How many live shows have you played?

The Lounge General Discussion
#1

I’m interested in how many of you play live and how much you got out to play live.

I maybe played around 200 - 300 shows over the last 20 years. Started in a funk/crossover band, later played hip hop and electronic music live. Some small gigs and some bigger shows with up to 500 people.
I only played around 15 techno live sets so far.

Lately i’ve become more interested in only making music at home or with friends. Also because i got tinnitus from a show 2 years ago. Since then i’ve to be very careful with my ears. Right now i’m at a point where i stopped doing shows completely because the stress of performing live isn’t working very well with my tinnitus.
First i was very sad but about it now i can accept it and actually feel a bit relieved. Because as much as i love playing live it has also been a somehow stressy situation for me.

How about you?
And it’s not all about the amount of shows, i’m more interested in your experiences and what you got out of it.

Btw this was me 20 something years ago playing drums on the keyboard with boxing gloves. It was just a short part of our show but people loved it.

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And this is me to the left at one of my very rare Doktor der Filsofie gigs. Some funny rap type stuff with self drawn comic videos in the background.
bru und hades

Playing melodica on stage isn’t a good idea. Lots of microphone and tuning problems. And the sound of that instrument isn’t that great anyway. I don’t know why we did it. Probably because we were young and dumb. But it’s a nice picture.

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#2

0 shows.

Had first one lined up and pandemic hit two weeks before. Hoping to do something though.

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#3

Well under 100. More like 10, unless I count the gigs with the church orchestra, which might bring up the number to 50 I guess - the church gig was once a month but I forgot how many years I played with them.

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#4

just a handful, but dozens of backyard and private events. not really my thing but techno is, esp live hardware and i got curious so i tried it out. def happy doing it in privacy by myself or very small engagements with friends.

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#5

Prolly close to 500 between 1996 and 2012.

Playing live was my drug, but the older I got I just couldn’t afford it. Being in the DIY realm and never getting paid more than a few hundred dollars, if anything made it too taxing. I do want to try and play some live shows with an electronic setup. Prior it was all punk and metal. Band stuff.

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#6

I’m in the same boat as you, OP. Probably close to 300 or moreish shows in the last 25 years. I’ve been in bands since I was 17, mostly weekend-type touring up to a few hours away, tons of local shows, and a small handful of 2 week tours.

Experience-wise, I feel like I continue to get a lot out of it. I’ve played mostly saxophone and guitar, but also (especially the past 5 years) samplers, synths, weird shit… There’s something to being on-the-spot of playing live. Everything I’ve done and do has an element of improvisation. I’ve really allowed my solo sets to go wherever I feel without over-thinking it. But, my favorite playing is with trios and duos with a drummer/percussionist. There’s a wild magic in small numbers when improvising or exploring a composition.

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#7

Played 1 show in 2011, enjoyed it thoroughly, got £50 in my pocket for doing a pretty shoddy singer songwriter set with a looper pedal, guitar and omnichord. Got blind drunk after with the proceeds and tbh don’t ever feel need to do another, been there, done that and have the t shirt. But then I play music as a hobby and have bugger all ambition :laughing:.

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#8

maybe around 200-300? I really want to see if I can’t come up with a list!

I started out with rock music with bands and then moved into solo acoustic guitar + sampler, then into solo shows with backing tracks.

My first electronic show was a Reason session file with loops that I merely soloed + muted! Pretty awesome :slight_smile: then basically karaoke where I’d play a backing track and sing.

I’m learning the Octatrack this year so I can do more dynamic electronic music solo shows - but the exciting news [secret] is that I just got some band members for live performances starting this summer! :partying_face:

One thing I’ve learned a lot from is playing new material live - the idea of “writing the song on stage” where you can see how people react, or how something feels way too long, etc.

The other thing is that I was scared/not confident in my career so I didn’t spend enough money on good cables, good cases, etc. My first electronic shows were on TV trays!!!

Excited to hopefully bump my show numbers into the 500 range in the next decade! :cowboy_hat_face:

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#9

Done a lot of djing when I was 18-22 maybe 20 or more.
Before that lots of orchestral stuff with 20, 30 people doing violin.

This was really rewarding experience.
It’s been now 20 years that I have not done anything in front of people. Mostly by fears, and lack of « wanting to do it ».
Might do it someday, I guess I have to do it to prove myself, that I can make people enjoy a 45 minutes show :blush:

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#10

I’d say a couple hundred give or take. I hated it. Every moment of it, except for that brief time on stage when you’d lose yourself in it. Once I was on stage I was calm and focused and loved it. Made me sick with anxiety before every show and fragile after every show. Couldn’t take the emotional toll despite the cathartic physical aspects so I quit. Funny thing is I was a pretty damn good performer and frontman and it for better or worse overshadowed my mediocre music. Like living in New York and LA, I don’t miss it for a moment.

