What to give the sound engineer

Most bands hand over a photocopy of the one on the monitor. It has the keys on it, and the capos, and somebody has written GO HARD next to song four.

None of that is usable at the desk. An engineer does not mix in a key. What they are tracking is different from what you are tracking, and it is mostly arithmetic.

How long is this song. So they know whether there is time to fix the thing that is wrong before it ends.

How far into the set are we. So they can tell the promoter something true when the promoter asks.

What time will this finish. Because the curfew is a time of day, and nobody in the band is thinking about it.

This is the part almost nobody does, and it costs nothing.

If you know your downbeat, every row on the sheet can carry the real time of day it lands. Not song nine. 21:47.

That single change makes the sheet useful to everyone holding a radio. A lighting op knows when the slow one arrives. The bar knows when the room empties. The promoter running three bands knows whether you are eating the next band's changeover, and they know it at 21:20 instead of at the end.

It also protects you. When somebody claims you overran, the sheet says what you planned and when. A band that hands over a timed running order is a band that gets asked back, and the reason is not the music.

A gap on a sheet with no label is a gap somebody has to ask about.

Write the length on it. 15 minutes reads as a plan. A blank line reads as a mystery, and the desk will fill the mystery with music off a phone at whatever volume was left over.

Say whether it is a break or a changeover, because they are different jobs for the person reading. A break means your gear stays where it is and you walk off. A changeover means somebody else is loading in, and the desk is about to re-patch everything. Those two words tell an engineer whether the next twenty minutes are theirs or yours. Which one you have booked, and why the second always runs long, is a question of its own.

Timing matters more than the document. A perfect sheet produced after the first song is a sheet nobody reads.

Give it to them while they are still patching. That is when they are building a picture of the night, and when a piece of paper can still change what they do.

Paper, not a phone. A desk is dark, both their hands are busy, and your screen locks. Paper sits on the console under a light and stays there.

One page. If it needs turning over during the set, it will not get turned over.

Your name and the date at the top. They will do three bands tonight and nine this week.

Everything you put on there that they do not need makes the things they do need harder to find in the dark.

Keys, capos and tunings are band information. Lead vocalist is band information. Arrangement notes to yourselves are band information, and one of them always says something you would not want read out.

Cues are the exception. If there is a hard stop, a false ending, or a song that starts with nothing but a vocal, that belongs on their sheet, because getting it wrong is audible to the room.

Setlists.io prints a separate sheet for the desk from the same list you already built. Titles, how long each song runs, the elapsed total, and the time of day each one lands once you have entered a start time.

The band keeps the keys and the capos on their own sheet. Two different pages, one list, and nobody at the desk squinting at somebody's capo.