Managing my acoustic music

[love the guitar]

For my solo gigs, I memorize everything. I have the songs I play in a book if
I'm performing small group with others and someone needs a lead sheet. The
book is organized by rhythms and feels. I like to switch them up a lot. So for
example I have a section called "bluesy" which includes songs like "willow weep
for me" which is not a blues but is bluesy. A bebop blues would be in there along
with gutbucket blues etc. Another section is "straight eighths" which includes
a lot of rock, bossa nova's etc. Other sections are "3/4" with tunes like
Norwegion Wood, Charade, More or Less etc. Funk, ballads, folkish, swing,
and other sections are in there.

[Johann]

All right, so I narrowed it to Ultimate Guitar tabs, Onsong, and Songbook and downloaded all the apps. So far I'm leaning toward Songbook.

Onsong
Goodness, this thing is busy. A million settings and a thousand tutorials. So far, not finding it that intuitive or useful. I spent 30 minutes including some web searches trying to find the Dropbox authorization before I found it by luck. I also prefer a true windows app to the "Consol," which also is garbling my text for some reason (displays fine on the iOS app).

Ultimate Guitar
I like how it shows the chords at the top of the page and the display looks nice; it'd be nicer if it had a "show on one page" option like Songbook. I generally just want to list chords and lyrics. However, it seems like the entries that show these usually use the simplest (1st fret) variant of the chord. For the opening chord of Baby I Love Your Way, I want it showing the correct G variant which is x-10-x-0-12-x. Presumably I can edit the files to put the proper chord type in, but it seems like I'd be doing that on a lot of songs. Can the chord list be edited within a song easily to show variants of the same chord-- so 2 ways to play a G chord for example?

Songbook
It lacks polish, but I kind of like that it's also less busy than Onsong. It has a true Windows PC app and it displays stuff nicely on one page, which I prefer to a scroll feature. These are big advantages. Couple of annoyances so far: (1) When you click a G chord above a lyric, is there a way to just get it to show the G variant I want it to show? It pulls up every G variant it has instead of just one. (2) It looks like you right click on a chord and select "Define in Song" to get the chord variant to appear in the chord listing. However, it seems to only allow you to see one G chord in the list at a time. Again using Baby I Love Your Way as an example, the intro G chord is at the 10th fret, the first chord in the chorus is the standard G at the first fret. I can add both chords in the define parameter in ChordPro, but the print preview only shows one of them.

[justonwo]

You really should have Guitar Pro at the top of that list. There is nothing it can’t do. $70 well spent. And the interface is fantastic.

[Creekside Guitar]

I paid a one time fee for UG and it has worked well....with a few issues. The nice thing is you can arrange setlists and download them for offline use. In theory, this is great, but I have played a show where 4 versions of the same songs were listed. I managed to work through it, but it threw me off a bit. I'm not sure why this happened when I using downloaded songs on my Samsung Tab S3, but it only happened once.

I have my originals memorized so I don't use anything for those songs. The problem with the 3 ring binders is you have to use a music stand in front of you which can block the view the audience has of you. With a tablet, you can just mount it to your mic stand and it's very low profile.

[der Geist]

Originally Posted by justonwo

You really should have Guitar Pro at the top of that list. There is nothing it can’t do. $70 well spent. And the interface is fantastic.

+1 on this.
I don’t perform but I would think GP pro would be at the top of the list as well. The cost for the iPad version is less than $10 I think and it is somewhat compatible with songbook. I use it for practice everyday and I can’t imagine ever going back to sheets of paper.

[Johann]

Originally Posted by justonwo

You really should have Guitar Pro at the top of that list. There is nothing it can’t do. $70 well spent. And the interface is fantastic.

How much of a pain is it to learn guitar pro?

Also, does it use chordpro or a proprietary format?

[justonwo]

Because it can do just about anything, that means there's a little learning required to master it. But once you have it, you'll never want to use anything else. They use their own format, but have the ability to export into just about any format you want. It also imports a variety of formats.

I have an enormous catalog of Guitar Pro songs, many of which I've tabbed myself. If you want one program to catalog everything you have and give you flexibility for playback, exporting, importing, and just about anything you could imagine, this piece of software is it.

[Kelly Grayum]

Do all you OnSong users realize all you have to do is go to Ultimate Guitar, find the song you want and then just click “share” then click on the OnSong icon ( you have to enable this in settings) and it imports directly to OnSong App. It also only imports the chord chart automatically none of the other mumbo jumbo on the screen. No need to convert anything. It does it automatically and all the OnSong functions ie, font size, capo, key change etc. work like a champ.

[shawnco999]

Originally Posted by Kelly Grayum

Do all you OnSong users realize all you have to do is go to Ultimate Guitar, find the song you want and then just click “share” then click on the OnSong icon ( you have to enable this in settings) and it imports directly to OnSong App. It also only imports the chord chart automatically none of the other mumbo jumbo on the screen. No need to convert anything. It does it automatically and all the OnSong functions ie, font size, capo, key change etc. work like a champ.

This is why chordpro format is becoming universal - if you maintain all your music in this format, you have your choice of tools going forward and never need to re-convert your years of song collections. No need to be online if you don’t want to use tools like ultimate guitar, no need to worry about print or screen formatting - use the best tool for that, no need to print lyrics for sharing - choose the best tool for that, no need to play with fonts or scrolling- choose the best tool for that, no need to sort your songs and play lists based on folder structure or some tool-specific feature - just choose the best tool that handles your songs the way you want. But your baseline of accumulated songs always stays the same and doesn’t need to ever be converted to some other format - AND you can always render formats from chordpro files that other people might insist they need like pdf, Microsoft Word, etc.

[justonwo]

Originally Posted by shawnco999

This is why chordpro format is becoming universal - if you maintain all your music in this format, you have your choice of tools going forward and never need to re-convert your years of song collections. No need to be online if you don’t want to use tools like ultimate guitar, no need to worry about print or screen formatting - use the best tool for that, no need to print lyrics for sharing - choose the best tool for that, no need to play with fonts or scrolling- choose the best tool for that, no need to sort your songs and play lists based on folder structure or some tool-specific feature - just choose the best tool that handles your songs the way you want. But your baseline of accumulated songs always stays the same and doesn’t need to ever be converted to some other format - AND you can always render formats from chordpro files that other people might insist they need like pdf, Microsoft Word, etc.

Does that format contain the tablature, the time signature, and the musical time? I'm not familiar with chordpro format.

[dermeister1331]

Honest question: what’s wrong with the old fashioned method of memorization?

[Methos1979]

Originally Posted by dermeister1331

Honest question: what’s wrong with the old fashioned method of memorization?

How many songs can you memorize? Some people can memorize a lot. Some can't. A three-hour gig for us is 45 songs. I can memorize that but after that it starts to get foggy. And if you're the type that has a couple hundred or a couple thousand songs you can pick and choose from, it's doubtful you can remember them all perfectly. songs come and go from active set lists.

I've probably learned a couple hundred songs but I can only remember the ones that are current on the active list (ie: practiced weekly to keep fresh). It's amazing how fast you lose being able to remember them. But if I've got even just a basic chord progression cheat sheet in front of me then I can almost instantly play it with the occasional glance.

[BT55]

Originally Posted by dermeister1331

Honest question: what’s wrong with the old fashioned method of memorization?

There’s a disease that comes as you age. It’s called CRS - can’t remember....

[dermeister1331]

Originally Posted by BT55

There’s a disease that comes as you age. It’s called CRS - can’t remember....

Haha aright I can get that

[FlyWilde]

Did I understand what I read correctly?

You have to be online to use Ultimate Guitar?