It’s not enough to just go onstage and play your music to get the audience into it. You have to worry about all sorts of variables ranging from your stage appearance to the lighting effects you use. While many artists think about improving their live sound, their lighting setup, and their stage appearance, the idea of flow within a setlist sometimes gets forgotten. All of the big artists either focus on this themselves or hire someone to focus on this aspect. The same way the flow within a single song is important to that song, flow between the songs in your set is important to your performance. Creating a well-structured setlist not only improves your night but the audience’s as well.
Determine Your Needs First
Not every venue will want you to perform the same length of time, and not every venue’s audience will respond the same. If you are the only act for the night and are playing three sets, then find out when the busiest time is during a night. If the venue typically gets busier late in the evening, then put your better songs around that time. If the venue is normally packed by the time you’ll start, then have your stronger songs in the first set.
Give Them A Bang!
Generally it is best to start the night with a very strong song. This is so you quickly grab the audience’s attention and make sure they know the show has started. Giving them a jolt like this can help in getting them to quickly shift their focus to you. Now this doesn’t mean play your best song first or necessarily even play an upbeat number. You will probably want a song with a mid-to-faster tempo rather than a slow song, but it doesn’t have to be your fastest or even one of the fastest tunes. You want a song that says, “hey look up here!” You need to captivate the audience’s attention from the very first note.
Keep It Flowing
Now that you have their attention, you have to make sure to keep it. This is where focusing on the overall flow of the setlist is important. You don’t want to create too much “jerk” with your songs. By this I mean you don’t want to play one fast grooving song followed immediately by a slow dance and then back to another upbeat number. You want to keep your adjacent songs somewhat similar so there is an element of continuity within the set. Notice I said the songs should be somewhat similar. You don’t need to keep it to songs with almost identical tempo or key. Too much similarity between adjacent songs creates a dull repetitive feel to the performance. Finding the middle ground between too similar and too varied is the key to this.
Peaks and Valleys
Following the focus on flow, you don’t want to have an all-upbeat set unless that is what your audience expects. Generally you want to have parts that are more energetic than others. The idea here is once again to create variance within your overall setlist but keeping to a smooth flow. Perhaps you start the set with an upbeat song followed by even more upbeat songs. If you just kept building, then eventually you would have nowhere left to go. What many artists (famous ones included) do, is have at least one segment where they bring the energy level down intentionally thereby creating a more mellow, and even intimate, feeling between the audience and artist.
Consider the Venue and Audience
Think about the place you’re going to be performing at. What kind of music do they usually have? What will their patrons expect to hear? Picking the right songs and the right order is even more important if you don’t fit with the venue’s typical performers. If it is a country-inclined venue, then going in with something that sounds like Lamb Of God or Avenged Sevenfold probably won’t go over well, but something along the lines of AC/DC might work.
Look To Your Peers and Idols
When you just can’t get it to flow right, look to other performers. If you are a cover band, then look to other cover bands in the area. Original artists should check Setlist.fm and look up their idols to see what they do. By observing what other artists are doing and thinking about how you yourself feel when you listen to that song order, will help give you some ideas for your own setlist.
Don’t Forget The Banter
Playing non-stop from one song to the next will let you perform more songs, but it doesn’t involve the audience as much as talking to them does. Even if you can play non-stop through ten songs, take a pause after three or four and speak to the audience for a moment. Make it a point to do this so you get into the habit of it. After all, there will be times where perhaps something goes wrong with a guitar or the drums that must be fixed quickly or even just the usual tuning changes between songs. During these pauses you need to have someone talking. Otherwise the audience is just watching you stand about on stage while something is being fixed. That sounds boring even to a musician. Take the opportunity to talk with the audience at different points of the set. Tell about the next song and why you wrote it or mention your new merchandise that just came in.
Don’t Wear Yourselves Out
If you are just playing a short set then it shouldn’t be a problem to go full out the whole time. But if you have to play multiple sets, then you need to consider your endurance. Putting all the vocally hard songs at the start of the night can put extra strain on a singer. It’s the same with instrumentalists. Putting tough songs early in the night before you have sufficient time to warm up can make things rough. Just like taking pauses to talk, retune instruments, or fix small problems, you want to have “light” songs to mix in. If one song is really tough for the singer, you don’t want to follow it with another song that’s really tough for them. This also goes hand in hand with the idea of Peaks and Valleys. If you have a barrage of songs featuring shredding guitar solos or Sebastian Bach high vocals, they will start to run together in the audience’s ears as well as wear the performers out faster.
There Is No “One Size Fits All”
I know everyone likes the idea of having a single setlist and sticking with it for every gig. It’s much more convenient to not have to continuously change. In contrast, some artists prefer building a new setlist for every gig from scratch. While this is nice in that the audience gets a different experience each time, this doesn’t allow for focus on the “core” songs. There will always be certain songs that universally receive better responses than other songs do regardless. There will also be songs that only do well at certain venues. These are things that need to be noticed and thought of when creating a setlist. I know a few bands that have been playing a majority of the same cover songs for the better part of a decade. They keep playing these because they work. These bands have found through trial and error where each song fits best and flows with the rest of the set. They also know that certain venues or types of venues are different like I mentioned earlier. So they have a “bar” setlist, a “private party” setlist, and so on. You wouldn’t necessarily go and play the same setlist at a country bar that you would for a wedding party would you?
In the end, if you are going to be playing multiple kinds of events and venues you will need multiple setlists to cover all the options (and a large list of songs). However, if you are going to be sticking with the bar circuit or all-ages original music venues, then focus on finding your “core” songs that always work. Put them in the strongest points of your set, and then you change up the rest of the set between gigs. Don’t think you have to do this. If you want to create one set and think it is magical and will work everywhere, then go for it. Nobody is going to stop you. Just keep in mind that the more an audience hears that song order, the more they’re going to say “their live show is always the same.”