Gig Tracking?

baimun

Funkasaurus Rex
So those of you who are band leaders/bookers/etc... how do you keep track of your changes and progress?

I do my set lists as spread sheets and save them for each venue. That way we can change up our set list when we go back... at least the start and ends of sets. That way people who come to multiple shows won't see the exact same show twice.

Also, I have a spreadsheet showing every single gig we've played over the past 2 1/2 years, the dates, cities, and I write notes in the corner like "First gig with ___ guitar", "Chris sat in on bass", "Started selling T-shirts".

I want to mark the progress of how many times a year we play certain venues, total number of gigs per year, and ideally, how much we're getting paid at each venue.

What about the rest of you? any tips or suggestions?

@OGG @micwalt @smurfco etc :baimun:
 
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Gigs are kept on a Excel spreadsheet with all pertinent data. Started logging in 2012.

As for gig sets, all are done in MS Word. Not so detailed though on that one. Lately since I use Onsong with my iPad, I just build them there and trash them when done.
 
wow, someone is a little OCD :grin:

I never kept anything like that when I gigged. We always randomly made up setlists before the gig so they were never the same. One of my bands, we had a big list of all the songs we played and we would actually make pick the songs as we played so we could get the feel of the crowd.
 
wow, someone is a little OCD :grin:.

Yeah.... :embarrassed:

The other issue is, I hate repeating songs, I hate the show not having a certain flow, and I hate finishing a show and saying "Shit, we forgot to play _____"

There's still plenty of room in our sets to throw in random songs off the cuff, to skip songs or slide one from the third set into the second if the dance floor is packed, but I like knowing that even if there's all kinds of distractions or whatever that we have an idea of where to go next without too much thought.

We also block a lot of our songs together so we can say "trip around the world" and know it's "Land Down Under/ No Woman No Cry/ Wherever You Will Go/ Hey Soul Sister" or "Summer" and it's Summer of '69/ All Summer Long/ Semi Charmed Life.
 
I usually have a prepared set list, and, like Baimun, am prepared to veer from it. I generally don't compare it to past lists as I don't play enough for people to think "he did this last time." I did not prepare a set list for last Sunday's Farmer's Market gig; I did some songs I hadn't thought of in years, but I also found myself wondering, 'now what?"
 
I like to know in advance what I am playing. It is all about song flow and how each song moves through the set. If need be, songs can be substituted as necessary pending the crowd pleasers and/or request. What I don't care for is redundancy of the song order or the same songs played in the same order all the time.

Besides some songs were made for beginning, middle and end of a set.
 
I've never been in a band that put more than about 10 minutes of time into a setlist.

Mixed Nuts usually has a couple of master song lists, and we just pick and choose as we go.

My earlier bands would spend about 2 minutes before each set picking what 10-12 songs we were going to play for that set.

No spreadsheet was ever kept for pay or dates or anything like that, though a few of the master song lists were in Excel.
 
I used to have a fairly convoluted spreadsheet with all my DJ gigs, meets, payments etc... on the main page then sub pages with more details.

it become unwieldy really quickly so now I have an A2 wall calender in my home office that details the stuff via the power of different coloured highlighters and apart from that I keep track of things generally by using my "contracts" folder in my documents. It's never failed me yet and is about the simplest, most straight forward way to keep track of things - I don't even need to put stuff on my phone for the most past.

I've been meaning to get DJEP for a while but apparently to get current clients in on it they need to go through the motions of "booking" as you can't just add them into the system, chasing up 40 odd wedding clients to do that, no thanks.
 
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