iPad in Worship

I recently purchased an iPad with the intention of replacing all my notebooks of worship music and paper shuffling on a music stand. After some research into the various apps and peripherals, I decided on unrealBook and the Footime Page Turner. I have four main goals in using the iPad:

• All songs, one place, always available
• No more shuffling papers on the music stand during worship services
• Enhanced practice at home
• Improved leadsheets (chordsheets actually)

I have used the iPad two Sundays now in worship. The first Sunday two weeks ago was when I played the bass and this past Sunday when I led worship with my guitar sharing my music stand with another guitar player. I am pleased to report that I am well on my way to accomplishing my goals.

All songs, one place, always available. This is the most ambitious of the goals. At this point I have reformatted into PDF files all the songs (almost 500) from my Access database, my separate bass arrangements (almost 30) for capo songs, and around 20 songs for our fourth Sunday Fellowship. This represents the main effort, but I still have other smaller collections of songs and instructional materials I want to input into the iPad.

No more shuffling papers on music the music stand during worship services. With the songs in the iPad it is now a simple matter of building a setlist for each Sunday. Since I normally read a printed passage from the Bible each Sunday, this morning I saved it as PDF, copied it to my iPad, and then added it to my setlist. It worked just fine.

Enhanced Practice at home. UnrealBook has a metronome that allows you to link settings to individual songs, and it also allows you to link audio files to songs. When I practice the bass I normally have to find and pull up songs individually on my laptop. Now as I link the songs to individual PDF leadsheets, practice and preparation for Sunday is a breeze. I have only used the metronome enough to master the functionality of the feature, but I plan to integrate it into my practice to work more on my timing.

Improved leadsheets. Because the iPad’s screen is smaller than a standard piece of paper, a normal leadsheet will be scaled down to fit on the screen. Since reducing font sizes is not an improvement, my leadsheets will all have to be reworked. Since I’m going to have to do the work, my preference is to have the font size slightly larger. I experimented briefly with a program that would allow me to use proportionally spaced fonts which look great, but I decided that the extra work and inconsistent results are not worth it. My current chordsheets use a more readable, modified version of the Courier New font that I did on the Mac back in the early nineties. After some testing of some potential replacement monospaced fonts I downloaded from the internet, I decided it was still my best choice. I used a few macros in Word to aid in the reformatting effort. I ended up using .1” margins and a 24 point font size which after the scaling yields text slightly larger than 14 points size on the normal printed sheets. I put an orange arrow at the bottom right of multiple page leadsheets, so I will know there is another page.

Since the Footime Page Turner plugs into the bottom of the iPad, I made a wooden holder so I can set the iPad on the music stand and allow for the cabling.

So far I am pleased with how everything is working, and I am getting better at using the footswitch! This beats paper any day. The iPad also works well in poor lighting which is not unusual in many living rooms. It won’t be long and I will have all my music easily available for use in any setting.

If you have some specific questions I will be glad to answer them.

 

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