Digital Lyric/Chord Cheet Sheet

Design Concepts
1

I really love our band, but one thing we’re pretty lame about is we use music stands and lyric/chord cheat-sheets for live shows and that’s no fun mostly because they are obtrusive (well, and lame :P). I’m sure eventually we’ll have everything memorized, but we’re writing songs while doing live shows, which makes it a tad difficult at times.

That said, I’ve been trying to think of ways to make it less of an eye-sore. Since MIDI supports lyrics and I’m already testing out the MIDIO128 for playing back MIDI files (and doing routing, etc.), I was thinking about some way of sending the lyrics from that to some sort of a display. Be it a character LCD attached to a micro-controller, an iPad or phone using something like OSC or?

I was also thinking about integrating that with actual visuals (which I would imagine might require OSC or some sort of network support so I can use WiFi).

I was curious if anyone had any clever thoughts? One thing I was curious about is what the max length of a cable for an LCD can be?

2

The LCD cable should be as short as possible, I wouldn’t use lengths > 30 cm

 

Sending to an iPad/phone via OSC sounds like a good plan! It shouldn’t be so difficult to integrate this into MIDIO128.

But I’m unsure about a suitable application to display the text (at least OSC doesn’t prevent you from sending strings)

 

Best Regards, Thorsten.

3

Hmm that’s what I thought. So some sort of OSC-based approach sounds like it would be best. I don’t know enough about OSC yet, but if that didn’t exist, the Linux SysAdmin in me would be wondering about using something like telnet and capturing the results on the tablet. My hunch is doing something similar in OSC won’t be much more difficult than that.