I perform as a one-man band. I use my own custom backing tracks created with Band-In-A-Box or Cakewalk Music Creator. Over that, I sing the vocals and/or play keyboard, saxophone, clarinet. With well over 550 songs, I am finding 6 books of lyrics and (when necessary) scores a bit unwieldy, especially when jumping from book to book for audience requests. This method wastes too much valuable time. There has to be an electronic way to do this, using tablets perhaps. No, karaoke is not the answer – I would need to sync the lyrics on one tablet to the musical score on the other tablet. More complicated yet is the fact that my aging eyes would need only a portion of the song viewable (in big letters and notes, of course), and then scroll as the song progresses. BTW, I use MediaMonkey as my database program and player. Anybody out there with the same needs? Or, better yet, the solution?
Tom
I use the Big lyrics window in RB. Some call it Karaoke, but i call it convenient. 550 songs is a big task, but hey!
I use this on a laptop and it works great. You can make playlists and organize all your music and find it fast.
http://kb.musicreader.net/index.php
You could also use one of the dozen or so teleprompter programs and use a foot pedal to start and stop the scroll.
1st of all I gig right from my laptop using BIAB files. I type my lyrics in the memo window in BIAB, works well for me. I also prepare playlist for each gig as I know what my audience expects to hear, but I do take request as all songs are in folders that are easly found with just a few clicks. With this said I make sure by taking request I don't put myself in a "name that tune" situation so I stick pretty close to the playlist I have prepared. After the 1st request I let my audience know that if there is a song they really want to hear and I know it, I will play it, if I don't know it, I will try to fool them and if that dosen't work I'll play something pretty close. This usually breakes the ice and lays down a method for handling request.
I pride my self on kicking off tunes from a playlist no longer than 15 seconds apart. I do this for 3-5 tunes then slow down and visit with my audience for a minute (60 seconds as they came to hear me play and sing not to talk) then repeat another 3-5 tunes 15 seconds or so apart. The jukebox feature is a great asset for live gigging.
Break A Leg!
Thanks to all who replied. I think Bob Hunt is on the right track. All along I've been thinking of the need to synchronize part of a music score (such as a predefined sax solo at the Bridge), with the lyrics so that I can pick up the vocal again at the Chorus. Since "MusicReader PDF" is just that -- it reads PDF files and, with a footpedal, "turns" the page, I got to thinking: why not combine the lyrics and the sax solo into a PDF document! I've already got my backup track (a .wav file) playing thru MediaMonkey or Windows Media Player, whatever, on my laptop. What I lacked is a manually-controllable lyrics / music score display. I believe MusicReader PDF is the answer. Now I need to determine whether to output it to my iPad or to a 2nd laptop. Nice dilemna to have!