{"id":6402,"date":"2011-07-15T09:23:23","date_gmt":"2011-07-15T09:23:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.musicademy.com\/?p=6402"},"modified":"2019-07-31T12:23:09","modified_gmt":"2019-07-31T12:23:09","slug":"easyprojector-free-musicians-chord-chart-software-for-all-musicademy-subscribers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.musicademy.com\/blog\/easyprojector-free-musicians-chord-chart-software-for-all-musicademy-subscribers\/","title":{"rendered":"EasyProjector – free musician’s chord chart software for all Musicademy subscribers"},"content":{"rendered":"

EasyProjector \u2013 a musician\u2019s prompt<\/h2>\n

We were contacted recently by Paul Ganney, a musician and all round technical person who wanted to let us know about some software he’d written to ease his life as a worship musician that he has very generously offered to share free of charge with Musicademy subscribers. Here he tells the story of EasyProjector’s development and give you the links so you can download it for yourself.<\/p>\n

In 2005 I was invited to stand in as lead guitarist for a gig by theREIGN, a prominent (and more so now) Praise & Worship band in Hull who also did the odd cover and several original songs. As there were a lot of songs to learn in a very short time, I could see I wasn\u2019t going to achieve this without notes. So I decided that, rather than a pile of paper and a light, a backlit-screen would be much easier to see and so I put all my notes into PowerPoint \u2013 one song per slide. I also built a footswitch to advance through the slides (actually much easier than that sounds \u2013 just buy a cheap mouse and a cheap footswitch and solder the contacts from the footswitch onto the left button switch of the mouse).<\/p>\n

A couple of years later and I was still \u201cstanding in\u201d and still hadn\u2019t learned enough of the songs to just be able to play them (they had a big repertoire and they kept writing new ones). My church had also decided to experiment with projected song words. Rather than splash out on Easy Worship when we had no idea if this was going to work, I wrote a program to do enough to prove the concept, called (in a fit of unoriginality) EasyProjector. It had the same schedule-based approach where you keep all the songs in one list and put them together into various ordered lists (called schedules) which you then save. This worked well, so the church bought Easy Worship.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, I had become fed up with having to re-arrange my PowerPoint slides for theREIGN for every gig\/service only to have to put them back when \u201cnext week\u2019s the same set as a fortnight ago\u201d. A schedule-based system seemed the way to go. So I adapted EasyProjector to do this. I was also getting fed up with rapid page-turning and swapping books\/scores\/handwritten notes in church (and we\u2019ve all had issues with the 5-page score that needs 3 music stands to display \u2013 especially when it keeps going back to earlier bits). EP was already doing several screens per song in its EW-clone mode, so I realised that a bit of extra code would make it display chords as well. Hence I now have just a laptop on my music stand, with the service schedule all cued up and a footswitch that turns the pages for me, meaning I don\u2019t have to let go of my guitar to do so. It\u2019s also got rid of hasty book-changing on the music stand and having to read chords on one page and words on another.<\/p>\n

I showed this to friends of mine who were also leading worship and they said \u201ccan I have a copy?\u201d and so I release EP into the wild. They came back with suggestions, which I implemented and away it went. I\u2019m now letting you know about it. If you\u2019d like a copy, go to\u00a0http:\/\/www.ganney.net\/EP\/E\u200basyProjector.zip<\/a>, download it, save it, open the Word document and follow the instructions.<\/p>\n

EP has many modes, but the most useful seem to be these three:<\/p>\n