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Guide4 min

How to prepare a setlist for a gig

The running order is the easy part. Getting the same programme into every head and every device before you play is the hard one.

— Eutepio

A setlist is not a list of songs. It is the plan for the evening — and you find that out at the venue, when someone is playing last rehearsal's order and the guitarist has no sheet for the third song.

This is about avoiding those evenings. Most of it you can do at home; at the venue one check is left.

Running order first, everything else after

A good set has a shape. A few habits worth considering:

  • Open with what you play best. The first song goes to nervous people in a cold room. It is not the moment for the new one.
  • Do not put two slow ones together. Energy that drops is harder to lift than it looks.
  • Group the tuning and capo changes. Every retune is extra silence.
  • Keep one song up your sleeve. For an encore, or for the moment something falls apart.

Fill in the song lengths

Almost everyone skips this one, and it pays off the most. When every song carries its length, the setlist tells you when the set ends.

The promoter who said "you have forty-five minutes" meant it. Seventy minutes of material means somebody will be waving you off halfway through the last song.

Lengths help the other way round too — finding out you have ten minutes left to fill is better done at home than on stage.

Breaks and notes belong in the setlist

A pause between blocks is part of the programme just as much as the songs. When it is written down, nobody has to ask about it.

The same goes for per-song notes: singer talks after this one, second verse guitar only, ending on three. Everything you would otherwise have to remember, or say out loud five times anyway.

Send the programme to the whole band

This is where it usually falls apart. The setlist in the chat, the sheets in an email from last week, two different versions of the fourth song.

In Eutepio you send the whole programme as one file — it holds the order, the songs and the attachments you pick: PDFs, sheets, photos and optionally backing tracks. Whoever gets it previews it and decides what to add to their own library. Personal notes and drawings are not sent; those stay yours.

One thing about it: the file is not encrypted. Send it by a route you trust.

At the venue: one check instead of ten questions

When you arrive, run the pre-gig check. The leader asks once and the whole band answers. The result is a list of what is about to go wrong:
  • who is missing a song from the active setlist
  • who is missing a sheet or a PDF
  • who has a different setlist loaded than you do
  • whose battery is running out
  • who has their audio muted and will not hear the metronome
  • which songs cannot be played from, having neither lyrics nor an attachment

Run it when you arrive, not five minutes before you start. Missing attachments can only be fixed while everyone is still on the same network and there is time.

While you play

The rest is simple. The leader changes songs and the band follows — and each person decides for themselves whether to follow the scrolling, the metronome and the backing track as well. Cues like solo or last chorus appear to everyone at once.

And if the leader's phone dies, a member you nominated in advance can take the role over. A person has to accept it — nothing switches over on its own.

The short version

  1. Build the order and keep one spare song.
  2. Fill in the lengths so you know when the set ends.
  3. Write the breaks and the notes into the setlist.
  4. Send the whole programme to the band as one file.
  5. At the venue, run the pre-gig check.

The first four happen at home. The fifth takes a minute and heads off the kind of problem that otherwise gets solved to the sound of applause.

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