A black three-ring binder, two inches thick. Charts in sheet protectors, a setlist in the front pocket, a pencil jammed through the rings. It came to every rehearsal for years, and it worked.
I have played drums and bass in a few bands over that time. Blues, hair metal, alt rock, now Cali reggae. More often than not I am in two of them at once, and that overlap is where a hobby turns into administration. The same song can live in two bands in two different keys, with two different endings, and one of them cuts the solo. Multiply that by a setlist and a couple of bands and you stop managing songs. You start managing versions of songs.
The paperwork of playing music
None of this is the hard part of music. That is what makes it so annoying.
- somebody changes a key, and now four printouts are wrong
- the arrangement gets tightened at rehearsal, and the change lives in one person's memory
- the singer's copy has the good notes on it, and the singer is not here
- you print the whole thing again, and the printer is out of cyan, and it refuses to print black
Paper never pretends to be in sync, at least. Everybody knows the copies have drifted. You just do not find out where until the one night it matters.
Everybody is on a different device
The obvious fix is to stop printing, and that is the second wall. I write software for a living, so this is the kind of problem I cannot leave alone, and every time I looked at it the answer came back iPad only. My bands were never all on iPads. There was an Android tablet, a couple of iPhones, an old Windows laptop in the rehearsal space, and a TV.
An app half the band cannot open is one member with a nice setup and four members still holding paper.
So I built one for my own band
In 2024 I wrote a rough web app and put it on the TV in the rehearsal space. Our charts, our notes sitting on the lines they belonged to, a count-in, and reference playback for the parts we kept arguing about. It ran in a browser because a browser was the one thing every device in that room agreed on.
We used it every week for years. It became the source of truth almost immediately: once a chart was in there nobody printed, and if you changed it you had changed it for everyone. What surprised me was how little of that was about features. It was about there being one copy. A decision we made in April was still there in July, on the exact line it applied to, and the new bass player could read the whole arrangement's history without anybody having to remember it out loud.
I called it Band Practice Pro. It was a long way from ready for anybody else's band.
Where BandBinder comes in
BandBinder is the next generation of it. One shared library of charts, setlists and rehearsal notes, on Windows and Android now and iOS at launch. Notes attach to the line they are about. The stage side runs fully offline, because you cannot count on a venue's Wi-Fi at 10pm. It is priced per band rather than per person, because a five-piece paying five times over was the part that made my bandmates say no.
The binder is on a shelf in my basement, still full of paper, still out of date. It taught me the one thing the app is built on: a band that keeps its work gets better. It just could not be in five places at once, and neither could I.