How often do you repeat songs?

[SixShooter]

Our band is starting to get a pretty good list of songs that we do after having played together for a couple years. That means we can repeat songs once in a while so that we are not constantly learning all new songs. How often do you repeat a song?

[christhee68]

We have over 100 songs in our playlist, and we try to match up the music to the readings each week. There are some songs that only get played during Advent and others played only during Lent.

Even so, it seems there are certain songs that we play a lot more often than others.

[SamClemons]

You talking about during church. Occasionally we will repeat a song the next week. A good song, the congregation does not mind hearing it over again, in fact, it helps them to learn it. On the other hand....I have about 500 songs in my book. Like above, we try to match the song to the sermon.

[Nub]

New songs get introduced & done 2 weeks in a row, skip a week, then done once more... that way everyone gets pretty familiar with it. Regular rotation for current stuff is generally once a month... maybe a little more if we have a lot of call for it, or have a special service where a song fits well. Older stuff gets done once every 2 months or so, until it gets phased out and done "once in a great while" after that.

[still_fiddlin]

Long story, short, you have to repeat songs, IMO, to keep the congregation comfortable, and your ability to gauge the right "tempo" for new/repeat will be important to keeping everyone happy. That depends on the musicians to some degree, and the congregation to a larger extent.

We are a bit slower to introduce new stuff at this bigger church, but I think that reflects that the leadership is more experienced (i.e., they know what they are doing :)). It's hard to bring in new material that is actually something that the congregation can warm up to reasonably quickly and get it "in rotation." We try to not have "performance" pieces except where it really fits the setting (readings, message, season, whatever), and those are rare. Figure in that the sending/closing is "always" a war horse, and the opening pieces are something that's been done enough to insure participation, and we have a goodly amount of repetition.

The ex-statistician in my keeps pretty good records for the Sundays I play (probably 45 or so per year), and for the past year, I recorded 70 different songs played from our playlist (about 100, excluding carols). If I lump it into quarters, we played 60% of those songs in the past quarter (13 weeks), and about 85% in the last 2, i.e., the 6 months ending last Sunday. After that, there's about a dozen sprinkled across the previous 6 months. I didn't look at them, but they could have been special requests, songs about to go "on sabbatical" or possibly songs that are seasonal/occasional. The *average* number of times a song has been played in all the songs I've got is 3.7 (going back over a year). At the previous church, for a 2 year period, it was around 3.2, IIRC. Like I said, we introduced more new songs there, but we were starting with a shorter list, and a lot of stuff we introduced didn't get a lot of repeats because we realized it didn't make a good "worship" song, regardless of the quality of the song or message.