Arrangements that catch you out

[anaxcrosswords]

[b]Billie Jean[/b] – aaaargh! In fairness it’s very rare that we actually cock it up (and we somehow manage to get back on track anyway) but it’s a song during which we often end up looking around at each other with a “Which bit do we go into now?” expression. For those unfamiliar with it, the song has a few moments of repetition which don’t happen anywhere else – overall not a standard song structure. This uncertainty has been there from the start and it’s a song we’ve been doing for about 5 years.
Are there songs that cause you to get nervous for the same reason, even though you’ve had them in the set for a long time?

[Dad3353]

[quote name='anaxcrosswords' timestamp='1432664770' post='2783782']
[b]Billie Jean[/b] – aaaargh! In fairness it’s very rare that we actually cock it up (and we somehow manage to get back on track anyway) but it’s a song during which we often end up looking around at each other with a “Which bit do we go into now?” expression. For those unfamiliar with it, the song has a few moments of repetition which don’t happen anywhere else – overall not a standard song structure. This uncertainty has been there from the start and it’s a song we’ve been doing for about 5 years.
Are there songs that cause you to get nervous for the same reason, even though you’ve had them in the set for a long time?
[/quote]

Not quite, but similar... There are numbers we've been playing for years, some, many years, and I'll suddenly have a 'senior moment' and frig up the ending. An example..? RATM's 'Killing...'; I've hammered out the snare thrash too early, shortening it by a couple of bars, for no apparent reason. Trust's 'Antisocial' has also been massacred in this way. Why, and just that one evening..? Dunno. Could it happen again..? Quite certainly... Will it..? I most certainly hope not..!

[anaxcrosswords]

Thankfully endings are endings – if they go a bit wrong there’s nothing left to get right!
Incidentally, we quite often have to go out as a 3-piece for reasons of venue space or client budget, so we rely on (smite my cheeks) backing tracks; drums and keys. You’d think that would solve most problems in terms of tempo etc, but it’s not without its hazards. Obviously the backing track is king and it won’t adjust if you get something wrong, but the worst thing – and it does happen – is when the MP3 file decides to have a little skip while it’s playing. Some time last year, while we played [i][b]You Can’t Hurry Love[/b][/i], it jumped almost precisely 1 bar. So the drums still sounded OK, but the rest of the track was essentially brass parts which ended up out of sequence with what we were playing/singing.
Thankfully they weren’t loud enough to sound ridiculous, and nobody in the audience seemed to notice – they just carried on dancing and singing.
Doubtless there’s a message in that!

[sykilz]

Our common hiccups occur when the vocalist either comes in early...or not at all...but we can usually cover it up o.k. Until last week, when during American Idiot by Green Day, he was fine til the bit after the solo, then decided to sing with the music and leave the silent bits...er....silent...instead of vice versa. Classic.

[anaxcrosswords]

Ha! I can imagine [i][b]21 Guns[/b][/i] wouldn't be much easier.

[DaveFry]

The extra two-beat bars in Forty-Four Blues often catch me out ;
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5h-95D-MAsE[/media]

[scalpy]

A +1 for billie Jean, it totally depends with us on the singers getting it right.

Personally, a band I dep for does Pretty Woman and the bridge always does my nut. It's not hard but I just always have a total mental block.