A setlist app for working bands that change the set live
syncMNFST is a setlist app for working bands. Not a practice tool, not a songwriting notebook. It is built for the cover bands, wedding bands, function bands and jazz groups that play forty songs a night, change the setlist during the gig as the room changes, and still have to put the right chart in front of every player before the count-in.
What working bands actually need
A working band is a small operation with a lot of moving parts. The needs are not the same as a solo act with a music stand and a folder.
- Forty song nights. Three or four sets, a repertoire in the hundreds, and a book that has to be findable in seconds, not minutes.
- The set changes live. The floor empties, someone requests a song, the client asks for something slower, the previous act ran long. The set you printed at soundcheck is not the set you play.
- Subs and backups are normal. Someone is ill, someone is double booked. A dep walks in at seven and has to be gig ready by nine.
- Mixed instruments, mixed needs. The guitarist wants tab, the singer wants a lead sheet with lyrics, the horns want their part. One shared document serves none of them well.
- Venues are hostile to software. No WiFi, dead cellular, a basement stage. Anything that phones home during the show is a liability.
Every one of those is a normal Saturday, not an edge case. syncMNFST is designed around them.
Change the setlist live, every iPad follows
A shared PDF or a printed list is a snapshot. The moment the set changes, it is wrong, and the correction travels by shouting across the stage. When the bandleader changes the setlist during a gig, or calls a song request straight from the library, the rest of the band shouldn't have to update anything.
syncMNFST works differently. The leader taps a song on their iPad. That song, and only that song, goes out to the band. Every iPad follows to that song, each one showing the chart for its own player’s role.
What does not travel is just as important. syncMNFST never sends a page, a position or a measure to anyone. Once you are on the song, your place in it is yours: you turn your own pages, you sit where you want to sit, and nothing on stage moves your chart out from under you. The band shares the song. Each player keeps their autonomy.
Musicians can also browse the full band library themselves. They can look ahead to another song, check a chart or add an annotation without leaving the live session. If the leader calls a new song while they're working elsewhere, syncMNFST lets them know so they can jump straight back to the live song.
More on the mechanics: sync setlists across iPads, live.
Handling song requests without derailing the band
A request doesn't have to mean rebuilding the setlist.
If someone asks for a song that's already in the band's library, the leader can call it directly. Every connected iPad moves to the song and shows the chart assigned to that musician.
Play the request, then continue the set, without passing around song numbers, filenames or new setlists.
Reliable offline
The venue’s WiFi is not part of your rig, and it should not be part of your setlist. During the show the iPads talk directly to each other over a local network, in the same spirit as AirDrop. No internet, no cellular, no login screen from the hotel router twenty minutes before downbeat.
You prepare online, at home, in the web app. You play offline, on stage, where it counts.
Full detail: how the offline setlist app works.
Role-based charts
One song in the setlist can hold several different documents: guitar tab, a lead sheet with lyrics, a bass chart, a horn part. Each player’s iPad is paired to a role, and the role decides which version appears.
The practical effect is that nobody manages their own folder anymore. The leader keeps the library correct once, in the web app, and every iPad on stage inherits it. When a dep or substitute musician joins on Friday, they open their role and the right chart is already there.
Full detail: role-based sheet music for bands.
Founder-built by a working bassist
I have played bass on stage for about twenty years, mostly in the kind of band this page is written for. I built syncMNFST because I got tired of the same forty seconds of chaos every gig: the leader calls a change, half the band hears it, someone is on the wrong chart, and we start anyway.
Everything here comes out of that. The sync model, the roles, the offline behaviour: none of it is a feature list I invented at a desk. It is what I wanted on my own music stand.
Go deeper
Set up your repertoire in the web app, pair the iPads, play the gig.
Prepare on the web app, play on iPad.