TimR

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.

It's worth bearing in mind the Beatles and Stones heyday music was 60 years ago. People who were big fans and teenagers then are now in their late 70s/80s.

That all goes with the territory. Problem is if you only do two gigs and one is rubbish then 50% of your gigs are rubbish. The more gigs you do, the more you'll understand whether what your playing is what people want to hear and you're just getting the odd duff audience, or whether it's the other way round. As I wrote earlier, if you're playing Dad Rock, all you'll get is Dads standing at the bar watching and drinking. If you play modern pop, you'll get a younger, keener more energetic audience. If you are dead set on only playing music you enjoy, the only person who will enjoy the music is you.

It was going OK. You do have to try a lot of songs to find ones that work quickly. Quite a few of them ended up being too much effort for little reward. When there are thousands of songs around just have to keep plugging away to find ones that suit and can be easily adapted to a 3 piece plus singer.

When my kids were small and I was working stupid hours, it became a source of great frustration that I was making some serious commitments with time, energy and money, when other members of the band who didn't have busy jobs and families weren't even making half the effort to learn and practice material or even cancel minor social nights out in order to play gigs. When your drummer decides he wants to watch football in the pub with his mates rather than play a wedding gig you start questioning if you're in the right band.

One pandemic later... Have picked up another 4 songs in the last 3 weeks from 12+ that have been suggested. Suffering a little bit and regressing a bit back to "But I have a heavy rock sounding guitar and all these are synthesizer songs".

Is it a full time job that would pay enough to warrant staying away from home? Or is it evenings and weekends and you are holding down a full time day job?

I don't understand that analagy. Changing your own wheel. Putting up your own shelf or curtain pole. Bleeding your radiators. Setting up your bass. Are all very simple jobs. Going to listen to a band vs playing in a band, are, I'd suggest, a completely different level. Otherwise, I'll just hand my bass to the first punter who enters the pub and tell them to get on with it....