How to build a setlist for a gig

The timing arithmetic and the honest song-picking that most setlist advice skips.

Most advice about setlists is about the shape of the night — open strong, dip in the middle, finish big. That advice is fine, and you will find it everywhere, including further down this page.

But a set that fails on the night usually fails for duller reasons. It runs eleven minutes long. It has three songs in a row nobody has played since January. It puts two capo-4 songs either side of a drop-D one. None of that is a taste problem. It is arithmetic and honesty, and both are fixable at the kitchen table a week beforehand.

Start with minutes, not songs

The usual rule of thumb says a 45-minute set is ten to twelve songs. That is a reasonable first guess and a poor plan, because it quietly assumes every song is the same length. Your set has a 2:40 opener and a 6:30 closer in it.

Work in minutes. And count the two things that actually eat a set:

Your real song lengths. Not the album times — yours. If you stretch the outro of one song every single time, it is a four-minute song, not a three-minute one.

The gaps. This is the one almost nobody adds up. Tuning, a word to the audience, someone finding a capo, counting in. Twenty seconds between songs is brisk. Thirty is normal. In a twelve-song set that is eleven gaps — between 3½ and 5½ minutes of your slot, spent doing nothing.

So a 45-minute slot, planned properly:

• Target 42 minutes, not 45. Leave yourself a minute or two of slack.
• Eleven songs averaging 3:30 is 38½ minutes.
• Ten gaps at 20 seconds is another 3½.
• Total: about 42. That fits.

Add one more song and you are over. That is the difference between a plan and a guess, and it takes five minutes to do.

Why overrunning matters more than you think

At a pub or function gig the end time is rarely yours. There is a curfew, a bar to close, a DJ to follow, or three other bands behind you. A band that overruns is the band that gets cut off mid-song, and it is remembered by the person who books the room.

Running short has its own cost — an empty ten minutes at a wedding is conspicuous — which is why the spare songs below are worth having.

Pick from what you can actually play

Here is the honest bit. There is a difference between the songs in your repertoire and the songs you could play well tonight, and the gap between them is where gigs go wrong.

Before you sequence anything, sort your candidates into three piles:

1. Solid. You could play it tired, in a noisy room, with a monitor mix you hate.
2. Probably fine. You know it, but you have not played it in a while.
3. Not yet. You are still thinking about the changes while you play them.

Build the set out of pile one. Take one, at most two, from pile two, and put them early — while everyone is concentrating and before anyone is tired. Nothing from pile three, however much you want to play it. A gig is not a rehearsal with an audience.

If that leaves you short of songs, you have learned something more useful than a setlist: you know exactly what to rehearse this week. (This is the job SetForge's rehearsal tracking does — it keeps the three piles for you, based on what you have actually practised.)

Then order it

This is the part every article covers, so, briefly. Open with something familiar and mid-to-high energy — a statement of what you sound like, not your biggest song. Build. Drop the energy somewhere in the middle so the peak has somewhere to climb from. Put your strongest material near the end. Finish on something people recognise.

The parts the articles tend to skip:

Keys. Two songs back to back in the same key can blur into one long song, especially at similar tempos. But a jarring jump is worse — landing in E♭ right after a song that ended ringing in E sounds like a mistake rather than a choice. Moving to a nearby key, or one a fourth or fifth away, tends to feel like a lift. If you have your keys written down, this takes one pass down the list. (SetForge tracks key and capo per song — see keys, capo and transposing.)

Capo and tuning changes. Every capo move, retune to drop D, or instrument swap is dead air, and dead air is where a room's attention goes. Cluster songs that share a capo position or tuning. If a change is unavoidable, put it where someone is going to talk anyway — and decide in advance who is talking.

Who starts it. Being clear on which instrument counts in, and how, removes the most common three seconds of confusion on stage.

Write down what happens between the songs

A setlist that is only a list of titles is half a plan. The gaps are part of the set, and if nobody has decided what happens in them, the answer on the night is silence and tuning.

You do not need a script. You need to know which two or three gaps have something in them — an introduction, the one story worth telling, the thank-you to whoever booked you — and that everything else is a straight run into the next song.

Mark those on the list. Everyone gets a copy, including the person at the desk if there is one.

Take two songs you are not going to play

Keep two solid, well-known songs off the bottom of the list. They cover the three things that actually happen: the audience wants one more, you are somehow ten minutes short, or a song has to be dropped mid-set because a string went.

Knowing what the spare is beforehand is the whole point. Deciding it on stage is how a band ends up playing something half of them do not remember.

After the gig, mark it up

The best setlist you will ever write is the one you have played three times.

Take the sheet home with a pen on it. Which song lost the room. Which transition was clumsy. Where you actually ran to. Two minutes of that after a gig is worth more than an hour of planning before one, because it is the only part of this based on evidence rather than guesswork.

That is also the version of the set worth keeping, because next time you are not starting from scratch — you are starting from something that already worked.