Your Inner Librarian: How To Keep Your Gig Books, Charts, and Sheetmusic Organized
Photo by Joyce McCown on Unsplash
There are many things to keep track of when you’re a professional singer — your performance and rehearsals calendar, practice goals, and social media posts and engagement. Plus, there’s the never-ending outreach to promoters, agents, and club owners to get booked for performances.
It can all be overwhelming, especially if you’re not naturally organized, and have a day job, family responsibilities, and creative practice that take time and energy.
One of the most important ways you can tame the chaos is to keep your sheet music, charts, and song list organized and up to date. From the moment a song enters your life, it needs a place to live — somewhere you can access and share it easily.
In this blog post, you’ll learn what a gig book is, and how to keep your lyric sheets, charts, and sheet music organized. Your inner librarian will thank you for the help, and you can get back to singing!
If you’d rather see and hear this blog post, there’s a lesson in my free course, Becoming A Singer, that goes over this same material using video. You can find it HERE.
ORGANIZED RIGHT FROM THE START
Different types of performance situations require different ways of using written music. Some, like jazz or classical performances, are more reliant on charts or sheet music. Others, like pop, dance, or hip hop, might not have any.
Sometimes, you’ll only need the written music for rehearsals. Then you’ll go “off book,” as they say in musical theater parlance, and memorize the music for performances.
Whether you need written music for rehearsals only, or for rehearsals and performances, you’ll save yourself a lot of headaches if you keep your music organized, right from the start.
Let’s take a look at a few different ways you can do this.
YOUR GIG BOOKS
Your gig books are where you keep all your charts or sheet music.
Some people print out a copy of each song and keep them in notebooks, others prefer to use a digital system. We’ll take a look at both.
Let’s start with the paper version.
PAPER
Here’s a notebook for the jazz quartet I sang with years ago. I have a separate one for bass, drums, and vibes, containing special arrangements for each tune. The players use their books for both rehearsal and performance.
This one is for the vibes and piano player, Mike. All of the charts are alphabetized, and each one is in a plastic slipcover. This keeps the paper from getting worn and makes the pages easier to turn.
Important tip: Use non-glare slipcovers; otherwise, the reflection on the sheets makes them impossible to read.
For casual gigs, where the focus isn’t necessarily on the band or the singer, I have a whole different set of notebooks. These contain standard jazz charts where the arrangements aren’t as complicated, so they can be performed without a rehearsal. I have a song list printed out and stored here in the front, and again, everything is alphabetized.
I like to work with a setlist, but some singers prefer to call out the songs they want to do next based on how they feel, or audience response. If they’re alphabetized, the players can quickly and easily find their charts.
I always print my setlist out. Even if I don’t use it, it provides some structure, so I don’t have to decide what’s going to happen next while I’m in performance mode.
In a concert setting where the audience is more focused on the music than on drinking, eating, or catching up with friends, I go one step further. I pull all the charts on the setlist out of the gig books and put them in the order they’ll be played on the setlist.
Because they’re not searching for charts, the musicians have time to take a look at the music they’re about to play. Even if you’ve had a rehearsal, the more time they have to familiarize themselves with the music, the better.
Paper systems have their advantages — they’re simple to use and inexpensive. But notebooks can get lost or damaged, and they’re a pain to lug around.
In the digital age, there are some incredibly powerful apps that store and organize your music and give you the tools to annotate, share, transpose, turn pages with a foot pedal, and more.
Next, we’ll look at a few digital options that many of my musician friends recommend.
DIGITAL SYSTEMS
A great digital sheet music app will do more than store your charts or sheet music in the cloud. It will expand the ways that you can use it.
All of the apps below will help you:
Organize your music library
Transpose your music
Annotate and add notes to your heart’s content
Share with other musicians
Change charts or turn pages with the use of a foot pedal
Some have additional functionality:
Tools to create charts and lead sheets right in the app
Fully customizable settings where you can change the app’s look or the intensity of it’ sits brightness.
Connections to your lighting system so you can cue lighting scenes in performances.
Practice session logs.
ANDROID
The iPad is the tablet of choice among most musicians I know. It has a more robust operating system for the sheet music apps out there. But suppose you don’t need a ton of power or functionality and you’ve already got an Android or Windows computer. In that case, MobileSheets is the app for you.
APPLE
Among my musician friends, forScore is the hands-down favorite app for sheet music and charts, especially among jazz musicians.
Saxophonist John Nastos says, “ForScore is basically the industry standard on iPad. It has all the features I’ve ever needed. In fact, it’s one of the only iOS apps where I’ve never been tempted to build my own solution.” High praise indeed from a musician who’s built his own music apps from scratch.
OnSong is another excellent app for organizing your songs and sheet music. Like forScore, you can upload the sheet music and chord charts that you’ve created in other programs and sync your files through Google Drive.
