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Location: cincinnati, ohio | Okay – here’s the deal. I never used to need lead sheets and songbooks for onstage performance, but as I’ve…matured, I find that the memory storage tanks don’t hold as much as they used to. Over the last decade or so I have accumulated a formidable and impressive collection of lead sheets that I’ve pulled off the web and customized (because quite often they’re not especially accurate). I kid you not – I have four of those U-Haul type moving boxes in the trunk of my car filled with loose sheets and a binder that must be 6” thick. The binder’s bad enough; it requires a clunky music stand that takes up space. I have a clamp-on music stand that attaches to my mic stand which is more streamlined, but that’s an even bigger nightmare. You have all that loose paper that needs to be clamped in place with those big black paper clips. I have access to well over 1,000 songs with all that paper, plus a pretty fair amount I’ve learned by heart. But at what cost?
I see performers using iPads, sometimes with a Blue Tooth pedal. No paper, no muss and fuss, no sorting through stacks of paper before a gig alphabetizing what I want to play.
My question is this: are there apps for iPad that have libraries of acoustic classic rock songs preloaded that you can pull up and display, or do I have to manually load all of that stuff? If that’s the case, the next millennium will be here before I do that – plus I don’t have anything that’s the ios equivalent of MicroSoft Word.
Suggestions?
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Location: Boise, Idaho | There was a thread a few years back where some of our regular performers discussed the various programs they use for tablets. I know Cliff and Waskel expressed opinions, so that might help your search. I don't recall any discussion of libraries of acoustic rock songs preloaded into the apps. There may be some now, but I think they organized their songs onto their tablets, much like you'd arrange your set lists. |
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Location: cincinnati, ohio | ...but where did the songs come from - the songs they organized? |
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Location: Central Massachusetts | Like Mark said, there are specific apps and pedals for doing this and perhaps Cliff or Waskel will chime in here.
You might want to look into something like a ScanSnap that would allow you to scan in your existing sheets and save them as PDFs.
Microsoft Word for iOS is a free download. And if your iPad is relatively recent, it should have come with the Apple Pages app, which is their equivalent to Word.
Hope that gives you some ideas! |
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Location: Latitude 39.56819, Longitude -105.080066 | Most of us use OnSong.
If everything you have is paper only, it will require a lot of work.
If you saved the Doc files when you originally set them up, then loading them into OnSong is fairly painless. |
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Location: closely held secret |
OnSong is fantastic, and they keep improving it.
I'm not aware of any catalogs for sale (just think of the royalty issues), but who knows? There may be someone out there who has built up a nice library and is willing to part with a copy of it on the side (for a price).
You could scan your pages into PDF's, OnSong will handle those but you can't edit them. you can load text files in from iTunes (easiest way, do the editing on your PC or Mac, then move them over).
They have a "send to onsong" feature where you can find a song on one of the song sites (like chordie) and import it to onsong, then it's usually minimal editing to get it up to snuff. Editing in OnSong is easy once you get the hang of it.
Any way you do it, it's changing the medium you work with. Compared to the boxes of lead sheets I have in the upstairs closet... yeah, definitely worth it. Pair it with one of the 2 bluetooth pedals for it, and you life just became much easier. |
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Location: south east Michigan | First thing I'd do is cull the heard.
That many boxes sounds like it could be hundreds of songs..
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I need to do that myself. I can be happy with forty or fifty songs practiced and done well.
Cheat sheets, IMHO, should be just a safety net for brain farts. If you have to have your full attention on the book, the song is probably not fit for public consumption.
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Location: cincinnati, ohio | Thanks, everybody. Please keep the thoughts coming.
Mark - thanks! When (if) I get some time I may do a site search to get some further input.
dvd - ScanSnap. Interesting. How does that work?
stephent28 and Waskel - at this stage of the game, I think I'd just start fresh and pull stuff from Chordie, Ultimate Guitar and Rusted Guitars (incredibly accurate, note-for-note Neil Young guitar tabs). I'm assuming you can pull the tabs up on your iPad and load them directly into OnSong?
Waskel - do you have a pedal?
Slipkid - I DEFINITELY need to cull the herd. Some of those sheets I haven't looked at in years. I have enough stored in the brain cells to do an entire (four set) night without need of a cheat sheet, and I DO use them more as a safety net. But we still add new stuff, and like to have a sheet for that obscure, out of left field request. |
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Location: Central Massachusetts | Rick, I have the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300i. It's a relatively small document scanner, great for scanning in bills, receipts, etc. It scans both sides as it feeds and by default saves them as PDF files. Its auto feeds a dozen pages at a time, give or take. In theory, it can do optical character recognition of typed/printed text and save it as a Word doc but I've never tried that as there are a number of products out there now that allow you to edit PDF files. I don't use OnSong so I couldn't tell you how well the app deals with PDF files. I would probably just cheap-out myself and throw the PDFs into Dropbox folders and access them using the Dropbox iOS app. But I don't play where other people can hear me, so there's that! ;-) |
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Location: closely held secret | When you say 'tabs' I'm assuming you mean charts or lead sheets.
