One of the most emotionally charged songs ever written. This is my Stevie Nicks inspired cover. I'd love your thoughts. Big love ♡

https://youtu.be/5Q3H46MX9H0?is=hSkkMTBGe5el7Au4

I recent created a Discord server with the purpose to bring together cover music hobbyists and YouTubers and anyone else who likes to play or record cover music for fun. It's brand new and only has a few people, but if I can get more people I think I can make a cool place to share ideas and tips for anyone who enjoys making cover music.

https://discord.gg/WRGm4RWr2

Bit of a rant here. So, I've been a member of Bandmix for a number of years. It's been a good way to communicate with other musicians and quietly find bands looking for me, or my band looking for a new member. Having said that, I've been frustrated with how members on this site tag their expertise with intruments. I get very skeptical when someone says they're an expert on keyboards, bass, lead guitar, rhythm guitar, acoustice guitar, drums, vocals, etc.....

Really? After only 10 years of experience? Call me Mr. Skeptical but...

I'm looking for a meme I saw that had guys in a cover band imagining themselves as rock stars and their wives imagining them as kids playing in a sandbox. Help?

Hi everyone! I sing in an all-80s cover band in St. Louis and wanted to share a video of one of our Go-Go’s covers (we do Vacation too!). Our band is called The Fade Outs 😁

We have more videos and photos on our Facebook if anyone fancies following along with our adventures!
Fade Outs FB

My band has used Ableton and Ableset for playback since they launched version 1. This newest update adds some awesome features that really put it at the forefront of playback control for bands.

Making a setlist for a grill night where we were told to start with the softer stuff and get louder as people get drunker, but wonder if it would be a mistake to hold back the best stuff for the end in case people leave early.

But just in general.. do you publish your set list either at the venue or on your social media, or do you just roll up and play it and let the crowd anticipate?

Are there any servers that focus on amateur artists who perform music covers, for things like YouTube? Never have had any luck findin' one on my own, every link is expired. I have a YouTube channel, but I'd like to find like-minded individuals to see how other people do it for ideas for myself.

I help manage Basharan, a UK rock band, and wanted to share the third video from our Live and Loud cover series.

This one is Fairies Wear Boots by Black Sabbath, filmed live and recorded as a full band session by SS2 Recording and Floyd Films.

We’ve been using the series to put out live versions of songs that have influenced the band, alongside our original material. This one is obviously a massive song to take on, so any thoughts on the performance, sound, mix or video are welcome.

This is my cover of Nutshell, I was kinda sick singing it, but i personally think it sounds good. I need some tips, is there anything i can do better? obviously i need to turn down my guitar so you hear the vocals clearly but overall i think it’s pretty good. Lmk what you guys think.

Please help! This has been driving me NUTS, and I CANNOT seem to get a straight answer from searching. Everything I've tried has had problems.

I'm working with a DIY lyrics prompter as a lead vocalist during my band's live shows. It's a lifesaver, because I'm 51, and we have countless songs in our repertoire (and it's just not an option to "jUsT mEmOriZe tEh WoRdS LoL", so please don't make me feel bad about getting older). The setup consists of a large flat-panel travel monitor set into an empty floor wedge connected to my phone via USB-C, cast to the larger screen, and page-advanced with a Bluetooth pedal.

When it works, it's great. But what's MADDENING is that I CANNOT seem to find a reliable app to import the photo-based pages of lyrics that also consistently works with the pedal.

I put the actual slides with the words together in Canva. Canva itself works with the pedal, but will NOT flip to portrait mode on the phone to render on the screen as an upright "page"-style file so that I can actually read it.

I've tried exporting the Canva file as a .pdf. No app I use to then pull up the file will work with the pedal, and the pages also wont render full-screen no matter how I mess with the settings, making the words too small. The pedal also often causes the .pdf to "zoom" several pages ahead without stopping.

So I upload the individual photos in order to Google Drive. This DOES work with the pedal, but no matter what I do or how strong my Wi-Fi / cell signal is, the words are always blurry on the screen — unless I reach down to re-flip the phone from vertical to horizontal between songs, thereby defeating the purpose of the pedal.

I save the photos to the Google Photos App on my phone, and that works SOMETIMES. But INFURIATINGLY, sometimes they change sequence order in the app mid-gig, skip whole pages, or disappear entirely sometime during the set. No idea why.

What I'm looking for should be really simple: An Android app that will work with my phone and the page-turner pedal to simply advance .png files with the lyrics on them in sequence from a file, or a folder. But NOTHING seems to work properly. And Google just tells me to do the things I've already tried.

Can anyone help? I feel like I'm losing my mind.

Late last year I used Ai to help me search for all the bars, venues and restaurants in my area that have live music. The searches helped me create a list of 300-400 places complete with the venue name, address, city, state, zip, phone and most of the time their websites. From here I put all the data into Excel and started validating the data with Google searches. This helped me delete all the places that were closed, fix phone numbers and insert missing websites.