When my friend Dave Schulz (keyboardist, vocalist for Berlin, Wang Chung, Goo Goo Dolls, and more) started using OnSong, he took photos of his entire songbook. He uploaded each image, et voila — all the music he needs for the different bands he plays with, organized, and ready to take on the road.
If all you need is a lyric sheet with the chords written above it, OnSong has you covered. You can create your own lyric sheets within the app, sync with Dropbox or Google Drive, and import lyrics from any web page.
ANDROID & APPLE
SongbookPro is an app designed for both tablets and laptops. It works on any Android, iOS, Windows 10, or Amazon Fire device. Like OnSong, you can import pdf files or create simple lyric sheets with the chords written above.
Set List Maker can store your lyrics and chord charts, keep track of rehearsal notes, and archive all your setlists. You can include multiple reference recordings for each song and design your own screen layouts to show each performance’s most essential information.
In-app purchases provide even more functionality. You can slow down or pitch-shift recordings while practicing, transpose chords with one touch, and make a quick recording if inspiration strikes.
I’ve found the app developer, Arlo Leach, to be super responsive and helpful when I was using another app he’s developed called Bandhelper.
BandHelper is in a league of its own. You can store your repertoire and create setlists in the app and then share them with bandmates. You can also use it for scheduling, keeping track of business contacts, financial info — everything you need to have organized when you’re a bandleader.
There’s a pricing option for every band, large or small. When I was managing Nu Shooz, we had a Plus account for 6-20 band members and crew. It made life so much easier! I could automatically send out rehearsal and gig dates to see who was available. If a bandmate doesn’t respond, Bandhelper keeps sending them emails until they do. Once your dates are set, Bandhelper automatically sends reminders to everyone, plus info that they need for each event — the date, time, and even what to wear.
Bandhelper is a must-have if you’re the one who organizes everything for your group.
ACCESSORIES & RESOURCES
Coda Music Technologies sells a BlueTooth page-turner and app controller, tablet stands, and more. They also have a fantastic blog with articles about their favorite sheet music and chord chart apps for both Android and Apple products.
CHARTS
Next, let’s take a look at the charts themselves.
A few years ago, I conducted an informal survey among my musician friends who regularly accompany singers. I asked them, What’s the most important thing for a singer to know about playing with other musicians?
Their answer? None of them said anything about a singer being pitch-perfect or having a fantastic voice. All of them said, “Get the charts, right.” The people who are accompanying you want to sound good themselves so they can make you sound good.
So, make sure your charts are:
Readable
Have the correct chords
Have the melody written out
Include the lyric (or part of it at key points in the song)
And Indicate as much information as possible: things like Tempo, Feel, and Dynamics
When I first started putting my own gig book together, the charts were a mess.
For instance, here are two examples of World On A String. The one on the left is a copy straight out of the jazz Real Book. The original chord chart wasn’t in the key that I sang it in, so I took a pencil and wrote in the chords for my key above the printed ones.
How easy do you think it would be to read those pencil scratchings in a dark jazz club or dimly lit stage? Almost impossible, right?
Example #2 is a copy of a piano chart from a big band arrangement. This one was also in the wrong key for me, so again, I penciled in the correct chords above.
This chart is also not easy to read. Besides the pencil markings, it has additional information that’s only important when it’s being played in a big band context — things like rhythmic “hits” that are played with the horns and drums, plus an introduction that I never use.
Next, I asked my husband, John, to write a chart for me for our jazz duo gigs. He re-harmonized the song and handed me the chart you see on the left. It’s much cleaner and easier on the eyes but is still missing a few key ingredients.
Example #4 is the most recent iteration. I created this one in a music writing program called Sibelius. It’s the cleanest looking and easy to read chart yet. But it’s still missing two ingredients that would make it feel complete — the melody line and some lyrics in a few key spots, like at the beginning of the verses or chorus. So, I still have some work to do.
THE LANGUAGE OF MUSIC
If you don’t know how to read or write music, this all might seem really daunting. I get it. I’m not the best sight-reader. I can barely scratch out a chart myself. But the little I do know about the language of music has made an enormous difference in my ability to communicate musical ideas to others.
It’s not essential that you learn how to read and write music. You can hire others to create charts for you. But the more fluent you are in the language of music, the freer and more confident you’ll feel.
An introductory course in music theory will go a long way to helping you communicate with others and advance your artistry.
It took me a long time to accept that librarian was another of the many hats I need to wear as a singer. I just wanted to show up and sing. But when I did, and the written music wasn’t together, the rehearsal or gig was a disaster. I learned the hard way that the more organized I am beforehand, the easier it is to just show up and sing.
I hope this blog post has been helpful to you. If you have ways of organizing your written music not listed here, please let me know in the comments below!
For more resources for singers, head to the Resources page.