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#11

do you still have your set all ready to go? (assuming it was an electronic set)

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#12

That was my drug. When the crowd lost themselves at the same time was like (redacted).

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#13

I haven’t played any yet, but I’m only 47 years old.

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#14

Probably well over 1000 dj gigs in the last 25 years but only around 10 to 15 live gigs. Lots of those dj gigs I could have played live but I always struggled to be happy with my live setup and what it offered. When i did play live it was mostly at showcase type events or one off things that alllowed something different. Those live gigs were nothing special but I just enjoyed playing out live.

I’ve been spending the last few years chopping and changing a live set and constantly changing hardware and never being happy with it. Dj sets just so much easier and I mix in my own tracks to my sets.

Will always be planning that live set though, even if it rarely happens.

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#15

Between 2000 and now, I’d guess something like 125, synths and keyboards playing black American music of varying styles. Between 2015 now, live electronic stuff … 10 shows.

If you include jams of wildly varying quality, that adds another 250 I’d guess.

I’ve been very fortunate to play with friends who are professionals of varying degrees.

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#16

I can’t remember; a steady stream of live gigs in various bands or random events from the late '90s to early 2010s. Plenty of DJ gigs at the same time, from tiny back-room pub nights up to several of the major London arts venues such as the South Bank Centre or the Barbican.

The biggest was being put on stage at the Roundhouse to open for Holger Czukay when I thought I’d be safely hidden out of public view by the mixing desk - not at all intimidating; or maybe when playing in Damo Suzuki’s band at the 1234 Festival in a big tent with so many people in the band it was nigh-on impossible to know who was doing what or hear anything through the monitors. One favourite was playing bass on the Funktion 1 sound system at the inimitable Corsica Studios; I also played to literally two people and a dog when the preceding band went on far longer than promised thanks to a ludicrous soundcheck so everyone else had left to get the tube home by the time we got to play.

Then I moved to rural France and have probably played ten to twenty gigs in the last decade, half of them in London or Germany, though it’s probably through lack of trying. Not being able to drive doesn’t help either; in London I could get the bus to most places with two flight cases of small synths and FX (I once fell asleep on the night bus back from one gig on Oxford Street and woke up in Walthamstow bus garage - the flight cases were still there but all the stickers on them had gone, probably just from blundering about), hitch a ride with whoever else in the band had a van, or venues would pay for a taxi home. Not possible so easily here without being part of a real-world (ie not online) musical network any more.

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#17

…around 2000…at least half of them with the ot as the backbone…never failed me once…

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#18

…let me add…that’s pre pandemic head count…
post pandemic head count is 3…

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#19

This reminded me of a NYE long, long ago where after a DJ set I woke up on the 25 (this was the bendy bus era) that had already stopped at Romford and turned back the other way!

I’ve never kept count of shows but started very young (like 12/13) in punk bands, then DJing for a few years in various forms before CDJs were a normal find in clubs - at one point I had an SP-202 that I would plug in and live sample to. That was surprisingly hard to nail, but you could do some very cool things with samples and the delay FX time.

I got into sound art and improvised sound performance, at first with turntables and then with tape players, unusual electronics (I still perform with a couple of STEIM crackleboxes) and things that weren’t really musical instruments - one really memorable performance was the opening of the Turner Contemporary in Kent where I made drones by dragging stacking chairs with rubber feet across the polished concrete floors of the corridors!

After a break for a few years of performing for various reasons I started playing in bands again, the one I’ve been in since 2015 has put out a 7”, 2 LPs and a few tapes. We toured the UK and EU quite a lot. Those experiences of getting to travel and play music with my good friends is definitely one of the best things I’ve done with my life save having kids. It also really changes how you think about buying/using/setting up gear, I’m always thinking about how I can make sure everything will pack into hand luggage, or survive being on the road for 2 weeks at a time.

After another break because of 2020, that band switched from being mainly instruments/post-punk to mainly electronic/techno which brought me here - we haven’t started playing shows again yet but are about to finish a (long time coming) EP and play shows again. I also went back to uni in 22 and started doing improvised solo performances again. Someone earlier mentioned getting lost in their performance - for me this is the setting where I feel that the most, and rediscovering that feeling/being compulsively drawn to it is a huge thing for me. Currently my favourite live setup is playing a closed feedback loop of with a sheet of steel, a pair of surface transducers and a shotgun mic…

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#20

I ended up buying my own Numark CDJs to take to venues that didn’t have them, and then occasionally using them as instruments in their own right, which was a lot of fun and something I should revisit.

Once I played a gig as a member of an ensemble under the name This Is Not Faust where I was mixing CD loops (the Numarks can do this really nicely) into the rest of the band through FX - it worked pretty well. Then the leaf blower full of hay was turned on us (as opposed to the audience in Faust gigs proper in previous eras…) and I tried very hard not to get grass in the equipment cases.

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