Why I Keep a Notes App Open During Every Event

About four years ago I started keeping a notes app open on my phone during every event. Not for set lists — those are prepared in advance. Not for track requests, which go on a separate slip. A running log of observations, recorded in real time, about things that will be useless in the moment and useful later.

I do this because memory is unreliable in the way that matters most. I can remember the general feel of an event. I can't reliably remember that the bass was boomy in the left corner of the room, or that the floor opened up exactly at 10:45 when I switched from house to something more recognisable, or that the table nearest the booth was a group of executives who kept signalling for more volume and ended up being the most engaged dancers of the evening.

Those details are the ones that matter for the next time.

What I Actually Record

The notes are brief — a sentence or two, sometimes just a phrase. A few categories that come up repeatedly:

Room acoustics observations. The first thing I note is anything unusual about how the venue sounds. Which areas reflect badly. Whether the bass accumulates in certain zones. Whether the room has a low ceiling that makes high-frequency content harsh at volume. These things are essentially invisible until you've played the room — and I might not be back for eight months.

Track-level reactions. When something unexpectedly lands — or doesn't — I note it. Not every track, just the surprises. The track I expected to fall flat that cleared the floor of talkers and pulled in the dancers. The classic that I thought was safe and received with puzzling indifference. Over time, these observations become patterns that are worth more than any gut feeling.

Time and crowd state. I often note the time alongside what happened. "10:15 — room starting to warm up. 10:45 — floor open, high energy, slightly younger demographic leading." The correlation between clock time and crowd state varies enormously by event type, and having data across multiple events at the same venue starts to reveal genuine patterns.

Client-specific notes. If I'm working for a company for the second or third time, I note what the crowd responded to and what it didn't. Sometimes patterns emerge that tell you something about who that company is culturally — what their people share, what they're comfortable with, where the energy tends to come from in the room.

How the Notes Get Used

The notes aren't much use during the event. They're too brief to be a full record and the information is too raw. The value arrives later — specifically, when I'm preparing for the same venue or client again.

Before returning to a venue I've played before, I read through all my notes from previous events there. Not to replicate what worked, but to understand the room's tendencies. Does the floor typically open early or late here? Is there an acoustically difficult zone I need to manage? Did a specific style of music consistently perform better in the later segment?

Before returning to a corporate client, the notes become a kind of demographic intelligence. What did their crowd respond to? What fell flat despite being the obvious choice? What surprised me positively? That information is worth more than any new brief they'll give me, because it comes from observation rather than aspiration.

The Event That Made Me Start This

The reason I started keeping notes was a hotel ballroom that I'd played twice before under different client bookings. On the third booking — a different company, same room — I made the same acoustic mistake I'd made twice before. I didn't remember making it. I'd learned the lesson, lost the lesson, and paid the same tuition a third time.

After that event I started writing things down. The format has changed, the habit hasn't. Every event gets a note. The note is usually four or five lines, sometimes less. But across five hundred events, those notes are an asset that no amount of experience alone can replicate.

You can't remember five hundred rooms. But you can read the one you're going back to.