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Establishing Your Band: Building Repertoire

by Joel Falconer

It’s time to discuss repertoire production. This has to come before you actually go out and recruit members. 99% of bands skip this step and begin writing songs once they’ve put their band members together, but developing at least a decent amount of repertoire while you’re still on your own is a great idea.

For starters, it’s going to help you with auditions. You will not only be able to tell if members are capable of playing your style of music well, but they’ll be able to tell if they like playing it upfront. A common problem is that a band gathers up its members, the members hate the style of music being produced or just can’t agree on how to write it, and the band falls apart within a week.

You also maintain your control over the band this way. If you’ve developed the bulk of the material, then most of the band’s intellectual property belongs to you. The sound is also yours and you become indispensable. This makes it almost impossible for a ‘mutiny’ of some kind to occur, especially if you’ve followed my advice in previous posts and set up the proper agreements, checks and balances.

Make sure you have a fair stash of songs ready. I’d say no less than twenty, but this number is up to you. This shows leadership and commitment to your band members, gives you enough material to plan ahead pretty far in the future, and twenty songs—more than the amount of songs on most albums—really reinforces the maintenance of the leader’s control discussed above.

So, in short: always develop a stash of material before you invite others to join your band.

For some more thoughts on why it’s important to build repertoire before putting together band membership, read this article.

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The Establishing Your Band Series
Part One: What Direction Are You Going In?
Part Two: What’s This Band About?
Part Three: What You Need in Band Members
Part Four: Governing Models
Part Five: The Band Agreement
Part Six: Building Repertoire
Part Seven: Recruiting New Members
Part Eight: Learning & Arranging Repertoire

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Posted in Songwriting, Starting your band on June 18th, 2007

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About Musician’s Notebook

Do you know which essential questions to ask yourself when starting a band? What is your strategy for reaching an audience? Which tactics are you using to promote? Can you answer in 4 seconds or less what the strongest theme of your music is? Most musicians answer these questions with a shrug and glazed-over eyes, but they're just a few of the things a musician must know to create exposure and audience. Read Musician's Notebook with Joel Falconer and discover how to make your music sharp, focused and successful.

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