My use case:
I volunteer at a local seniors center and run a weekly guitar drop-in session for the ~10 attendees. I’ll display songs on an overhead projector at 1920×1080 resolution (landscape mode), and they can play/sing along. If no one can lead the song, I’ll play the MP3 via Bluetooth to my amp.
Interestingly, most attendees are better guitar players than me. I just got caught up in the technology.
The history:
Back in the day, our original ‘convener’ (as the role is called), provided songs on paper, and us attendees would bring our books and play along with the very accomplished convener. Unfortunately, our books had different versions of songs, some photocopies of hand written photocopies so it took a few minutes for us to get things co-oordinated for each song and each person’s books were different.
We had four books of a few hundred songs, and they were called the ‘Sherpa collection’ as you needed a Sherpa guide to carry them, the music stand and guitar to each session.
When the convener left, our group fell apart, so I took it upon myself to distill the Sherpa collection down to 50 songs that I cleaned up by downloading new versions from Ultimate Guitar and printed a book for our group, as well as providing a PDF (all for free) just to us few members, about 5 at the time.
As time went on, I continued to download more songs from Ultimate Guitar, and changed the format so that an Excel spreadsheet with links to the PDF’s were displayed on an overhead projector, and MP3’s were (downloaded, edited and) played as we no longer had our experienced convener. At this point, I was unable to bring my guitar to play along as it took considerable effort to run the spreadsheet, find/pick the songs, display and scroll them on the screen. This method got me up to about 450 songs.
The problem(s):
- The songs were PDF’s, so you couldn’t change key on the fly.
- Ultimate Guitar required Internet access to their web site, neither of which I trust 100%. I kept it all local on my laptop instead.
- Ultimate Guitar web site does not provide full screen lyrics nor a full screen index. I made my own index.
- Changing keys in Ultimate Guitar has a long unresolved issue with personal edits of songs. There’s several complaints about this on their forums.
Enter SongbookPro:
As recommended to me by one of our attendees, I purchased SongbookPro (for Android and Windows) and delved into the various features, with a goal of being able to minimize my time operating the display so that I can bring my guitar. After about a month of learning, importing, editing and so on, I’m close to realizing that goal.
The killer features:
- Full screen display of the songs.
- Ability to adjust the timing of the scroll rate according to the length of the song.
- Ability to import songs directly from Ultimate Guitar.
- Ability to sync songs online between devices.
- Ability to export them as a single database file.
- Ability to import and export ChordPro formatted songs.
- Ability to batch export ALL songs as ChordPro files.
- Ability to change key and capo on the fly. Much better than on Ultimate Guitar.
- Ability to work reliably with a Bluetooth page turner.
- Folders are very cool, because you can sort by artist/title and filter on key.
The so so:
The built in media player is boring at best. I use a 3rd party app that allows me to change pitch, tempo, volume, rewind as well as provides STEM separation of vocals. There’s NO comparison.
The sync and backup/restore functionality has provided some unexpected results when tested. I lowered my expectations accordingly.
The bad:
SongbookPro’s index of songs in landscape mode is tiny/unreadable in our group setting. I made a list of songs and stored them as a PDF and uploaded that PDF as a song in SongbookPro. More difficult to operate, but it’s now readable.
The ability to print out that index of songs relies on cut and paste while in ‘Manager’ mode, and with no metadata. I had to write macros in my text editor to clean it up. Ugh! On the other hand, a similar product called BandHelper provides reports with sorting/filters and adjustable columns. Again, no comparison.
In conclusion:
I’ll still be using Ultimate Guitar’s database of songs, however I’ve stopped printing to PDF and am now importing songs directly into SongbookPro. I’ll be keeping my subscription to Ultimate Guitar Pro, but am now solely using SongbookPro when practicing and displaying with our group. I’m almost ready to bring my guitar and play along with them, which is a huge step forward.
Update:
I brought my guitar to the group, and with a Bluetooth page turning pedal, I was was successful in playing along, however I didn’t have as much fun. I no longer bring my guitar, but am MUCH more satisfied with my simplified and improved workflow.
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