BandInKey

BandInKey keeps your band on the same page. Your songs with chords, your sets, your keys and tempos, on every phone, tablet and computer in the band at once. One device leads, the others follow.

Your songs

Type a song in yourself, paste a sheet copied from a website or a message, or take it off the device as a file. Plain text, ChordPro and Word .docx are read. PDF and pictures of sheets are not: that is the honest list of what the app can actually do today.

When a chord site gives you lyrics but no chords, it is because the chords there are drawn, not written as text, so the copy really does come away empty. The app tells you when it found no chords, and it has a screen where you place the chords yourself: tap the syllable, tap the chord, and it jumps above that syllable. You never type a bracket or a code.

The stage screen

Black background, big adjustable text, chords in their own colour, and the screen never sleeps while it is open. Opened from a set, the whole set runs as one long sheet: when a song ends the next one is already there. Two columns in landscape fit more of the song on a wide screen.

Each player reads chords the way they learned them: letters, German H instead of B, or Latin do-re-mi names. That setting belongs to the device, so you can read one notation while the next player reads another.

Keys, singers and tempo

Three buttons next to the title move the song a semitone at a time, and the chords in the text move with it, immediately, on every device in the band. A change like that lasts for the evening unless you save it, and you can save it for the whole band or inside one singer's profile.

Every singer gets a profile with their own keys, per song. Pick a singer at the start of the evening, or in the middle of it, and every song moves into that singer's keys by itself. Closing the event puts everything back to the saved keys at once.

Each song carries its own tempo and its own time signature. Tap the number to tap the tempo in with your finger, or hold it to type one.

The click for in-ear

The click goes out from the device that is in command, and its button sits away from the key buttons so it cannot be hit by accident. While it runs the button blinks on every beat and shows which beat you are on, so you can see from across the stage whether the leader is on one. The count-in beats one bar first, in a different colour.

A click test measures how well one particular device can hold a click: the gaps in the sound, the worst moment, and whether it keeps up. Worth doing once on every device before a gig, because an old tablet can struggle. The click can also be handed to the drummer, and taken back.

Playing together

One device says it is the leader, over your hotspot or the venue's Wi-Fi, and the others join. What the leader does, everyone sees: the song, the set, the key, the tempo, the scroll position, the chosen singer. The song arrives whole over the network, so a member with an empty library still sees what the band is playing, and somebody who joins halfway through lands exactly where the others are.

Nothing on the network starts by itself. Somebody has to press.

When the leader's device dies

The others are asked who takes over. The first one to press becomes the leader, and the evening carries on from where it stopped: same song, same place in the song, same keys and tempos, the click included. When the old device comes back, the chair is not taken away from whoever is holding it.

Getting everybody the same songs

At a rehearsal, the leader sends the library over the air, with no file. Under each device name it says whether that device has the same library or, in orange, a different one, so you can see who is out of step before the first song. For sending across town, the library exports as one file, and importing it asks whether to replace or to add.

Small things that matter on stage

• A Bluetooth page-turner pedal works straight away, with nothing to set up: one press scrolls a page, and at the end of a song it moves on to the next one by itself.
• The interface is in nine languages, each one written in its own language so you can find yours whatever the app is set to now.
• A device log, off unless you turn it on, writes down to the millisecond what the app is doing, for chasing a fault.

Devices

Mac, iPad and Android tablets, in the same session.

Privacy

No account, no server, no analytics. See the BandInKey privacy policy.

Questions

The full manual is on the help page, and the same text is inside the app, where it works without internet. Anything else: contact@bandin.ro or WhatsApp.