Whew! It’s taking forever to get this stuff right…
What stuff? Well, song selection is the biggest thing. How do you pick songs that A: Everyone wants to play? B: Doesn’t put the non-musician in the audience to sleep? Even with all the great music over the last 50 years, it’s tough to find songs that meet these criteria. Pop songs are usually so repetitious that they’re a snooze-fest to play, but it’s that repetition that makes them popular. Songs that are fun (difficult) to play usually aren’t repetitious, so they are usually only popular with people that like all the music from that particular band.
It turns out there’s some songs over the years that have become popular and are fun to play, those are the songs we’re focusing on. You can see our set list here.
Secondly, there’s the equipment.
I’ve been working on automating sound and lighting so that we can travel light and still have a professional show. It’s a LOT of work. Literally hundreds of hours have gone into this aspect of After Dark. We are as faithful as possible to the original artist when playing one of their songs, which means the sounds we use change on a song by song basis. Lighting is a bit easier because it doesn’t have to match the original, but it still takes a lot of time to make it interesting but not distracting.
There’s been talk about starting a YouTube channel to show off all the work we’ve done, and how other bands can do the same thing. I’ll put that in the “Everything is working and we’ve got more songs down than we need and now I’m bored” category, so expect to see it soon 🙂