Quai34 wrote:Could you describe a situation where you don't have a Setlist?
One of my band uses set lists, but they are only rough guides, they never end up being right. We take requests, for one thing. For another, if certain kinds of songs are going over better than others, the list will be updated on the fly for that reason. (And for an example of a situation where there is no set list at all, I've been in the band that backs up the singers on Open Mic night, you never know what song is coming next!)
Quai34 wrote:as soon as you play with others, how could you expect them to be ready for what you decide or you to play what they decide?
Ideally, everyone is always ready to play every song. Assuming the people in the band know the songs, all the bassist, drummer, singer need to do is start. Even the guitarist usually has little or nothing he needs to do to be able to start a song. The keyboard player is the only one likely to need time to set up sounds.
In the old days, it was the same for keyboard players. If you played Hammond and Rhodes, you had a Hammond and Rhodes up there, and you were always ready to play any part (maybe a few seconds to get the right drawbars). Call out a song, play it. Now we're trying to cover all the keyboard sounds ever invented, plus brass, strings, and winds, and do it all from one or two keyboards.
Quai34 wrote:I' m would like to know when you don't use a Setlist and expect ALL musicians to play at their best....
If you know the songs, you don't need to know what order they're coming in to be able to play them at your best. The purpose of a set list isn't for people to play better. The main reason is simply to avoid dead air between songs while the band decides what to play. A secondary reason is to give advance notice to people who may need set-up time, i.e. to call up a chart (or lyrics) if the song isn't memorized, or to get the needed sound.
Getting back to the subject of Pending Load, once we're off the set list (or there's some reason to just not do the next song listed), we will often communicate amongst ourselves toward the end of a song to indicate what the next song is going to be (again, so we can avoid the dead air... sometimes the beat never even stops). So yeah, it could be helpful to "call up" the sound you're going to need to begin the next song, before you're actually ready to play it, i.e. while you're still actually playing the previous song.
Quai34 wrote:Then why you don't prepare the 300 songs in Setlist maker and program all the midi programs you use in each song, attached it to the song and then, just click on the song?
Using SLM can be a great addition, but there are some instances where it doesn't address the Pending Load problem. One is that there's the additional complication of multiple sound changes needed within the one song. As if programming 300 songs into SLM wouldn't be tedious enough, many songs could require multiple patch change events. But for me, the main thing is what I talked about in my post toward the top of this thread... that there are hundreds of songs that just use some combination of the same handful of sounds. It's a waste of prep time to set up hundreds of presets that are such minor variations of each other (and it's a waste of performance time to go through a list of of songs to find the song title you need, just to call up what should be a simple, common setup).
As I described in that earlier post, I set up my NE5D to have some of my most common sounds (piano, rhodes, wurli, B3) on song 1, more of them on song 2 (strings, brass, etc.), so I can quickly switch among the most common sounds on the fly, but I get stung if I'm playing piano (Song 1) and have to get ready to play a brass part for the bridge, since the very act of moving from Song 1 to Song 2 (in anticipation of hitting the brass button when needed) cuts out my piano.
