Hi Mike. I looked up Mobile Sheets and it seems that it runs from a PC. I use an iPad running OnSong, but it may help you to read about another way of doing things, so I’ll tell you about my experiences and hope that helps. This post is quite lengthy, but stick with me.
First off, GIg Performer is an amazing program, so persevere with it. When I first bought GP, the set list feature didn’t exist for me to use. It arrived in V3, but by then, I had built up nearly 300 rack spaces. I looked at the set list feature and talked to a few of the forum users and decided to just carry on using the rack spaces format not using the set list at all. Now I have a monster gigfile of over 400 racks spaces where each rackspace is a song, and I use the front panel for the song’s name. This monster rackspace loads in about 3 minutes, but I also have the 400 songs divided up into smaller set lists consisting of 19 songs each which for me is about an hours worth of singing. The smaller sets load in less than 20 seconds. If I use the monster rack, a song will load in 3 to 4 seconds, and this is random choosing of songs anywhere from #1 to #400. I have predictive loading set to 3 which is one before and one after. So that’s the scenario that is working for me. So how do I control it? I use an 12.9 iPad Pro running an app called OnSong.
OnSong is lyrics and chords but I think you can scan sheet music into it. The real power of OnSong comes in the form of a very powerful master midi controller which is built in. Each heading in OnSong (verse, chorus, fill, intro, bridge etc) can output the full set of midi commands. So when I swipe to or tap on a new song in OnSong, several things happen, namely:
1 The correct rackspace loads in GP
2 The correct program loads in my harmoniser
3 The hamonzer is correctly set with the right amount of harmony level,
Reverb level, echo level etc
My iPad is connected through a wireless network using a modem I take with me. GP runs on a MS Surface Pro 6 using the free RTPmidi app that allows the iPad to talk to the Surface Pro over a wireless network. The S Pro runs Bome Midi Translator which is the app that tells the harmoniser what to do. In practice, I stand out the front with my iPad on a small mic stand with no wires attached. I call up a song, GP loads the required song, the harmoniser is set, I stomp the Bluetooth pedal on the floor to advance OnSong to the intro heading, the drum intro starts and then automatically plays the verse pattern. I stomp again and OnSong moves to the Verse heading sending a midi message to the harmoniser to turn harmony on or off as appropriate and I start singing. It can take me a whole day to set up a song, but hey, I’m retired and have as much time as I need.
I looked long and hard at the set list feature, but in the end, how I was using my iPad as a midi controller just made it too difficult to change so many songs over. And the advice I received from a few forum members suggested that the way I was doing things was best for my situation. And I’ve done lots of gigs since and proved that my set up works well in practice.
Sorry about the length of this post, but I wrote it to show you that there is another way. I’m not dissing the built in set list feature at all, but in the end, we use what works best for us.
Cheers from New Zealand, Alan M.
3 Likes