Testing Your Songs Live

Well, here's goes nothin'.
I'll be playing a song I wrote this week, live, Sunday night.
Yep. Then I can just see how it flies.
As long as I can remember the chord changes...

I'll be doing three song I've placed here on the SA:

I Can't Get Over It
The Skeleton of the Rocketship
I've Got News For You

(and maybe Don't Give Up as well)

Sunday Night, Bean Town, Sierra Madre, CA

I'm on at 7pm. I hear you can get some killer rates into L.A.X. this time of year.
:)

I'll Take A Fifth and Thirty Useful Tips For $100, Alex

Here's a short explanation on the Circle of Fifths. Even if it STILL doesn't make sense when you're done reading it, you'll come away with at least two or three new chord progressions to stick in your quiver.

After reading that I started reading the blog I found it in. Great ideas here! This guy has a blog chock full o' ideas. I found myself just reading straight down the page and getting more and more inspiration.

He posted an article about playing live here.

That lead me to the site it was hosted on, Muse's Muse.

I feel like Alice In Wonderland here, but THAT lead me to THIS site, which was highly suspect because of the random pop-up ads, but I stayed and surfed anyways and found a list of programs for creating loops. (I've been messing with a pretty fun online loopmaking program called Splice that I really enjoy, but that's another rabbit hole to wander down at another date.)

Which naturally lead me to I Am The Mighty Jungulator, a band AND an educational software for looping music used in schools in the UK. Yeah. I took the blue pill.


Too many links? Sucker, you ain't seen nothin' yet. I need to write/finish a song now. As is obvious, the computer used its evil tentacles of coolness to wrap me up and suck me in.

(Read Jeff's Songwriting Blog if you do anything, but if you feel like chasing the rabbit, start with the first link and work your way down...)

iSOUND - A Wealth of Information for the Aspiring Performer

Normally when I find a really useful site, I just copy the URL and put it somewhere on the sidebar on this site assuming you all will eventually come across it. Tonight I was messing around in the Man-Cave™ and received a message from a fellow Michigan perfomer, Dan Vaillancourt. He turned me on to a site that had a page full of useful article links. A few article titles:

• Getting Better is All About Promotion! Promotion! Promotion!
• Entrepreneurship Is The Key To New Artist Success Today
• Image: It Still Matters More Than The Music
• Building An Effective E-Mail List and Delivering the Right Message
• The importance of blogging and keeping your content fresh

Check them out if you get the chance. Note the list of article links in the sidebar of this site. There is a ton of useful information available to the motivated artist.

John

Playing Live

After witnessing the Ann Arbor Folk Festival this past weekend (see my review) I'm feeling pretty motivated about not only writing, but playing out. In addition to hosting such great acts as Over the Rhine, Glen Phillips, Bill Staines and more, The Ark in Ann Arbor has an open stage night about once a month. I've played out a bunch as the drummer for my band in years past, but never as a singer/songwriter. Now that I've got a couple years of playing under my belt, I'm considering taking a few songs out to the public.

I'm wondering what others have to say about the challenge of playing your songs out live. Any comments, hints, suggestions or warnings?

Thanks,
J

edit to add: Also, what do you think about "scripted" banter? I know that most banter isn't technically "scripted", but artists repeat the same banter between songs as a result of trying different things over and over and finding what works. Seems to me that keeping the audience involved and interested is vital. Comments?