Recently I’ve been trying to get more organised with my trio, and define structured set lists which I print and hand out to each band member at the arrival of a gig (no, I wasn’t doing this previously – yes, I live life dangerously).
While creating my set list, I initially looked for free templates online, but didn’t find any that suited my needs. In my trio’s case, we play folk music from the alps, featuring mostly polkas and waltzes, so unlike many of the set list templates available online, I don’t need or want to specify the BPM (beats per minute), or the original artist, or the song’s duration (the average duration for songs in Alpine Folk Music is around 2.5 to 3 minutes). I just wanted something colour coded for the different rhythm types (so as to easily find our place), the starting key, and a reminder of the song’s structure (for example part [A] C x2, part [B] F x1… etc) that we can all reference, with reasonably large text for readability.
(Credit for the last column’s structure that I provided in my template, for example “[A] G x2, [B] C x1 end vamp…” goes to my guitarist, Paul, who used this structure for himself to follow, and I’ve adopted for my band to follow, so that we are all on the same page.)
Hoping that I could save time and effort for other accordionists (or any musician) coming across the same problem, I thought I’d share a free template Google Doc that you can copy to your own account and modify to your own needs. It contains 2 sets per page, placeholders for song names, rhythm type, starting key, and notes. Each song and set is numbered, and the rhythm types are colour coded. Within your own copy, you could amend the set list as needed, including removing or adding columns or rows, changing the rhythm names, typing in song names, and so on.
Please click the link below to access my free set list, with instructions on the first page, on how to make a copy which you can edit to your liking.