the folks in the band needed one.

 

But it is now one of those what might have been things. I will always wonder what if . . .

Zomby, I've been duly admonished, that if you are playing for free.....you can't call it a gig. Just FYI. I don't know what you call it, but NOT gig.....apparently

[BluesKing777]

It is a bit of tough question, PM.

 

 

There are lots of approaches taken by bands and in some ways I am glad I was in a few different bands to see the wayyyyyyyyy different approach taken to the set list, encore and general organisation.

I liked having a very definite show on paper including encores in one particular band, but I have been in a band or two where we winged it from beginning to end.

 

I guess it comes down to experience and musician's intuition - the more live gigs you have under the belt, the more natural all that stuff falls in to place without too much thought.

 

I will digress for a moment............ a friend was keyboard player in a pro cover band that was probably the most organised unit I have ever seen, but with 10 pieces and people coming and going, they had to be on it. And they were - not a note out of place. He came to see a band I was in at the time, and frankly, I was really embarrassed when I saw him coming over after, but he said he liked what we were doing and gave some very, very, very constructive set and arrangement ideas for us : for starters, have a strict set list that was timed; no boom, boom crash, zing, bang boom noises from any band member between songs; silent tuning of instruments; singer to have a bit of a planned spiel for the audience instead of going Duh, errhhh etc; work on band dynamics in different ways so it wasn't "All in, All of the Time" - get the drums and bass to start a song, get them to do a structured solo with a riff together in the middle of a song here and there, guitarist shorten the solos to 4 bars instead of nine thousand bars etc. etc. etc. We DID work on a lot of this at rehearsals and the difference was stunning. And we tried to do our best songs last, including encore.

 

 

BluesKing777.

[Fullmental Alpinist]

he said he liked what we were doing and gave some very, very, very constructive set and arrangement ideas for us : for starters, have a strict set list that was timed; no boom, boom crash, zing, bang boom noises from any band member between songs; silent tuning of instruments; singer to have a bit of a planned spiel for the audience instead of going Duh, errhhh etc; work on band dynamics in different ways so it wasn't "All in, All of the Time" - get the drums and bass to start a song, get them to do a structured solo with a riff together in the middle of a song here and there, guitarist shorten the solos to 4 bars instead of nine thousand bars etc. etc. etc. We DID work on a lot of this at rehearsals and the difference was stunning. And we tried to do our best songs last, including encore.

 

BluesKing777.

 

Wow, BK777, that's really good stuff.

 

FMA

[Debonnaire]

For an original act, the encore is a good time to kick out a cover.

 

I toured with a ska band that played I Can't Explain as their encore and burned the house down with it.

 

For the record, I was not the guitar player, but their dancing gorilla/roadie.

[Mojorule]

Back when I was gigging I was in one band which used set lists and one which didn't. Both were improvising jazz bands, but one had a more limited repertoire than the other, more complicated head arrangements (acid jazz rather than trad/dixie/manouche/mainstream), and so stuck to a pre-established order and only ever played a single, short set. It was great, but not very flexible aside from the freedom to do what we wanted with our solos. True we could have played the songs in any order if the band leader had called them differently, but he never really did, and I'm not sure there was ever any real thought given to the way in which the set order might build up and break down a particular atmosphere. For sure there was no real room to respond to the audience by switching things around.

 

In the other (trad/dixie/manouche/mainstream) band, we winged it from start to finish. The most rehearsal we ever did was an hour before a particularly intensive week of gigs. We used to go busking instead of rehearsing formally. When we got to gigs, the head arrangements were essentially the melody played in clarinet and/or either fiddle or trumpet depending on the year, and there were occasional ending arrangements. In between there were improvised solos from various band members, often called by one of the frontmen just before one of us had to step up. The violinist just used to point at one of us. The leader would use signals or talk to us when he wanted us to change volume or just hit the first chord of each bar. We never had a set list, and he'd just decide what came next in function of the audience and mood in the room. We all read chords from real books and cribs, so the only pause came while we found the right page. The music was less fun than the acid jazz for a guitarist (I didn't have the chops for real manouche solos), but the audiences really used to dance. We never knew what might happen - the drummer once played a solo on a full beer bottle, with spectacular results - but looking back the edginess often carried over to the audience.

