Started off inauspiciously, when my D-string tuner peg button snapped right in two as I tried to turn it past an internal obstruction in the sealed gearbox, before I'd even started playing. Fortunately, it was pretty close to in-tune when it broke, 'cuz I had to play the whole night with it exactly there. These are my second set of tuners and they've always had this grinding issue from day one. I thought it would lessen over time, but it hasn't. Fortunately, I have 6 spare buttons on the old set somewhere...
It was also the first outing for my "songbook in the iPad" experiment. I combined all the Word doc song sheets for the songs in current rotation into a big PDF, with a hyperlinked Table of Contents. The advantages over paper are many: much smaller and lighter to carry, much faster to "flip" to the desired song, no booklight needed, almost infinitely expandable with no added bulk,
The main disadvantage is that the screen is smaller than a piece of paper, so the words and chords are harder to read. This was my main worry, but I put on my "gig glasses" (blended bifocals for distance and "3 feet away"), and it worked out fine. Probably not as easy to read as the paper version, but serviceable.
Also, it's tougher (but not impossible) to scribble on the sheet with hints, notes, diagrams, arrows, etc. I incorporated most of these from the existing pages when I created the PDF version, but I do tend to need to add stuff on the fly during gigs. But I have a PDF viewer that allows annotation, so it'll be clumsy but do-able. And of course, creating and maintaining the PDF itself will be a lot of work -- adding songs will be theoretically easy, but hard when the links get broken, as they inevitably do. Just getting this "proof of concept" main list working right was a lot more trouble than it should have been...
I was also worried about battery life, but I played from 6:30 until 11, and only went down 25%, so that'll be fine (at that low level of backlighting, anyway). It occurred to me, the next morning, that this solution is OK for indoors and nighttime, but may be completely unworkable for daytime (and "starts in the day") gigs. I don't know if some kind of sun shade might make it readable, or if I'll have to maintain a fallback paper copy (with a reduced list?).
Anyway, it was pretty successful, so I'll definitely pursue and improve on the idea. One great advantage not listed above is that I actually have multiple linked Contents lists: Everything Alphabetical, By Capo (I tend to try to play songs with the same capo setting in a row so I don't have to stop and retune so much), Kids' Songs, Dance Tunes, and By Artist. At the very top is a List of Lists, so I can quickly get to the one I need. In real life, this worked out even better than I'd hoped, so I'll think about even more ways of categorizing the songs, since the "What to play next?" question is of the toughest parts of this thing. Maybe "Age Group", or a separate "Late Night" list?
It was pretty cold, so not a lot of people out, but I had plenty of people come by for brief periods. Some young girls specifically asked for Justin Bieber, which had happened a dozen times last summer, just before I actually broke down and learned his big hit, and hadn't happened since. Some older teenage boy came by and started asking for a series of kids' songs, which struck me as stranger and stranger until I figured out that he had someone else (girlfriend? little sister?) on the other end of his phone. Concert by proxy?
But tips were up from previous weeks ($71), and friendly people are starting to come out, so I'm looking forward to springtime.
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