Practice vs. Rehearsal
 

My band has a problem (at least I think so). We don't get to play more than once or twice a week and it seems like we always have a show coming up, so we spend more time rehearsing the same 5 or 6 songs we've played at nearly every show we've played in the six months we've been together than writing new material and growing as a band...I realize our current rhythm section has only been playing with us for about a month now, but they're already really tight and when we jam we almost always come up with something good...

Do any of you have any similar stories/suggestions?

my band rehearses only once a week too, in the best case, right now we usually have two or three gigs per month, when those are on a saturday we can't work on new stuff that much either, in may there's five gigs and a lot of them are on a sat i think..problem.. because we're getting bored of playing the same stuff over and over

you could split one rehearsal in two: first two hours to work on new songs, last two hours to play the setlist twice, more than enuff, and when a new song is finished we replace a song on the current setlist with the new one

that's basically how we do it right now, our sets are 45mins sets ..mostly, so it's alright

My previous band we were like that. We'd only ever rehearse the same songs over and over and rarely even rehearsed. we could go weekly without a jam. We also had a drummer and bass player problem though, neither of them were overally commited, so it was hard enough to get them to rehearsals as it was. Plus we had to pay for the rehearsal room each time and it got monotonous.

Although now, in my new band, we have a bassplayer and a drummer who are fully commited and keen and you can tell the unity within the band. It's a nice feeling. Also our bassplayer has a rehearsal space at his house with lots of recording gadgets and even a guitar stack so that I don't always have to lug mine around. We get so much more done without time restrictions. And it's actually fun to jam now.

I went through periods like that with my old band. However, we always played different sets since before our first show we had 40 minutes worth of material and we usually played 25-30 minute sets.
We had to take a couple months off of shows once to write new material and it worked well we came back with 3 new tunes.

record your new ideas and give/send them to your bandmates to work on when you arent practicing.