This week I had a client in touch about preparing a set of songs for a wedding they were singing at. Amongst other things, they wanted to know how best to prepare themselves for singing through a lengthy set of songs at a wedding. This is a great question, so I thought I’d share my general thoughts here.
1. Go through every song you have that you’d like to choose from, and grade them from 1 to 3
Songs that you grade as ‘1’ should be easy and basically effortless. Seriously, they should feel so easy they feel like nursery rhymes. Songs that you grade as ‘3’ should be still doable but are amongst the hardest in the set. Songs that you grade ‘2’ should be in the middle.
If you’re thinking “well THIS song is harder than 1 but easier than 2” you could call it ‘1+’, same with adding in ‘2+’, but the principle of grading your songs as easy, moderate and hard is important to get a sense of what you’ve got in your repertoire.
2. Pick a set that has an appropriate balance of these songs
As a general rule for ease of singing, your set should consist of around:
60% – 1-grade songs
30% – 2-grade songs
10% – 3 grade songs
As an additional level to think at, these grades should still be valid even if you’re doing the songs all in one go. So something you’ve graded as a ‘2’ shouldn’t become a ‘3’ or even more difficult just because it’s the last song at the gig. It should be a ‘2’ at your worst, not at your best.
2b. Change the key as appropriate to increase the ease of a song
An easy way to take a song from a ‘3’ to a ‘2’ is to change the key to make it less demanding on your voice. Most of the time this involves taking it down a few keys, but could still theoretically involve taking the key up (if too low and dragging your voice down – I’ve experienced this myself). This entire step is almost always going to happen, but it is still technically optional depending on the songs we are talking about. If you’ve got enough songs in your overall repertoire this should be manageable.
However, for some of you, you will find that almost all of your songs are graded as 2 or 3 and are just too hard to make balanced sets out of. You will need to have your song keys altered to adhere to rules 1 and 2. Be brutally honest with yourself about how each song matches your capacity to sing them. This is hard, and it’s only the most honest that can face up to having too many songs that outstrip their ability to sing them. Remember: there’s no prize for singing a difficult song in the original key. No-one is going to walk in with a medal or trophy for singing ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ or ‘Nessun Dorma’ in the original key. The only thing the audience cares about is hearing you sounding at your best. That’s it. Period. So be honest with yourself.
3. Arrange the setlist so have peaks and troughs of difficulty
As an example, if you’ve got six easy songs (‘1’), three moderate song (‘2’) and one difficult song (‘3’), then arranging them to go through a pattern like the following would be helpful:
1 1 2 1 1 2 1 2 3 1
This is not the only arrangement of songs that would work, but singing a long set is like a marathon, you’ve got to pace yourself. As you can see, the songs you find easy create a nice easy baseline trajectory, and the ‘2’ and ‘3’ songs make excursions from that, with the only ‘3’ becoming a climax at the end of the set. You can fiddle around with the order, but you want to observe this general peak/trough trend.
4. Test your set
If you’ve done the preceding steps right, your voice should be feeling better and better coming out of each song than when going in. As a result your making the set-list into a series of vocal springboards, each on setting you up to go into the next one. As such, you should be able to do your set multiple times through with no ill effects.
This is important for two reasons:
1) It will reveal any shortcomings in your assessments through each of the preceding steps:
Ex. 1: if you’re fatiguing by song 5 of your first run through, then there’s a big problem and keys/difficulty of every preceding song (as well as number 5) should be assessed.
Ex. 2: if you’re fatiguing by song 5 of your SECOND run through, then that’s far less of a problem, but review the keys anyway and check if just a simple key change in one or two songs would help eliminate this issue.
Ex. 3: if you’re fatiguing by song 5 of your THIRD run through, I wouldn’t worry about it. You’re likely on the right lines and have observed the earlier rules well to make it through two entire set-list run throughs, instead keep practicing the full set repeatedly to build stamina.
2) You’ll figure out whether the set-list arrangement works artistically
This will help you to develop style and flow throughout the set, though this is a topic for another article.
There you have it! This is the process I suggest most go through in relation to building their set-lists, at least from the perspective of vocal quality and longevity. I hope this helps you, and if you have any questions do let me know.
Learn More: Related Articles
If you want to learn more about performing and improving your own performances you may enjoy these related articles:
Pacing yourself: Micro- and macro- rests in songs and sets
Performance Workshop with Rhonda Carlson: Part 1
Performance Workshop with Rhonda Carlson: Part 2
Performance Workshop with Rhonda Carlson: Part 3
Ease, Strain, Time to think: Improve your performances easily
5 Simple Tips to Improve Your Performances