Practice
 

I'm a fingerstyle/classical guitarist. I play both classical and fingerstyle arrangments of pop songs like Beatles, Paul Simon, etc. The gigs I play are about two hours long and I pull from a current repertoire of about 80 pieces. I will play around 30 songs in a two hour set. I'm curious how other musicians keep up with their music. I try to play through all my stuff in about two days and also try to add new music from time to time. I sometimes wonder if it is neccessary to parctice all the pieces as frequently as I do but it gives me a more secure sence going into my gigs having practiced them all. To be honest I still have memory lapses during some of the songs and I know some need more work than others. Would love to get feedback on how others handle this issue. Memoy is a whole nother discussion :)

You are on the right track. My band has a 50 song set list plus a handful on a "parking lot" that are in progress, may be added or have been replaced by other songs. I play one or two sets each day and parking lot songs two or three times a week. When I hit a song that I don't play as well as others I play it three times. Songs that I've mastered get one play through.

I'm working on a side project of entirely different songs and usually set aside time each week to work on them.

Wish I could help...

I also wish I could play that many songs.

But I have almost two under my belt! I have all the chords down, just need to put it all together. :up:

Hi yes I have all my songs listed and added to on my iPad . They are divided into four sets , so I play a set a day . I get all our worship songs for the month in one go so I add those to another day . I am lucky that I can practice for about two hours some days and an hour on others . I try to add one quality fingerstyle song to the list every month .

I would have a set repertoire of songs to play at a gig. Those would be core arrangements and would be practiced a lot. The others would get practice time and I would occasionally change up my repertoire with either new material or the base material I already play...

Think of it like playing Christmas carols. You may play them all the time to keep them somewhat fresh in your memory but only play them earnestly maybe 1-2 months before Crimbo and then they go back in the tool box.

I would find 80 songs too much to keep performance ready personally but 30 as you say is a comfortable amount if you practice enough.

So you're that George fellow that Knopfler was telling us about. Cool!

:D

LOL... didn't think about that particular reference. :)

But hey- I am feverishly working on it. At age 54, I still feel like I'm a solid 53.

I'm amazed at how many songs you pros remember, unbelievable!

My wife and I are an acoustic duo. The stuff you play and we play are worlds apart regarding complexity, as we are purveyors of 4-5 chord songs played mostly in first position. There is no reason that our system wouldnt work for you though.

We have essentially made a chart - songs on the left and days of the week at the top with lines between each song and each day - making a box - a homemade spreadsheet, if you will. When we play a song we simply check off the box. We can do a quick visual check and see if anything is being omitted too frequently from practice.

Like TahitiJack, we have weak, non-giggable songs that are works in progress or remnants of old set lists that we didn't like and abandoned. We call these "house songs" cause we only play them at home and just occasionally. This forces us to play all our better material regularly but it also reminds us to pull stuff out of the basement sometimes. After a long hiatus from playing a song sometimes we put them back in rotation.

Like you, we have around 100 songs 50-60 we gig with. They are relatively easy tunes but remembering the words can occasionally be a problem. Hope this helps or might give you some ideas.

I've been in more than a few bands, and am currently in two regularly. One's acoustic, the other is a full rock band. Between the two, there are probably around 600 songs we've played, and can rattle off more than half of those easily. Some we haven't played in a while and we'd need to brush up on, or just listen to real quick to remember the arrangement, etc.

I end up learning anywhere from 3-10 new songs every week for my acoustic band. We're always performing and always doing a weekly song challenge for us to come up with acoustic arrangements of songs that aren't typically acoustic, like Tool, Toto, SRV, Motown, etc.

My advice, just play, and play, and play. If you like playing, it's not work and you'll always love what you're doing.

Try learning 600+ performance ready solo fingerstyle instrumentals of those songs though complete with rich chord variations, key changes and meter changes. It's not as simple.

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Roy, thanks for the input. All is helpful. Good stuff.

Thank for the view on YouTube. Yea Haroshi has some great stuff. He actually stayed with me when he was touring the United States. Great experience. He is at that next level.

This sounds close to my current plan. Thanks for the input.