iPad for Worship

Recently I got an iPad 2, which is a wonderful thing in so many ways but especially useful for the worship musician. Actually all of the stuff I’m talking about isn’t necessarily specific to the church music setting – you could use it just as well in any live music environment.

One of the first things I thought the iPad would be useful for is to display my chord charts. I have a big library of chord/lyric charts in PDF and Word format and so I thought it would be great to display them on my iPad instead of having to print them out each week, with just a simple swipe between songs.

I’ve found an app which does not only that, but so much more. OnSong is a fantastic app for iPad (and iPhone), which allows you to import all your chord charts from PDF, Word, and others. These files can then be sorted into collections (books), weekly set lists, or sorted by artist, key, or topic (once you have your library set up). Your existing files can then be easily displayed in whatever order you want, changing page with just a swipe of a finger (or not… see below). Files can be imported through iTunes software via Wifi, through a ‘cloud’ service like DropBox or MobileMe or there is a search box which can search online for songs. You can also add sticky notes on top of your displayed files for what ever extra notes/reminders you need to write.

So as a program for displaying your files it works a treat, but this software has so much more potential. If you convert your songs to the OnSong format, you will then be able to access a whole raft of very cool features such as transposing the song into whatever key you want, adjusting fonts, sizes, and colours, a clickable chord library, metronome, linking to audio files and much more. You can even add a monitor out to your iPad and use the software to control lyric projection – it will project the words (without chords) on a nice background while still displaying the chords on your iPad. Not sure I want that kind of responsibility controlling the words whilst playing guitar and singing, but it is a very cool feature! I’ve attached a bunch of screenshots I took at the bottom of this post.

The only frustration I have with this software is that the process for converting your PDFs into Onsong file format is a little buggy. It would be great if it worked smoothly every time, but there generally needs to be quite a lot of further editing of the files in order to get them to work. I’m getting the gist of it but it’s still a bit of a slow process. Even so I think it’s worth the effort, and even without the conversion it’s still emminently useable just for displaying my existing PDFs.

Finally I just want to mention something that takes this software from being just very cool to being super awesome. With an AirTurn BT-105 bluetooth page turner and my trusty old Boss FS-6 dual footswitch I now have handsfree control. The two pedals can be used to move back and forwards through my song sheets without having to stop playing my guitar. Brilliant! I’ve posted a photo below from their website below which is pretty similar to my setup.

If you’re a musician with an iPad already then you owe it to yourself to check out this inexpensive software. If you’re a musician without an iPad, well it’s one more reason to think about getting one… (I’ll mention some of the other cool music apps I’ve got sometime soon.)

Finally, here’s a YouTube video I found which demonstrates a few features of the software :

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