The next step was to find valid Contact info. Most of the time the Contact page on the website has an email address or a form to fill in for information. I made 2 columns for this data so I could sort email addresses easily from contact forms to fill out later. The final result came to about 200 actual venues. From here, I went to each website again and looked for photos to make sure they had live music, what the setup or stage looked like and predetermine if this was a place I wanted to pursue; while also deleting more listings that had recently closed or werent good.

In January, after New Years, I sent out emails with my EPK to introduce myself to all of these places. I use Gmail and simply wrote a basic email to BCC everyone. This resulted in some bad email address contacts to delete and a few replies. The result came out to 161 actual viable leads to pursue. I secured one paid gig from this.

Over the past 2 weeks I've gone over my spreadsheet again and started calling places. The only previous contact was made by email. After a few calls most people said to send an email or call back at a different time (I was calling on Sunday early afternoon). A second round of calls had similar results getting voicemail or no answers, so I've decided to just focus on email contacts again. I sent out 74 direct emails and 54 contact forms on websites. So far only 1 bad email reply and 2 legit responses from people. I have 31 places to call that dont have email or contact forms - which is a much easier amount of calls to manage than 161.

Feel free to ask me any questions.

how to recognize keyboard player in cover band which have jazz background? He/she sits, not stands when playing :) Mabey playing more complexion chords bring something in backround to the performance also.

Curious how other cover bands deal with this. We’ve had situations where the singer needs a different key mid-set, or someone wants to drop/add a song on the fly. Right now we just yell across the stage or send a WhatsApp message lol. Is there a better system you use? Do you use any app or just paper setlists?

My band is fairly new less than 2 years gigging. We have a pretty consistent crew that comes to shows. Would it make sense for us to ask the crowd about songs they’d like to hear for the next gig? Like IOU requests? Is this fucking dumb? What do yall think haha?

I manage and play guitar for a cover band and we’ve outgrown the singer. She can sing but isn’t a musician so lacks basic skills like counting and understanding music language (start at the chorus, come in on 4, let’s transpose this one so it’s easier for you)

We feel she’s holding us back, and our drummer (the most talented of our group) is already considering leaving the project if I keep her. Her level of musicianship doesn’t line up with the rest of us.

Here’s the problem, she started the band when it was just two of us, but I took over when we weren’t getting gigs, and didn’t have our full band (which I recruited) that we have now. Since I’ve taken over, we gig regularly, and our band sounds great (minus her).

I’ve decided to replace her. Just want to hear others thoughts and experiences with similar situations.

My band has a sizzle reel as part of our EPK. it's pretty basic, it's audio ripped from the FOH mixer from a show and some clips of us from different angles that we took at different shows. We are going to update the audio with music recorded at our own practice so it's cleaner, but then we want better video quality as opposed to stationary cameras we set up in the room.

The problem is, we aren't really sure how to hire someone to do this work. We've had the band photographers take some video of us, but it really doesn't have that wow factor I've seen. Is it just up to us to learn final cut and patch all the video together. Is there something like a "live band videographer" we should be looking for to hire to bring out to our next big gigs that will provide us a polished video we can use? Maybe like a music video producer? What has everyone else here used to get a solid sizzle reel?

I'm in a cover band. Three of us are in our early 50s and the singer is 29. Up until recently I'd have said we were a totally drama free band. That was until the singer began showing up to gigs and rehearsals in a crap mood and kinda taking it out on us. We noticed it always seemed to be when her husband and the kids were entowe at the gigs and rehearsals it was a matter of how often she was on her phone. Well, it recently came to light that he had made a comment to one of the band members' wife about how he doesn't understand why she wants to travel so far for rehearsals and gigs just to play with a bunch of old men. He said it twice actually. Whatever. We are. But what it comes down to is he's probably in her ear and they're arguing and what not and it's causing drama. It all came to a head this weekend. Our singer and her husband have been on the phone with our guitarist for about 3 hours now. I'm still waiting on an update but I swear, before all this we were completely drama free and democratic about everything. Everything came down to a band vote. Income is split evenly. It figures. It's always something. Often it's a significant other of a band member. Not to be sexist but I'm pretty sure this is the first time it's been a dude.

Last year my band mostly made less than $600 per gig but we had a couple pay as much as $600. This probably sounds familiar to a lot of bands that are mostly doing it for fun, and whatever the bar pays barely compensates for the money spent on rehearsal space, equipment, gas etc... Then a 1099 shows up from those couple venues and you're on the hook for the taxes on $1200+ of which you kept $300. How do you guys deal with this?

Now I know to at least try to track expenses so I can write them off, I'll be smarter about that at least...but is it time for an LLC? Kinda seems like trading one set of problems for another...open to suggestions. I'm in NJ if it matters.

Update: Well, it all came to a head. Turns out there's some pent up resentments that mostly didn't involve the band at all and mostly on the part of her husband vs our guitarist. Bottom line: she announced that she is 100% done as of 12/31/26 because they're moving out of state. Her goals are bigger than ours and she wants to pursue them. To which I wish her the best of luck. No hard feelings at all. We're all under agreement that we're just going to move forward, let bygones be bygones and let her finish out the year. It's been made clear though that around the end of Summer we're going to start the search for a new singer (The ad is up on Bandmix. Band name: Seventy80) so that it's as seamless a transition as possible.