Keeping the setlist and the gig calendar in one place
Fifteen minutes before you go on, someone asks whether the slow one is third or fifth. Three phones come out. Two of them show different answers and the third shows a photo of a piece of paper from a rehearsal in April.
This is not a discipline problem. It is what happens when a setlist is a document, because documents get copied, and copies drift.
Why the setlist forks
Follow a normal setlist through a normal month.
Someone writes it in the group chat. Somebody else copies it into notes so it is findable. At rehearsal you swap two songs and drop one. The person who made the notes version updates theirs. The chat message stays as it was, which is a problem because the chat message is the one everyone scrolls back to. The night before, someone prints "the setlist" from whichever copy they happen to have.
Nobody did anything wrong. The forking is structural: every copy is a new source of truth, and the number of copies only ever goes up.
A setlist is a view, not a document
The alternative is to treat the running order as a view of the repertoire rather than a file.
The band has songs. A setlist says: these ones, in this order, for this night. Change the order and the order changes. There is one of it, because there is nothing to copy. Add a song and you pick it from the repertoire you already have, which means the setlist automatically points at the same chart, the same lyrics and the same agreed take that everything else points at.
That last part matters more than it sounds. When the setlist is a text file, the song is a line of text. When it is a view, the song on the list is the song, so the person who wants to check the arrangement for number seven taps number seven.
This is how Band Companion does it: every gig carries its own running order, numbered, with songs added from the repertoire and dragged into place. The list is not a copy of anything.
Print it anyway
Being digital about the source does not mean being digital on stage.
A phone on a music stand at an outdoor gig in July is a bad plan, and so is one at an indoor gig where somebody knocks the stand. Screens sleep, batteries go, and the one thing you need at the moment of a transition is the one thing you have to wake up first.
So print it. The point is that the printed copy is an export of the single source, produced on the day, rather than one of five competing versions. Print it at a size that reads from standing height on a dark stage, which is larger than you think, and print more than one.
Band Companion exports the setlist to PDF at the size of a sheet on a music stand for this reason.
The gig is more than the running order
Once the running order lives with the repertoire, the gig can carry the rest of what a gig needs, and the calendar stops being a separate tool.
A gig has a date and a place. It has a running order. It very often has a different running order from the last one, and comparing them is useful: you find out that the third song has opened every gig for a year, or that the new one has never made it past the soundcheck.
What a gig calendar in a general-purpose app cannot do is connect the date to the material. It tells you that you are playing on the 14th. It cannot tell you which twelve songs, in what order, or take you to the chart for the one nobody has played since March.
Setlists with no date, which is the underrated one
Here is the case most tools miss completely.
A rehearsal where you are working four specific songs in a specific order is a setlist. It has no gig attached. It is exactly as useful as one that does, and arguably more so, because it turns a rehearsal from "let's see what we feel like" into a plan that everybody can see before they arrive.
The bands that get the most out of their rehearsal time are the ones that decide the night before what they are working on. A dated setlist prepares you for one night. An undated one prepares you for the ten rehearsals that get you there.
Band Companion added setlists without a date in version 10 for precisely this. Same object, same drag-to-order, no date required.
If you are building rehearsals around a plan, the natural next step is recording what came out of them. That is covered in how to record band rehearsals on your phone.
Ordering a set, briefly
Not a tooling question, but the tool should not fight you on it.
- Open with something you can play badly and get away with. The first song happens while the sound is still being fixed and while you are still nervous.
- Put the hardest thing third or fourth. Warm, not tired.
- Watch the keys. Three songs in a row in the same key sounds like one long song. So does three at the same tempo.
- Plan the gaps. Which songs need a retune, a capo change or an instrument swap. A running order that ignores this produces four silent stretches you did not budget for.
- Know your two closers. One for the good night and one for the night that is running twenty minutes late.
All of that means moving songs around repeatedly, which is the argument for drag-and-drop over a text file: if reordering costs effort, you stop trying alternatives and go with the first version.
What good looks like
At the point where this is working, the situation before the show is:
The running order is one thing, in one place, and everybody has it on their phone because it is the same repertoire they use every week. A printed copy sits on each stand, exported from that list this morning. Number seven is the song you have not played since March, so this afternoon somebody opened it, read the note the guitarist left in April about the ending, and listened to the take the band marked as final.
Nobody had to ask whether the slow one is third or fifth.
More on the structure underneath this in what a band management app should actually do.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a setlist app and a band app?
A setlist app organises a running order for a show, usually as its own document. A band app holds the repertoire, so the setlist can be a view of songs that already exist with their charts, lyrics and recordings attached, instead of a separate list of titles.
How do I stop the band using different versions of the setlist?
Stop making copies. If the list lives in one place that everyone opens, there is nothing to diverge. Printed copies are fine as long as they are exported from that source on the day rather than being separate versions people maintain by hand.
Should we use a phone or paper on stage?
Paper for the setlist, printed from the shared source. Screens sleep, batteries run down and stands get knocked. A tablet or phone makes more sense for sheet music, where you need many pages and a page turner, than for a twelve-line running order that fits on one sheet.
Can a setlist be useful without a gig attached?
Yes, and it is one of the more useful things you can do with one. A list of four songs in a set order turns an unfocused rehearsal into a planned one, and the whole band can see the plan before they arrive.
How far in advance should the running order be fixed?
Fix it far enough ahead that anyone who needs to revisit a song has time to, which usually means a week. Leave the last two songs adjustable: the length of the set changes on the night more often than the rest of it does.