What your band’s song list is probably missing

The key (the one you play, not the original)

This is the field bands skip most often, and the one that costs the most when it is wrong. Your singer does "Superstition" in Eb, not E. The original key is trivia. The key you actually perform it in is the one that prevents the bassist from starting in the wrong place while the singer waves from across the stage.

Write down the key you do. Not the key you used to do. Not the key the chart says. The one the band plays right now, today.

Tempo

A rough BPM. It does not need to be exact to the click, but it needs to be close enough to settle the "was it faster last time?" conversation. Drummers know what 120 feels like and what 140 feels like, and the difference between the two is the difference between a groove and a foot race.

If the band never agrees on the tempo, record a version at rehearsal, tap out the BPM, and write it down. That number does more work than an hour of arguing.

Structure

The shape of the song as your band plays it. Not the album version, yours. How many verses before the chorus. Whether you skip the bridge. Whether the last chorus repeats or goes straight to the ending. The stuff that is memorized until it is not, and then someone is playing a verse while the rest of the band is on the chorus.

This matters most for covers, where every band does a slightly different arrangement and "you know how it goes" stops working the moment a sub is on the gig.

Solos

Who solos, in what order, and for how long. This is the kind of information that lives entirely in collective memory until a sub steps on someone’s solo because nobody told them the sax goes first. A line in the song entry - "guitar 1x, keys 1x, out" - takes five seconds to write and prevents a real moment of confusion on stage.

Length

An approximate duration per song, in minutes. Not because anyone times songs with a stopwatch, but because building a set that fits a 45-minute slot is arithmetic when you have lengths, and guesswork when you do not. Four songs at five minutes plus six songs at three minutes is 38 minutes. That is a useful number. "We have ten songs" is not.

Why titles-only fails at the worst time

All of the fields above share one thing: they are obvious when the band is playing regularly and useless when they are not. You do not need the key written down when you played the song last Friday. You need it written down when the last time was two months ago and the singer changed it in between.

The band’s memory is a cache, not a database. It is fast and reliable when fresh, and wrong when stale. The song list is the database. If the database only has titles, the band is running on cache alone, and a cold start - a new sub, a tune you have not played in a while, a set you are building at midnight - exposes every gap.

Put it in one place

The format matters less than the completeness. A spreadsheet with these columns works. A shared note works, if everyone actually keeps it updated. Setlist keeps all of it in a shared library, which is convenient because the same data also builds the set and runs it on stage, but the principle is the same in any format: one list, all the fields, everyone can see it, and it is true.

If your song list is titles only right now, sit down for twenty minutes and fill in the keys and tempos for your top thirty tunes. That alone will save you a soundcheck argument on the next gig. If you want the version that the whole band shares and that runs the set on stage too, Setlist is free on the web and in open beta on iPhone.

Try it with your real repertoire. Then reply and tell me what fields your band needs that I have not thought of.