It’s tough finding sure hits for your live band to play. You want songs that are going to fill the floor every time you play them. I’ve been playing the Billy Idol version of Mony Mony since 1985 and it’s STILL filling the floor when my band plays it. Am I sick of the song? Yes I am. Am I sick of seeing a crowd of people dancing and yelling and having a great time watching me play the song. No I’m not.
I’ll play pretty much any song there is as long as it fills the dance floor. I learned by sad experience that the way to keep a crowd is to play what they want to hear. I was in a band for a while that had the philosophy that if we played songs we love then the fact that we were going to be having a great time playing them would rub off on the audience. We figured if they saw that we were having fun then it would be fun for the audience too. Well, we were successful to a degree but we weren’t successful enough to get very many return bookings. The music we loved was fun for us to play and we had a great time but it wasn’t very danceable. A problem that a lot of advanced musicians have is we hear things that your normal music lover doesn’t. As a musician we break things down when we listen and listen in more detail than your average club goer. So we usually like more complex music which a lot of the time doesn’t lend itself to getting a party going.
That doesn’t mean that you have to play things you don’t particularly like all the time. It just means that on occasion you have to play a standard to keep the crowd happy. The good thing is that I like most of the standards that people enjoy dancing to. They’re generally really good songs that are fun and most of the time surprisingly easy to play. So it’s a good thing to have a few sets of top rated dance songs in your repoitore.
One of the challenges of being in a band is getting everybody a copy of the song so they can learn it and have the same version of the song as everyone else in the band. The iMix feature on iTunes allows you to create lists that everyone in your band can access in one place so you can be sure they can get the song and have the correct version. It’s a great way to keep everyone in the band on the same page while learning songs.
I will be putting together some Instant Set Lists for you to download from iTunes using the iMix method. I have chosen these songs from my own experience with what fills the dance floor as well as using top requested songs from DJ resources such as Mobile Beat. The DJ’s know what will fill the floor so why not use some of their experience when choosing songs for your band?
This is the first of my Instant Set Lists that I will compile for the Song Selection category. It’s called Instant Dance Setlist 1. These songs will fill up the dance floor so download them and start learning!
Download: Live Musician Central Dance Set List 1 from iTunes