How it works is when you're on the page of the song you want (in chordie for example) one of the share choices is 'send to onsong'. When you open or go back to OnSong it asks if you want to import them. Since all the sites (chordie, ultimate guitar, etc) use different formats, there's usually a little editing to do but it's usually minimal.
When I started I mostly did the editing on my pc then loaded via iTunes. I did a bunch by scanning the lead sheets through OCR software to text files. Works pretty well but you have to have clean copy to start with. Mostly now I use the import feature.
I have the cicada pageflip pedal. Cliff has the airturn pedal. I think the airturn might have more options, but the pageflip was cheaper and does everything I need it to.
Bottom line, if you've already got an iPad, get OnSong - I think it's still about $10. Play with it, use it... You'll be buying a pedal and throwing in your gig bag and wondering how you ever lived without it.
Hint on editing... The app lets you use either 'chords above' or inline... Inline is much easier and faster for editing once you get used to it. |
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Location: closely held secret | Oh, and you can import PDFs into OnSong, and they function like any other song, you just can't edit them in o
OnSong (yet). |
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Location: Latitude 39.56819, Longitude -105.080066 | I use the airturn pedal. I bought it at NAMM when they first came out with a 50% off special.
I have gotten emails occasionally offering pretty good pricing if you are patient.
I also believe they just came out in the last year with the AirTurn 2 pedal. Not sure what the diff is between them.
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Location: Flahdaw | Rick, do you forget how to play the song or just forget the lyrics? I almost never forget the song, but words often fail me. I now pull the lyrics up on the net, highlight and copy them, then paste them on a new Word document. They are there forever, or until your computer explodes. |
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Location: Boise, Idaho | I'm sort of resurrecting this because I've been trying to figure out how to get some use out of the Samsung tablet my wife bought a couple of years ago and never gets used anymore. The only thing I saved on the computer was my set list and that doesn't do me much good. The last time I updated it was about 5 years ago, which is probably the last time I did a set. I have a notebook with most of the songs I did back then and most were printed off Chordie, but I never saved my songs using the feature available on that site. I did a lot of editing on paper. Sometimes it was just transposing using Chordie, but most often making corrections of what I thought were errors or mistakes on the Chordie songs.
If I do some more research and if I find anything new, I'll add to this. In the meantime, I assume Rick found something that works for him. |
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| Here's a DIY Bluetooth pedal. I made one and it works well. If you can limit yourself to only paging or scrolling down, you could build it into an old sewing machine pedal and use the existing switch.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Bluetooth-page-turner-pedal-for-she...
Edited by BCam 2016-02-24 8:16 PM
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Location: Sunshine State, Australia | It's funny how everybody recommends OnSong. I found it so buggy and the Dropbox Synchronising is so frustrating and it STILL doesn't work.
If you only use it on one iOS device, you don't need it. I (and many others) have been begging them to sort it out for two years. - actually, probably closer to 3 years now. They've been threatening to release OnSong V2.0 for the last 2 years too. They're up to V1.9999999 or something near that. My recommendation is for ChordPro Songbook. It may not have all the bells and whistles that OnSong has, but it's rock solid, synchronises effortlessly and really easy to edit songs and convert many files to chordpro format and just works. Much easier to get your head around it too. Onsong is anything but intuitive. OnSong more popular than Chordpro Songbook, Windows more popular than Mac, VHS more popular than BetaMax - there's a pattern.
Edited by muzza 2016-02-25 7:00 AM
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Location: Phoenix AZ | I wonder if the white house will auction off obamas teleprompter setup? That would be pretty cool for a gig. |
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Location: Boise, Idaho | Chordpro Songbook looks good and is supposed to work on Androids, which is what I assume our Samsung tablet is. |
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Location: Campbell River, British Columbia | Chordpro Songbook +1 |
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Location: Sunshine State, Australia | Funnily enough, TODAY I get this email from OnSong... ------------------------------------------- "OnSong 1.9993 Is Almost Here! We are excited to announce that OnSong 1.9993 is being reviewed by Apple right now and will be coming your way soon!" ------------------------------------------- They've been threatening us with V2 for over 2 years now. I look forward to seeing how many '9's they can fit after the 1. before they deliver. |
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OT: REPLACING PAPER LEAD SHEETS AND SONGBOOKS WITH AN iPAD
