Originally Posted By: Diki

Dennis, I know where you're coming from, and I understand the need if you want to have such a huge repertoire at your fingertips. The thing is, that's primarily for YOUR entertainment rather than your audience's. How much of them is repeat business, and how many tend to be seeing you for the first time? You've got to have a VERY dedicated fan before you need more than a couple of hundred songs or so, often FAR fewer than that... and you know what? They are FAR more likely to keep asking you to do the same favorites of theirs over and over than they are to tell you they are getting bored of the same couple of hundred!

Nothing wrong with having a huge on demand repertoire, but it's not exactly needed. Me, I tend to think of my time onstage as THEIR time, not mine. If I get bored of the same songs all the time (and trust me, they keep asking for them!), I simply think 'I'm playing four hours for them... that leaves 20 in the day where I can play what I want to at home'!


Actually Diki, it is designed primarily for the audience, that it also works for me personally is a bonus. I actively encourage requests at my gigs, and at my regular haunts audiences usually trust and enjoy the selection I make for any given night. But they will also come up and ask for quite different tunes, for various reasons and you would know what they are...

My system allows me to, mostly, give them exactly what they want...unlike in the band days where I would have to B.S and say "...not tonight I am sorry , but we WILL have that one ready for you at the next gig..." knowing full well the patron probably would NOT be at the next gig...

Believe me when I say in the near two years I have been running this system, just once did someone enquire about the device I was using. The thing with the iPad is it is so unobtrusive...with the lift up screen on the PA3 (same as those using ipads with a Tyros with ITS lift up screen) hiding most of it...it REALLY is not that noticeable.

And for mine, having that ability to make a patrons night just that bit happier and enjoyable because I could play THEIR song, far FAR outweighs any possible negatives of using the iPad charts.

I also do not have my head stuck in the book, as it were, because most of the tunes on my 935 list (and growing - just about to add the Pink Floyd, Muse and My Chemical Romance songlists, oh and some Chopin nocturnes and ballads)
I have usually played at home a few times so I am familiar with them as soon as the chart pops up..I am also, if you allow me to say, very good at sight reading so even if it's a tune I have not seen, there is usually no problem.... wink not the classicals though - they take a bit more work!!!! (:D LOTS more)

So really, having this large rep IS all for the audience.....not that I am making any criticisms of anybody, but those who simply play the same songs over and over again are possibly either scared to try something new, too comfortable in just repeating what they did last week, or are just a bit complacent.

The need to learn hundreds of songs so completely that it requires no assistance to recall, is daunting, maybe even impossible so I understand why those who eschew using charts do stick to a small but repeatable rep....it maybe a an incorrect view, but there you have it.

It is really easy to pick performers who have played songs to death, no matter HOW hard they try to disguise it, and this also permeates to the audience I think...

And playing new stuff all the time also stops it all becoming rather just like a "job" smile I have ALWAYS promised myself that if one day I woke up and discovered doing gigs had turned into a "job", that would be the day I quit!!

Dennis