Our band is in recess while I and 2 other guys have running repairs done on things, like our keyboard and main accordion player with a badly busted wrist and arm from falling off of a ladder, surgery on my injured and arthritic shoulder from too much music/ rsi and too many years , period !, our rubboard player having had a heart attack during a gig would you believe, now being fitted with a defib. unit,...etc.etc...it's been just one of those years I'm afraid!
Anyway..we still wanna rock n roll, and we're planning our late 2011 amd 2012 schedule on the basis we all come good, medically speaking.
One of the aims is to dispense with song sheets, music stands and the like.
We do sets from 45 mins. to 3 hours or more..involving anywhere between 15 and 45 songs.
I know everyone has their way of dealing with lyrics and song structures for gigs but short of playing every week, which we don't do, then I know for sure that I forget heaps of things...often I only need a key word prompt but sometimes it's more.
Any tips??...
And hey, I know plenty musos use prompts..I saw the Neville Bros. keyboard player using what looked like an iPad type unit propped up on his keyboard, another band I saw uses a teleprompter inside a foldback monitor cabinet with a rolling digital read-out of the lyrics ..and so on.
What do you guys and girls do?..especially if you have a long gig.
I make cd's with the songs I plan on singing and I and I play them during the week and sing along with the music. Sing when the on the ride of the fiddle, a trick Ganey taught me.
Le Piquant
I would never get on stage with a music stand, but thats just me. This isnt the kind of music you read from a stand.
One thing I do is visualize the attack, e.g. when me or our accordion player calls the song I start thinking about significant things about the song like the lyrics !
Another good way to remember is to HAND write all your lyrics. You can copy the lyrics at first, but the goal is to be able to hand write all the lyrics you know from memory !
Lyrics with a story-line that you even can visualize are easier to remember for me, than lets say all those variations about Jolie Catins, 'tit Mondes etc that always seem to force a man to go down the Grand Chemin tout seul to as far away places like Texas, after she ran away with l'Autr' at the Yaroslav Ball. F.i. for Cajun songs like Parlez nous a Boire should be easier to remember, than lets say Jolie Catin. Just heard a story from our (classically trained) fiddler that her mother stuck sheets of paper allover the kitchen cupboards above the sink to learn opera stuff before a performance while cooking. Imagine a Treville with Stan Laurel's smile standing in front of you holding a plate with a huge catfish while you sing Hackberry Hop might help you out? - Nout
..by necessity, we have a playlist of nearly 70 songs....I can't even begin to remember the lyrics of them all so I'll just try a few of your tips and also have technology as my insurance. Nothing worse than forgetting the lyrics in a song..I've done it a few times and resorted to mumbling skat style..sorta got away with it for a few seconds.LOL
The April 2011 Dewey Balfa Cajun & Creole Heritage Week
