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Context: I perform music in a cover band. It often takes a little time for us to decide on a set list of songs, or sometimes we deviate from the set list depending on the vibe. Sometimes, we just go on without a set list and often waste time choosing songs live on stage.

I need a way to be able to choose related songs quickly without having to scroll through the entire list to think of the next one.
I would like to represent the songs in our list as a set of nodes and manually make connections between the different songs, such that opening one song entry will list out all the songs that are connected to it in different ways (same pitch / key, similar tempo, similar style, etc.)

I know that I will probably have to manually add connections and relations for all the songs, which is a time-intensive task - to that end, I need the software to be somewhat user-friendly and easy to learn for someone who is not a great coder. Visual representation would be best.

Bonus - if there's some sort of AI that could do the heavy lifting, that would work too! But I doubt it.

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  • Is the set of songs to choose from finite (your repertoire, as the spotify link suggests), or would you also want to have previously non-rehearsed songs? In any case you might be able to leverage the Spotify API for recommendations among your own playlist there.
    – Marcel
    Oct 21 at 10:53
  • @Marcel The selection of songs should be limited to the songs visible on the Spotify list only.
    – Boloar
    Oct 22 at 7:55

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Of the few times I would actually consider using it, this feels like a good one to throw at ChatGPT & see if it can make any sense of it.

Otherwise you're into something like iTunes [Apple Music] Genius Shuffle, which, of course, will already have most of the relevant metadata.

If you wanted to do it manually - I've worked in bands where the set list was, say three hours, but songs would be marked as 'droppable' so it was a case of mapping the main points, & on the fly dropping songs to bring the time down to the actual gig length. There would be specific openers, closers, interval tunes etc. There were also specific segues or linked tunes that would always follow each other - for timing, pace changes, no-count gaps etc [which attempted to make the band look like mind-readers, no visible count-ins] - so they'd tend to remain inflexible.

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  • I tried ChatGPT (3.5, I don't have access to 4) and perhaps I don't know how to phrase the question. You suggestion of long set-lists with 'trimmable songs' might be the best idea then.
    – Boloar
    Oct 22 at 8:02
  • tbh, I'm no ChatGPT expert either. Maybe something along the lines of "Given the following list of songs, suggest a playlist of one hour" & see if it makes any sense out of it. If it can do that, then maybe "We need to insert an appropriate extra song after xyz. Can you suggest one?" I honestly don't know whether it will make a good choice or a wild guess. It seems to do either, at random;) The manual method [& many variations] stems from having been in bands since long before the laptop or iPad was an option;))
    – Tetsujin
    Oct 22 at 8:10
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Since you seem to maintain your repertoire on Spotify, as per your website, you can browse the recommendations from Spotify. Here's what I get, when I just scroll at the bottom of this playlist:

enter image description here

If it's not specific enough, you can also try to directly access the Spotify API. The have a recommendations endpoint. Here's the documentation of it:

https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/get-recommendations

You might build your own custom client, but I am sure there is already one out there, that lets you seed with artist, mood etc...

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    The songs recommended below my playlist on the Spotify website are usually songs we don't know, so it doesn't serve my purpose here - we need related song recommendations from within the playlist only, which we can immediately perform. I'm not much of a programmer but I'll see if I can figure something with the Spotify API, doesn't seem very beginner-friendly. I don't know that it will be able to accomplish what I'm looking for though.
    – Boloar
    Oct 22 at 7:59

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