Hey,

So my band has come into one of these frustrating dillemmas. We have two song writers in the band, the pianist, who was one of the founding members (the other founding member being me), and the singer.

Now the line up when the pianist writes the songs is Piano, Bass, drums, vocals. It's got this sort of, old, classical feel to it, but it's sort of... alternative rock.

The other songwriters songs often end up with the singer also taking over the bass role, and our bassist playing guitar. It's often much more straight rock and has a different feel to it melodically and in terms of chord structure.

We don't know if we should keep doing the singers songs, we don't know how much variation we can get away with since we really haven't heard our own songs in a set from the audience.

Anyone else had any experience in a situation like this? What happened? What decisions were made?

I think you guy's should explore the fact that songwriting or better still, the song itself is one thing; and arranging and instrumentation is another.

Take one of the piano player's songs and run them through the band arranging process as though they were one of the singer's - or vice versa. This can be a real exercise in maturity, particularly for your songwriters. But your band should really learn how to do this - "Baby, It's You" wasn't written by the Beatles (or Lennon/McCartney; neither was "All Along The Watchtower" written by Hendrix - though both sound as though they were.

With any given band, some songs can just seem a perfect fit right off the band, while others need to be molded and futzed with to work... and after all the work is usually impossible to tell which is which (if the band really puts in the creative work to make it happen).

Give it a try.

David