Originally Posted by: maggiorThe situation here on the east coast of the US is the same as Slipin describes.

I would say you should have some covers rehearsed that will go over well with the crowd there. You may need to go a couple of nights to just scope things out to see what goes over well with the crowd. If you play something the crowd doesn't know, they are likely to lose interest. Same thing if it's a rhythm-n-blues type crowd and you play GnR. You want to try to engage the crowd. You are there to entertain them, not yourself.

Take it from me, it's a lot of fun to play music that you may not normally listen too. I'm going over my part for Gladys Kight's version of "heard it through the grapevine" and it is a blast to play, even though it's not a song I would play in my car on the way to work.

Good luck with it!!!

Thanks :)

You bring up a very good point that I tend to either overlook or ignore when picking out songs to learn. I usually just pick songs that I love that I want to learn, but I should try learning a bunch of songs I normally don't listen to. That pretty much covers anything within the Grunge-subgenre, as well as a few older Rock Bands. I really should be more open about my song-selection, so it doesn't end up being 50% GnR and 50% Aerosmith...

To be fair, though, I've been spending a fair bit of spare-time this month with Rocksmith 2014, and I'm pretty close to nailing both "My Generation" by The Who (whom I don't listen to very much, if at all. I only actually knew the CSI-themes...), "Paint It Black" by the Rolling Stones and the Lead Guitar-parts of "We Are The Champions" by Queen. The original "Knocking On Heaven's Door", by Bob Dylan was pretty easy to nail too, since I already knew the GnR-version. Same chords, just without Power Chords in the Chorus, and none of Slash's solos (obviously...), and it is tuned to Standard Tuning, not Half-Step Down like the GnR-version is. "My Generation" and "Paint It Black" are actually some pretty good songs, yet they're sort of easy to play.

I should probably also pack a handful of Blues-classics into my repertoire, just to have a bit more variation. You never know what kind of audience you'll be playing for, if they're into Blues or into Heavy Metal or anything in between (and it's always fun to play the Blues).