A black three-ring binder, two inches thick. For years, it came to every rehearsal. Charts in sheet protectors, a setlist in the front pocket, a pencil jammed through the rings. It worked. It also felt dated and inefficient.
A few bands, one pair of hands
I have played drums and bass in a few bands over the years. Blues, hair metal, alt rock, and now Cali reggae. Different rooms, different people, different sets. More often than not, I am in two of them at the same time.
That overlap is where it stops being a hobby and starts being administration. Every band member has their own version of everything. 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, then by a few bands, and you are not managing songs any more. You are 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
- you need the set to run fifty minutes, and you are adding song lengths on your phone's calculator in a parking lot
- 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 is honest, at least. Paper never pretends to be in sync. Everybody knows the copies have drifted apart. 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. Then you run into the second wall.
I am a software developer and a cloud architect for a living, so I am the one in the band who cannot leave a problem like this alone. And every time I looked at it, the answer came back the same: the good option was iPad only, and my bands were never all on iPads. There was an Android tablet, a couple of iPhones, an old Windows laptop that lived in the rehearsal space, and a TV display.
An app that only works for some of the band is not a band solution. It is one member with a nice setup and four members still holding paper.
So I built one for my own band
In 2024 I got inspired to write something. A rough web app, up on the TV in the rehearsal space, with our charts in it, our notes on the lines they belonged to, a count-in, and reference playback for the parts we kept arguing about. It was not pretty. 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.
Two things surprised me about that. The first was how fast it became the source of truth. Once the chart was in there, nobody printed. The chart in the app was just the song now, and if you changed it, you had changed it for everyone.
The second was how little of the value was in the features. Almost all of it was in there being one copy. Our rehearsal work stopped evaporating. A decision we made in April was still there in July, sitting on the exact line it applied to, and the new bass player could read the whole history of the arrangement without anybody having to remember it out loud.
I called it Band Practice Pro. It worked for my band, but it was a long way from being ready for anybody else's.
Where BandBinder comes in
BandBinder is the next generation of Band Practice Pro. One library of charts, setlists and rehearsal notes that the whole band shares, on Windows and Android now and on iOS at launch, so nobody gets left on paper for owning the wrong thing. Notes attach to the line they are about. The stage side runs fully offline, because you cannot count on a venue's wifi at 10pm.
It is priced per band, not per person, because a five-piece paying five times over was always the part that made my bandmates say no.
The binder is retired
It is on a shelf in my basement, still full of paper, still out of date.
I am not sentimental about it. I am sentimental about what it taught me. A band that keeps its work gets better, and for a long time a binder was the best available way to keep it. It just could not be in five places at once, and neither could I.
That is the whole reason this exists. Not because bands need another screen on stage. Because the work you do in rehearsal deserves to survive until the gig.