Good topic, Earl. First and foremost, I do not use cheat sheets, I cannot read the dots and play at the same time - just something that I never was able to master. Usually, if I hear a song, after listening to it a couple times I can figure out the chord progression fairly easily. Yeah, I may miss some of the passing chords, but by and large, it all comes together.

Now, after all these years, I still have never been able to memorize all the lyrics to all the songs I performed, therefore, I have the ones that I have not memorized on a netbook PC so I can glance at them from time to time if I get lost along the way, which has happened. I can clearly recall that one night, while working in the Florida Keys, I fired up on Margarettaville, a song that I have performed thousands of times. For the life of me, Nibblin On Sponge Cake didn't come into my mind that night. So I just began as an instrumental, clicked the mouse, brought up the lyrics, then went into the song as if nothing happened. No one in the audience knew I had a brain fart.

When I commented "New Songs", I was referring to songs that I had never played, and in some instances, never heard. My old friend, Don Mason, hit me with several challenges in past years, to play and sing songs I never heard before me mentioned them. Each and every time, I went to You Tube, brought up the song, then sat down at the arranger keyboard, picked out a style that came relatively close to the original song, then saved the information into the Music Finder Directory so I could quickly recall the style, tempo, intro, and variation. Most of the time, the one touch settings were more than adequate for the right hand voices. Then I would go on to learn the lyrics, which often took a couple hours, when to kick in vocal harmony, breaks, fills, etc... It was challenging, but also a lot of fun, especially when I listed to my recording of the finished product, which I would email to Don, or in some instances, post the song on one of the forums for feedback.

As for set lists, I never used one, mainly because I didn't want to sound like the same trick pony every time I stepped in front of my audiences. Instead, I would often fire up the keyboard and perform one of the new songs I recently learned and see how the audiences responded. More often than not the response was positive, so I guess I was doing something right.

During a typical, 1-hour show at a retirement community, assisted living center or nursing home, I performed about 20 songs, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the average song length. About 90 percent of the shows ended up going for more than an hour, but the ADs and the audiences loved it when I went a bit overtime. I tried to stay as upbeat as possible, and provide as much variety as possible to keep things interesting. I wanted to keep their hands clapping, toes tapping, and for those that could, keep them dancing.

Some of the new songs I learned took as much as a week to learn them because they were in different languages, languages I did not speak. I mainly limited these to Italian and Spanish, but did manage to learn a couple in Polish for when I performed at Polish birthday parties. Also tried to learn one in Japanese, but I just couldn't master the lyrics for Suki Yaki and finally just did it as an instrumental, which came out OK. Click here to hear my rendition of Suki Yaki All my foreign lyrics were memorized phonetically, but no one in the audiences new that I couldn't actually speak that language. Consequently, there were times when someone would come up to me speaking Italian or Spanish, assuming I could converse with them, in that language, which I couldn't if they paid me a million dollars.

My biggest disappointment now is that I had to retire after more than 30 years of being on stage. When my back gave out, followed by my lungs, I no longer was physically capable to be an on stage entertainer, singer or musician. I've since sold my PA systems, gave away all my fancy, silk vests and tuxedos, sold the headset mics, and gave away hundreds of custom made cables. I still play the S-950 nearly day, and have one custom console, but the early onset of Parkinson's Disease has made this increasingly difficult. Gonna see the VA doc in mid January about getting some meds to control the shakes in my hands. There are no meds that will provide me with enough air to sing the way I could just a couple years ago when I retired.

Well, that's my experiences in this business, guys and gals, and I'm sorry for being so wordy on the subject.

All the best,

Gary