Every musician in the band sees their own chart
syncMNFST uses role-based sheet music. One song in your setlist holds several different documents, and each iPad shows the one that belongs to its player. Every band member can have different sheet music for the same song. Guitar tab for the guitarist, a lead sheet with lyrics for the singer, a bass chart for the bass. Same song, same moment, different page in front of every pair of eyes.
One song, different parts
A song is not one document. It is a family of documents that happen to share a title, and every player needs a different member of that family.
Roles can be as specific as your band needs. If two musicians need different charts, give them different roles. A horn section can have separate trumpet, alto sax and tenor sax roles.
Give everyone the same PDF and you have solved nothing: the singer scrolls past four pages of tab looking for a lyric, and the horn player reads a chart in the wrong key. Role-based sheet music removes that step entirely, because the sorting already happened before the gig.
To be clear about what this is: syncMNFST shows the document you assign to each role. It does not transpose or rewrite anything. The transposed horn part and the piano reduction are PDFs you upload, and syncMNFST simply puts the right one in front of the right player.
How to assign different charts to each musician
All of the setup happens once, in the web app, on a laptop where it is comfortable to do.
- Define your band’s roles. Guitar, voice, bass, trumpet, whatever your lineup actually is. Roles belong to the band, not to a person.
- Add a song and upload its charts. One song can carry as many documents as you have parts for it.
- Assign a version to each role. Pick which document the guitar role gets, which one the voice role gets, and so on.
- Pair each iPad to a role. The player taps their pairing code once. From then on their iPad knows which version of every song it should show.
On stage that setup pays out silently. When the leader calls a song, every iPad follows to that song and each one loads the chart for its own role. Nobody has to browse for the right file or ask which version is current. Each player keeps their own place in their own chart. Musicians can also browse the full band library themselves. Wherever they go, syncMNFST continues to show the chart assigned to their role, so browsing another song never means hunting for the right version.
The library stays correct in one place. When a chart changes, the bandleader replaces it once in the web app. The updated version is then available to the musicians assigned to that role. There is no separate bass folder, horn Dropbox and singer's collection of PDFs to keep in sync. The band's repertoire has one source, while each musician still sees only the material relevant to their role.
Bring your existing PDFs
Nobody is going to re-engrave a repertoire built over ten years, and you should not have to. Your charts come with you as they are.
- Upload a set of PDFs in one go. Bring your existing book in and work through it, rather than adding songs one at a time.
- Scans are fine. A photographed page from a real book is still the chart your band plays. It does not need to be typeset to be assigned to a role.
- Multi-part files work. Add several documents to one song and hand each one to the role that needs it.
- Storage is included. Charts live on syncMNFST’s own backend. There is no separate cloud account to keep alive and no storage add-on to buy.
You don't have to migrate the whole book at once. Start with the songs you actually call, then bring the rest of the repertoire across at your own pace.
Give substitute musicians the right charts
Because a role is a set of charts and not a person, a substitute inherits the job by pairing to the role. A dep or substitute who walks in on Friday opens the trumpet role and sees exactly what your regular trumpet player would see, in the right key, in the right order, on the right song.
The same mechanic covers your own backups. A second iPad, or an iPhone in a flight case, can be paired to the same role and kept ready for the night something goes wrong. Nothing has to be copied by hand.
It also means preparing a sub no longer requires an evening of finding and emailing PDFs. Send them their pairing code and the charts assigned to that role are already organised for them.
More on the thinking behind this: why your bass player and sax player should not read the same chart.
Where this fits
Role-based charts are what makes the sync worth having. Getting the band onto the same song only helps if the page each player lands on is the right one for their instrument.
Start here: the setlist app for working bands. From there, read how to sync setlists across iPads and how the offline setlist app keeps running without venue WiFi.
Upload your book, assign it per role, and let each iPad sort itself out.
Prepare on the web app, play on iPad.