I have a bookshelf full of music books and binders of music that I’ve been gathering for some time. When I first got my iPad I realized that it was well past time to retire the binders and books. At first I just took songs that I’d already had stored on my computer, converted them to PDFs and dropped them into Evernote. That worked and was relatively easy but was not anywhere as powerful as using Onsong. Granted, my binder carrying friends would probably just be happy to have their whole collection conveniently available on the 1-1/2 pound electronic beastie. Onsong goes well beyond just the convenience of jettisoning the binders.

For those who hate typing on the iPad’s virtual keyboard, you can edit your song files using any text editor on your computer and use a wide variety of routes to get the songs onto your iPad (I prefer posting them to my dropbox “songbook” folder). Now that I have the songs on my iPad, I have to confess that I have an unfortunate attraction to mainly female vocalists and while it might be comical for me to try to sing their songs in their key, when the funny wears off, I can easily transpose to a key actually within my voice’s range within the app. I can highlight the chords, change the fonts and I can click on the chords to get various fingering options. If I have the song in my music library I can click a button in the app to so that I can play along with the recording. If I don’t have the song, there’s a link to iTunes to purchase it (or similar tunes). If you have a really long song, or just one that rolls off the single screen, you can set the screen to auto-scroll for the duration of the song. So say goodbye to page flips or pages falling off of the music stand. Besides just storing your songs in the app, you can also create and organize set lists, so that moving from one song to the next is just a horizontal swipe. I haven’t experimented with the sharing features, but apparently you can share the songs and set lists wirelessly over Bluetooth and can project lyrics using the VGA/HDMA video out. Onsong is a universal app with a version available on the iPhone. In this generation of digital tools, there’s no excuse to really take your music to the next level (or at least have easy access to it!)

The next app, GuitarTapp, addresses the next problem with wanting digital song sheets: how do I get music onto my iPad if I don’t already have song sheets? Like I said, I’d previously written out my music in a text editor and then moved it that way. Well, in the era of music lyrics, chord sheets and tabs posted on the Internet, it seems a bit antiquated to type out songs by hand. GuitarTapp basically is a search engine with a front end set up with music management features such as transposition, chord dictionary, formatting to wrap the text so that you don’t have awkward horizontal scrolling issues, set list creation and saving favorite tabs in app. There were other iPad apps that did similar web searches for chord/lyric sheets, but this was the only one that didn’t require a monthly fee for access to the database. GuitarTapp is also a universal app with a version available for iPhone/iPod touch.

With the combo GuitarTapp and OnSong I should have my collection available on my iPad with minimal manual input. Now I just need to find the time on a regular basis to get into this. Yay!