 

As for encores in both cases, nobody ever seemed upset when we reprised something that had gone down well earlier in the evening. King of the Swingers was one of our favourites in the trad band. You can play that more than once in an evening, PM.

[ParlourMan]

Dunno man, I'm not a fan of repeating songs in a night to be honest. I seen another covers band here within the last few months, they played their first set which was 6-7 songs, took a 45 minute break then played the same set again... their encore was an extended version of the first song they played... meaning that one song had been played 3 times in a single night. I was mortified for them and left thinking why would you ever play the same set twice in a pub on the same evening.... mental......

 

I fired off about 8-9 song suggestions to the singer yesterday, he's off work today so we'll see what comes this week..... already doing a couple of tracks from the new arctic monkeys album as well, so that gives us a couple of very current tracks seeing as the album was only released about a week or so ago.

[EuroAussie]

Dunno man, I'm not a fan of repeating songs in a night to be honest. I seen another covers band here within the last few months, they played their first set which was 6-7 songs, took a 45 minute break then played the same set again... their encore was an extended version of the first song they played... meaning that one song had been played 3 times in a single night. I was mortified for them and left thinking why would you ever play the same set twice in a pub on the same evening.... mental......

 

I fired off about 8-9 song suggestions to the singer yesterday, he's off work today so we'll see what comes this week..... already doing a couple of tracks from the new arctic monkeys album as well, so that gives us a couple of very current tracks seeing as the album was only released about a week or so ago.

 

+1 repeating a song just seems weird, sort of says to the audience ... we really dont have anything else thats decent to play for you, hence I reckon its key to have a few up your sleeve that you save up for the encore, works for us. Although we did get fired from one venue where we played Lily Allens Fxxck You .... and the convervative publican was none too impressed. It took us a year to get back there and its still sort of sparadic, lesson learnt ..

[ParlourMan]

+1 repeating a song just seems weird, sort of says to the audience ... we really dont have anything else thats decent to play for you.

 

Exactly... I'd rather play no encore than have to regurgitate the same material. Lifespan is another thing, our city doesn't compare in size to the likes of London or NYC, so material does have a lifespan. You can't trawl out the same stuff week in, week out. We have a lot of the same people coming to each gig so it has to keep moving. Songs come & go... The best stuff we do tends to remain a bit longer but the majority of stuff is lucky to last more than 5 gigs. Rarely are we playing anything we played a year ago.

[Mojorule]

Maybe it's a rock thing. We had literally hundreds of songs we could have played at sight from the real book, and avoided repetition, but a sure-fire tactic was always to play one that had got the crowd dancing earlier. Never failed to get them dancing again. Of course we're talking improvised instrumental jazz. The solos were never the same twice. Some crowds really want you to reprise the hits. One or two like that at the end of the night is very different from a band playing only 6-7 songs twice in one night, then reprising the best couple a third time. I agree that that would be lame.

[ParlourMan]

I agree that that would be lame.

 

It was... it really really was...

 

Maybe it's a rock thing. We had literally hundreds of songs we could have played at sight from the real book, and avoided repetition, but a sure-fire tactic was always to play one that had got the crowd dancing earlier. Never failed to get them dancing again.

 

No, I can see where it would work, but as you say very different cases....

[Rambler]

Another approach would be to pull out a slow one, send folks out in a chill kind of way. The G. Dead used to do that to good effect.

[Mojorule]

How about combining the slow tactic with a subtle hint? Work up a version of the Doors' 'The End' for two guitars and cajon. It'll either send them home or send them to sleep.

 

If the audience don't go home after that one, then do an acoustic version of the Beatles' song of the same name. Give Leppard-man about five minutes of cajon solo, then alternate solos with your singer. Not hard to remember the lyrics either.

[ParlourMan]

Nah, prefer to bow out on a face rattler...... The singer had a day off, sent me a mail saying he'd recorded 7 new songs (all fairly upbeat buggers too) so it means we can try to fix them up tomorrow, play the ones which work on Friday, if we can get playable versions of half of them for Friday it means we can shake up both sets we played on Friday, move some stuff from the 2nd set in to beef up the first one, drop a few newies in the 2nd one....

[blindboygrunt]

Ah sure if it was easy everyone'd be doing it