URGENT - recommend me an iPad app for lyrics and chords

Trude

So, I'm helping out a mate on Saturday in his function band.  They've been let down by their lead singer/rhythm guitarist and I'm jumping into the fray at the last minute.  They play all the standard "60s till today" kinda stuff.  This includes a lot of songs I've never played or sung before (usual suspects like Mr Brightside, Sex on Fire, Superstition etc etc).  

I have little to no time to prepare for this, and so I need a crib-sheet app that can download lyrics and chords for all the tunes.  It needs to be easy to read on stage with no extraneous features or buttons all over the place.  Just big, clear idiot-proof text with good quality versions that are correct to the original recordings.

Can anyone recommend an iPad app that can do what I need?  Or even a website than can output a clean, printable format that will work on A4?

Thanks all!

TheBigDipper

That is a fast approaching deadline...

I've used Songsheet Pro for about 3 months and found it OK but not doing everything I wanted, so I looked around for something better. I've just moved over to OnSong and think I might have found the winner. One nice thing it does that might  help you is it can store/manage/display PDFs that already exist out there. That will help you get some stuff onto your iPad very quickly that you can use straight away. 

Trude

Thanks!  Yeah, I've heard about OnSong.  Does it have a search facility so I can download songs direct?  That's the bit that will take the most time I think.

Trude

@TheBigDipper  - Well, I've gone ahead and bought OnSong.  Looks good so far.  It seems the easiest way to get songs loaded is to search for them in Safari and then copy to OnSong via the browser extension.  This works, but the formatting of the various web pages is a bit hit and miss.  With many the chords aren't recognised properly and they are just considered part of the lyric text.  This means I can't control the formatting or transpose keys.

Do you know of any websites that have reliably decent formatting that is compatible with OnSong?  Otherwise I guess I'll have to do a lot of searching and vetting for each song to find a decent version I can work with.

TimmyO

OnSong is excellent - it can recognise both inline:

lyric lyric [G] lyric lyric [C] lyric

as well as chords-above text

              G                   C    
lyric lyric lyric lyric lyric lyric 

you might need to tell it which format the text is in for each song? 

I have found that you almost always need to tidy up text of downloaded/blagged chord/lyric sheets. And some look like they are plain text but aren't so come out odd.

I tried a few of the songbook apps and once you have got your sheets in there, OnSong is the best of the lot imho

TimmyO

oh and Chordie is a useful site for finding/saving cover stuff 

TheBigDipper

Trude said:

@TheBigDipper  - Well, I've gone ahead and bought OnSong.  Looks good so far.  It seems the easiest way to get songs loaded is to search for them in Safari and then copy to OnSong via the browser extension.  This works, but the formatting of the various web pages is a bit hit and miss.  With many the chords aren't recognised properly and they are just considered part of the lyric text.  This means I can't control the formatting or transpose keys.

Do you know of any websites that have reliably decent formatting that is compatible with OnSong?  Otherwise I guess I'll have to do a lot of searching and vetting for each song to find a decent version I can work with.

I don't feel like I'm an OnSong expert at all, but one or two things have become very useful to me in a very short time.

If you're editing the songs you store, then I've found that using the "inline" chord approach is best for me. The chords always display above the words when you're reading the sheet, but "inline" makes it easier to edit the song and keep the chords in the right place - esp. if you're using a variable spaced font.

If you want to add some tab in the middle, then you'll need to have a fixed font for the tab section. There are markup codes that you can put either side of the tab and it will display that in fixed font. Use {sot} (start of tab) and {eot} (end of tab). 

Trude

Yeah, if I had more time for this I'd probably do a lot of cleaning up and editing.  For now I'm just going to have to grab what I can find and hope for the best.  If only the time between now and the gig wasn't filled up with work, my son's birthday and another gig that also needs some prep.... 

guitarcookie1

Unreal Book seems good to me - Store all your crib sheets as PDFs in Dropbox and download the ones you need to your iPad.

TimmyO

guitarcookie1 said:

Unreal Book seems good to me - Store all your crib sheets as PDFs in Dropbox and download the ones you need to your iPad.

the benefit of something like OnSong (others are available) that use a text-based format rather than just serve up your existing PDFs is that you can transpose. so if we play a song Capo'd at the 4th fret, it's 2 taps to save another version for the bass player with the actual, rather than capo-relative chords. Name it appropriately and the bass player sees it in the shared dropbox folder and job's a good un 

Trude

I forgot to come back and update this thread with the outcome!  I discovered that OnSong could fix most of the formatting issues just by toggling between the two text format modes.  So, I got my songs together in short order, and the gig went really well (so well that they gave me another one the week after, and another for August)

It almost made me contemplate getting my own iPad (currently using one from work)...