TimR

I drive home listening to the radio. When I have time to sit down and listen to Pink Floyd, I do. I probably haven't listened to the BC competition as it requires me to actively do so.

More water is consumed than wine. But I suspect as many people consume both just not in equal amounts. A higher volume of consumption can be fewer people doing it more often, it's not always more people.

But as far as the OP and gigging is concerned, memorable songs aren't your bread and butter. Funding 30 individual high quality memorable tunes that some people may or may not like, or won't bore your bass player, or are in the singer's key and range etc is further limiting your choice of songs. Especially when you want to keep your setlist fresh. Simple 4 chord wonders that people recognise and can dance to makes a big difference.

Rick is very good. I agree with the snap to grid problem but not every song follows the same progression. There's examples where he sits through the Spotify list with his guitar and despite what he's said before then disproves his assertion. But there are very few chord progressions that actually work. Most are 3/4 chords with any 5th or 6th ones being incidental. You're essentially locked to the chords as soon as you pick a key, you can't just pick a few at random. C major means you have to play a Dm,Em,F,G,Am,B. (Not being to be condescending there). Unless you're playing Prog Rock, pop songs are pretty much all going to have been done before.

Unfortunately my creative juices left with my teenage angst and rebellion. I may write something but think you need something to write about.

Everything written since 1950 is the same formula. It's based on Jazz which has set out forms. There's a reason, it's because repetition breeds familiarity. Get in with the hook and repeat it.

In my experience of playing in original bands, a lot of songwriters can get bogged down in tinkering with a song and try to polish it too much and try to make them too complicated. This means a lot of time (and emotion) is invested in their creation. A lot of the successful bands seem to have jammed something and created a song very quickly. If you do this and write lots of songs you can afford to bin the ones that don't really work. I found that a source of frustration when gigging originals, the song writer would still be making last minute changes to a song just before a gig. And as I wrote before, a guitarist turning up with a load of licks and determined to jam them all into one song, doesn't work either. I'm not convinced writing good songs is hard, more that peole make hard work of writing simple songs.

Is that the advertising blurb? There's a reason I put 'forces' in inverted commas.

A lot of the reason is becase everything is snapped to a grid and uses prerecorded samples. It's dehumanised. Writing material using garageband 'forces' you to use a cut and paste 'cookie cutter' approach and anyone can produce 'music' in their bedroom. All they're doing is create a collage from other people's work.

Popular songs follow the straight form of repetition with a hook. VCVCBVCC Within the verse the melody will repeat and the chorus will lift up and usually follow the same chords as the verse in a different progression. Get that right and by the second verse everything will sound familiar and people will enjoy what you're playing. Too many bands want to be 'original' and depart from this to be different. At a cost.

Ironically their song about Anarchy follows music rules very closely.

I'll have a listen. But even classical music has movements and repeated motifs and themes. It's unusual to have something that doesn't have some kind of structure.

Having been to a lot of festivals there are some very good songwriters around who understand song structure and chord progressions and write songs that work, even if you don't actully like them. But there are an awful lot of bands who just string a load of riffs together and call it a song without understanding anything about music. That's never going to work for anyone.

Paul McCartney is 79 years old.

Westlife and Take That. Although that's probably granny pop now. Probably Spice Girls now.

Top of The Pops and the top 40 were different things. On the Top 40 you'd get a load of new entries from 40 down to 20 played and then you'd get the whole top 20 played. I'm guessing Top of the Pops was whoever was available to appear.

You don't have to learn new songs from the charts every week. You just need to be aware of what people are listening to, which ones are hanging around for several weeks (there's a few there that have been in the Top 40 for 12 weeks) and which ones can be quickly learned and adapted. I've also had the feeling from a lot of other threads that many bands take ages to pickup and learn new material. A lot of these songs have 4 chords and can be learned quickly and binned just as quickly when they're done. That's one way of keeping your musical interest up.

Yes. My point is its not really representative of anything or on anyone's Radar. I've just listened to the number 1. I'm either very old or the algorithm is broken. "Seventeen Going Under" Sam Fender would be a good simple quick track to do.

Just to clarify. By Dad Rock, I mean the stuff you get on a CD compiled by Jeremy Clarkson popular as Fathers Day gifts. I'm talking about bands playing generic setlists that every band plays. Tribute bands who market themselves and play specialist gigs are completely different. The audiences will be there to see the band sometimes having travelled a way in to see the band. People are just not going to get up off their sofas in large numbers to listen to yet another cover of Freebird.

Nope. Neither have I ever played Mr Brightside or Sex on Fire and the last time I played Mustang Sally was 2008. No one wants to play them and the only ptime people dance to them is when they're massively drunk. Again, the recurring theme on this thread is no one wants to play those tunes to a room full of drunk people. And you really don't have to.

Exactly. And as I pointed out if you're playing specialist gigs you'll have to travel around to find the venues and Pete claimed you wouldn't, and then said that's what he does. Additionally he has to use an agent to find the gigs. Successful dance bands have always kept their setlists fresh, my dad's band always had a numbers from the current top 40. I'd guess the difference now is there's no top 40 and Spotify etc have replaced Radio 1 as the mainstream music source. So we have to search around and pick newer songs to learn, but audiences really appreciate not hearing the 'classics' that every band seems to trot out. Bands seem petrified of trying anything different. No wonder some bass players are bored with gigging.

This is lazy setlist compiling in the extreme and going to end up the blind alley that the Dad Rock bands have gone down. If you want to play Hendrix and Led Zepplin becase that's the only music you like, then yes you're going to find fewer and fewer venues and audiences to play to. And that's why you have to travel around to find them. "Play something we know." doesn't mean, "Trot out some tired old classics that we hear every week.", but it certainly doesn't mean "Play something else you like, but we've never heard."

You're playing music no one else enjoys listening to? But people are enjoying listening to it? I think that you are missing something there. Either you are playing music other people do enjoy listening to, or your audience are faking enjoyment.

That's obviously not true at all. Playing music only you enjoy, by definition isn't going to appeal to a whole audience. And is completely different to enjoying the music you are playing.