⏰ How The Band Plan Saves Me Hours Every Week
A real-world example of how I use The Band Plan for weekly rehearsals and how it streamlines my workflow.
Weekly Rehearsal Workflow
I use The Band Plan every week to put together lists for rehearsals that have all the music on a single page in order for the guys to get through. Here's how it works:
1. Creating the Rehearsal Setlist
For this rehearsal, I just copied the planned setlist for the show and was able to easily remove items we already have down to get to this list.
The Band Plan makes it super simple to create rehearsal setlists from your show setlists—just copy and remove what you don't need. Just edit the setlist where you can remove, add and rearrange the songs in the set. On the right of the screenshot you can see the buttons for the things I get into below plus a breakdown of how long each set will take. Here we have 4x~30 minute sets that we'll try to get done in a ~3 hour rehearsal.
Here's the subset of songs from a show we're preparing to play in 2 weeks—the stuff we need to work on:
📄 Print Setlist: View Print Setlist
Note: I can share these things by URL and they can be viewed by anyone with the URL, so musicians who don't have accounts can view stuff that's usually private to band members if they have the right URL with the token.
2. Music Stand View for Rehearsal
This is what I'll bring up on my iPad during rehearsal and what I'll print out for the guys who don't have iPads:
📱 Music Stand View: View Music Stand
All the chords, lyrics, and performance documents in one place, organized by set.
3. Audio Playlist
If I want to send an audio playlist of the things in the set, that gets auto-generated too. It's a good idea to send this to band members to get the songs going through their minds:
🎵 Audio Playlist: View Audio Playlist
A complete playlist with all the songs in order, ready to share or play during rehearsal.
4. YouTube Playlist for Covers
For covers, if folks want to review the original versions, most songs have an associated YouTube video. These get compiled and ordered for our set in a YouTube playlist automatically:
🎬 YouTube Playlist: View YouTube Playlist
All the YouTube videos for the covers in our set, ready to review the original versions.
Recording Rehearsals
I sometimes use The Band Plan to record the rehearsals directly from my phone. It normalizes the recordings so they sound decent. Or I use an external recorder and can upload the files.
Waveform Tools for Splitting Recordings
Once I have a recording, there are waveform tools that make it easy to split those recordings into the songs in that day's list. This is incredibly useful for reviewing individual songs later.
Getting Your Songs In
It's pretty easy to get your songs in there in whatever format you have them. You can:
- Import from Google Docs (single or multiple documents)
- Upload PDFs directly
- Type directly in the editor
- Link to Google Docs that stay synced
Time Savings
⏰ Hours Saved Every Week
Between not having to rearrange Google Docs anymore and The Band Plan handling the recordings like that, I save hours every week. The automatic playlist generation, easy sharing via URLs, and integrated recording tools eliminate so much manual work.
Get Started
Create a free account and a band to get into it. You'll be up and running in minutes, and you'll quickly see how much time it saves you.