The covers band I play in is nicely democratic.
When we rehearsed weekly it was really easy to try new material and decide on it.
Rehearsals are far more infrequent now so I'm wondering if there's a way to plan choices for new songs a bit more efficiently.
The current method has been group emails with YouTube links.
The biggest problem has been the bitty nature of the medium -- suggestions get lost over the months, and if you put helpful titles like "song suggestion" it goes off topic always into stuff which just isn't relevant. That won't change because we're just not disciplined enough, and I'm as guilty as all of us.
What I'm picturing is some kind of online thing which can be viewed by all, posted to by all, but can't be derailed by other talk.
So what you have is a list of links, and only a list of links.
And then we can chat by email or whatever about whatever we think about the ideas.
Is there such a thing?
Oh, and no one does facebook, whatsapp, grindr, or anything vaguely social.
What am I looking for?
And have you discovered a way to do this?**
**Democratically, as in we know a "band leader" is the answer for many bands but that's not for us.
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We work on our own parts then meet at mine for a practice before slotting the new song in at the next gig.
The last 3 years have been great but in a previous line up we were doing 2 songs per month and as a result the band almost fell apart. We have had the same line up now for 3 years but in the previous 2 went through 3 drummers , 2 guitarists and 2 vocals.
Rio
Rebel Yell
Jump
Living on a prayer
Bo rhap.
Supportact said: [my style is] probably more an accumulation of limitations and bad habits than a 'style'.
We had a list of suggestions and a Y/N column for each band member if we got 3 of 5 yes - we'd give it a go. Each of us had a veto if we really hated a song!
Sometimes we'd try a song and it would work out so well even the No's agreed it worked well - the same happened vice versa tho.
We also use Spotify playlists but usually it's YouTube playlists - and that way we all learn the same version - as a general rule we do the Official single version as most people know that one!
There is a wiki page on best selling singles in the UK in the 21st century, here’s the top 20 ( some 20th century songs creeping in there). I think I can vaguely hum 15 of them. Sorry, on the original premise of the thread I can’t really help, it was just interesting reading as whenever I think I should be in a band again stuff like this reminds me of another level of crap that stands between what I think being in a band should be like and what it is like. Anyway, I look forward to hearing which of these you suggest to the band...
https://i.imgur.com/m0vkF5q.jpg
I Gotta Feeling is a great example of this - we tried it with my old lot and quickly realised it's actually really dull, musically speaking, which can make it quite difficult for a standard 4-piece to make it interesting
Doing this well is often what separates ok/good bands from really great ones. I'd love to hear how your lot do it