Chips fall. Em and Am seem to always come back, despite our best efforts. We do have atleast 2 numbers in Bm these days.

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What kind of considerations do you employ when putting together your setlist order of songs?

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Set list is usually arranged to have 3 rockers, take it way down and then build it back up to the final closer.

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Per Insect Dave, the saddest of all keys...

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ha, actually the saddest key according to Nigel Tufnel in Spinal Tap is D minor....!
We have a lot of songs in the same key but the trick is to make sure the melody or tempo is noticeably different from one song to the next. The key doesn't make as much difference as the vibe of the song....

I'm not surprised that Am is so heavily used in surf. It's really easy to play on the guitar, and plus it just sounds freaking good Hard to put my finger on it but it's probably my favorite key. Dm is another winner... somehow in the Deadbeats the vast majority of our covers ended up in Dm. I don't know what's up with that

Aaron wrote:

The first surf set I ever played happened to have every tune in E (one was major, the rest minor). No one noticed; no one cared.

I'm sure you're right, but I've realized that once I developed a more analytical ear as a surf fan that overdoing it with one key can actually get tiring. I particularly remember getting bored with nearly every song being in E at a Dick Dale show. Sacrilege I know, but man one riff-rocker in E after another really got tiring. And enough with the harmonics at every possible opportunity! Though the biggest problem was probably that the vibe of the songs themselves was too similar. I totally agree that writing songs with distinct moods will go a long way to make the key irrelevant.

whistledixie wrote:

What kind of considerations do you employ when putting together your setlist order of songs?

We listed songs by mood of the song before it, with an eye to the over-arching flow of the whole setlist. Then if we realized that too many songs in a row were in the same key we'd get self conscious and shuffle things around again

wooza wrote:

I'm not surprised that Am is so heavily used in surf. It's really easy to play on the guitar, and plus it just sounds freaking good Hard to put my finger on it but it's probably my favorite key. Dm is another winner... somehow in the Deadbeats the vast majority of our covers ended up in Dm. I don't know what's up with that

Aaron wrote:

The first surf set I ever played happened to have every tune in E (one was major, the rest minor). No one noticed; no one cared.

I'm sure you're right, but I've realized that once I developed a more analytical ear as a surf fan that overdoing it with one key can actually get tiring. I particularly remember getting bored with nearly every song being in E at a Dick Dale show. Sacrilege I know, but man one riff-rocker in E after another really got tiring. And enough with the harmonics at every possible opportunity! Though the biggest problem was probably that the vibe of the songs themselves was too similar. I totally agree that writing songs with distinct moods will go a long way to make the key irrelevant.

What i find happens when songs stay in the same key is that the same sort of phrasing gets used repeatedly because guitar players think to do certain things in certain positions, which makes it more repetitive sounding & more obvious (repetitive & obvious are two categories I try very hard to avoid).

For example, Journey to the Stars & Surf Rider. We do both & both are in the same key, but both have a very different vibe - we do Journey full on surf punk & the Surf Rider very mellow. But there are still a couple of melodic phrases in there that are so similar I wouldn't want them next to each other in the set.

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I tried this for our latest set list: Wrote down all the songs and the first tone and last one (not the geenral key). Depending on this I created a setlist that makes perfect sense to my ears.
Mood and speed of the songs are also important, of course. We always try to catch a littel breath with slower songs in the middle of our set (middle to end actually). Never open or end your set with a slow song, btw!
Oh and the topic: there are loads of Am and Em surf songs. And just out of curiosity I check our setlist. Out of 17 songs we have 4x Am and 3x Em. Maybe I should mention that we have vocals as well and had to transpose most songs to F or C. Found some A# and B as well.

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