You sweat blood to get it all just right…and then the listener presses the shuffle button and plays them in a totally random order!
First
of all may I wish you all a Happy New Year and thank you for bothering to read
this. If you enjoy it please look out for subsequent ones—I post them roughly
once a month but it can be a long or a short month and sometimes an extra one
creeps in if I get inspired. Have a look back through the previous ones
too…
This
post was inspired by a comment to a previous post and the conversation which
followed. I wrote about the songs I was doing when I first went professional as
a ‘folk singer’ and my first album which I said was pretty awful (technically
rather than musically, I think) but the person who commented said that she
loved it and particularly liked the way it was put together—the order of the
tracks.
That’s
what happens when you make an album. You spend hours selecting songs (and/or
stories) and deciding what order to put them in. You choose a good, lively
opener and either a real upbeat finisher, or something which will linger on in
the listener’s memory long after the album has ended. In between you have highs
and lows, variations in tempo and key,
different instrumentations—some with a lot happening and some unaccompanied,
perhaps. You go through all sorts of permutations. You decide to move one song
and that means the others don’t work. You might even change things at the final
mixing stage and add a whole new track, or leave one off. You sweat blood to
get it all just right…
And
after all that work what happens? The listener presses the shuffle button and
plays them in a totally random order!
 |
| Running order of my Poor Old Horse CD |
The
programming of an album or a live performance is actually as important as the
quality of the singing or storytelling. It’s what makes the whole more than the
sum of the parts.
You
can be the best performer in the world but if everything you do sounds the same
then you will soon lose your audience. They’ll become bored. You have to vary
the material even if that means putting in a few items which aren’t necessarily
your favourites. I love singing ballads—long serious songs with deep
stories—but you can’t do too many of those in one ‘show’. You have to put in a
few simple—even silly—songs to break them up. That’s often where my stories
come in—many of them are tall tales with a twist at the end so they work well
amongst the traditional ballads where everyone finishes up dead!
(Over
Christmas there was an old documentary of Bruce Springsteen explaining how much
time and energy he’d spent on working on his The River album. In order to get
it just right he recorded far more material than he could possibly use and it
only fell into place when he decided to make it a double album—and even then he
couldn’t use it all.)
You can see a video/slide show of When That I Was A Little Tiny Boy from Poor Old Horse here:
It's been one of my most popular songs, which took me by surprise!
(Programming a CD is much easier than it used to be to do an LP and even more so a cassette, where you had to get both sides round about the same time.)
I’ve
always felt that programming has been my strongest suit. I’m a good singer, a
good storyteller, a good guitarist but it’s my ability to put those skills
together into a better than good performance which has enabled me to work
professionally for nearly 40 years and counting. By programming I don’t mean
working out a set list and sticking to it but thinking on your feet and knowing
what should come next. I think it’s useful to have a list of what you might or
could do but sometimes it becomes obvious that it’s not going to work.
Every
audience is different and even if you’ve been there before you can’t be
absolutely sure what they are going to be like. You suddenly find that this
audience, on this occasion, is not up for listening to anything too serious; or
they might not want to join in and sing choruses; they might not like stories;
or they might just seem half asleep and even a bomb wouldn’t liven them up. If
you plough on with what you were intending, with no regard to the feed back,
then you’ll fail. You have to read the audience and vary what you do
accordingly. (There are also restrictions placed on you by unexpected
circumstances…. The outside world can impinge and cause you to add or subtract
items.)
I
usually go along with a programme sketched out but I rarely stick to it. It’s a
guide rather than set list—a menu to choose from not a set meal. The ones I do
stick to are often the openers and closers—but not always even those. Very
often the person on before me will sing or tell something which suggests an
ideal item for me to start with. Back in the days when I was doing 4 or 5 folk
club gigs every week I didn’t even do that, I’d do it all completely off the
cuff.
(This
is all assuming you’re working solo, of course, if you are in a group or have
accompanists then you’ve got to consider what the others want to do and whether
they’re happy putting in an item which you haven’t practised, or leaving out
one which they particularly like…)
The
picture (left) is of the set list I prepared for the Friday night concert at
Tenterden Folk Festival back in October. It was deliberately vague as I knew it
was to be a ‘round robin’ event with all the artists on the stage doing 2 songs
each and then round and round again. (I actually like that format
occasionally.) In fact I don’t think I did any of the material on the list.
Inspired by what the people before me had just done I started with a song and a
story and for my second turn did another song and a story. After that it was
expected that I did a song and a story every time so I did and everyone
commented on how well it worked.
You
always have to consider the whole event. Even if you are the main performer—or
even the only performer! You have to consider the atmosphere and the feel of
the audience. We’ve all experienced the terrible performer who goes on for
hours and completely kills the atmosphere! You have to find some way of
remedying that. And if there are several performers it’s no good just telling
that story you had planned regardless of what has just happened. It might even
mean you not doing your ‘standout’ item but doing something throw-away instead
just for the common good and the sake of a satisfying event for the audience.
(The ability and willingness to do that is part of what I consider to be
‘professionalism’.)
If
you'd like to know more have a look at my web site
http://www.petecastle.co.uk
You
may also like to consider subscribing to Facts & Fiction storytelling
magazine (
http://factsandfiction.co.uk ) It's quarterly and covers
all aspects of storytelling with news, reviews etc
My
You Tube channel contains a lot of videos of both songs and stories.
Have
a look at the previous postings below and if you have any comments please post
them. I'd welcome your (constructive) comments and would be very pleased if you
did sign up to 'follow' me!
No comments:
Post a Comment