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Projection/graphics for piano bar gig?


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So I've got a regular piano bar-esque gig that's running once a month at a local club. We're four nights in, and the reception has been really positive, and I'm having a lot of fun. It's kind of a mix between piano bar/sing-along (with a Broadway slant) and musical theatre karaoke. A great evening, and even though the tips are sparse, the club owners are paying me reasonably, so it feels like a worthwhile commitment.

 

With a lot of show tunes, people maybe know the first verse, but not subsequent ones, and/or not everyone is familiar with the words to all the "standards" (it's a generational thing, partly). What I'd like to do is, let's imagine I have all my music on my ipad (not yet, but slowly getting there). Is there a way to automatically associate a graphic with a song (or better yet, specific pages of sheet music), and have them automatically send out of an ipad to a seperate TV/screen, so I could project lyrics, or a playbill, or show stills, or something like that?

 

Any ideas? For this to work, I'd need to be able to activate things smoothly from my music stand and have them work kind of automatically when I select the appropriate sheet music.

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This is a great idea -- I'm curious about this functionality too. It's a function I could make use of in my day gig as well as music.

 

If you don't get any bites here, try over at the Computer Lab forum. They've been thorough with this sort of question.

Samuel B. Lupowitz

Musician. Songwriter. Food Enthusiast. Bad Pun Aficionado.

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I have my lyrics scroll on an app called "BandHelper". Great Program, all you do is set the song duration and it will auto scroll lyrics. Bandhelper is the web enabled version of SetListMaker. The web enabled version is much better because you can work on a desktop computer to build our your repetoire. It works on both ipad and android.

 

I would suspect you could build out the lyrics for around 100 songs in couple of hours. You may then need to adjust lyric formatting and song duration which will affect scrolling.

 

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So the workflow I imagine is:

 

  • I've got an ipad in front of me with pdfs of sheet music (I'm currently using forscore)
  • When I select a song, my screen displays the sheet music, while another screen displays a separate document (lyrics and/or images)
  • Bonus/optional action: As I page through my sheet music (either via finger on the screen or bluetooth pedal), the image on the second screen might change as well, depending on the song

 

At its most basic, this is about displaying two documents simultaneously to two different screens, that are paired together in some sort of setlist app.

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Cool idea, but it sounds like you'd need two separate ipads.

 

How many songs do you have at the ready- do you have a printed list of songs so people know which songs you can do for karaoke/singalong on demand? What keyboard are you using?

 

I've just gotten a Korg arranger, the PA1000. It'll scroll lyrics, you can input them yourself with a PC program, and there's an HDMI out port for external monitors. Best of all, it's an arranger that sounds fantastic. The backing rhythyms are really outstanding (and of course you can also have it play bass and accompaniment, but that's optional). I've always hated the sound of arrangers plodding along until I got this one, and it makes having large lists of songs easy to manage with its Songbook function. The built-in speakers are a huge bonus, 33 watts a side, the sound is like listening thru a decent set of headphones, crisp and rich sound. And with the large touchscreen you can easily dial in or back how much of the auto accompaniment fill you're using.

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Check out OnSong at onsongapp.com. There is a video on their tutorial page that discusses Lyrics Projection. This may work for you.

 

Thanks! I may reach out to them. That seems like what I want, though I can"t find any examples on their site of how sheet music management/playback works.

 

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I'm interested in any solution, because it might be useful for me in a different setting.

 

I frequently host jam sessions at my home, and I like to call relatively obscure tunes. I store all my charts on a Surface and use the software Mobile Pro Sheets (which I love). The software has an option to share screens, but that requires others to have a PC tablet. And I've always suspected that sharing screens like that might be susceptible to the vagaries of bluetooth connectivity issues. So I deal with this by printing out charts for everyone. It's not a big deal, except that I go through a lot of paper. Might be cool if I could just project the chart onto a wall, or one large screen.

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I too would be extremely interested! I play in a Video Game Music cover band, and we put together a slide-show of stills from the games, so people know what they're listening to. But we have yet to get a projector to actually run it. It just occurred to me that the guitarist also plays in a Live Karaoke band that's just getting it's feet wet. I filled in for them last week, and they just use an iPad that they pass around to people. In some ways, that's probably the best way, since singers have control over holding their own board. However, if we could find a projector that also bluetoothed into the iPad, that would be the best of both worlds, and my guitarist could use it double-duty for both bands. Of course, for the VGM band, we'd want to hook it into more of an automated PowerPoint program, but it could be iOS if need-be.

 

Anyone know of any bluetooth or WiFi-based projectors out there?

Puck Funk! :)

 

Equipment: Laptop running lots of nerdy software, some keyboards, noise makersâ¦yada yada yadaâ¦maybe a cat?

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