This looks interesting and I'll try it out. I've been using a spreadsheet successfully to store many of these elements:
- one row per bar
- columns for bar number, chords, patch settings or drum patterns, lyrics, notes
Breaking lyrics strictly on the bar initially seems unintuitive, but in practice it works well. Including pre-roll bars means the spreadsheet corresponds exactly to my DAW. As I work through the arrangement and production I'll tweak the spreadsheet and keep it up to date.
I also copy the spreadsheet to a new tab, rearrange and resize it so I can print it out one one page (lyric-heavy tracks take two). There's a bit of messy cutting and pasting in this, but I've got quite quick at it and it means that while recording I can have all this information in front of me without using any screen real estate. When I've finished the last of these printouts, often with scribbled notes all over it, goes into a folder in case I need to do a remix.
That's a super interesting process! I haven't heard of using spreadsheets to track this kind of thing. It sounds like you're sort of building a spreadsheet-based lead sheet.
Thanks for checking out Songcraft. Let me know if there are features it's missing that would make it useful for your method!
Breaking lyrics strictly on the bar initially seems unintuitive, but in practice it works well. Including pre-roll bars means the spreadsheet corresponds exactly to my DAW. As I work through the arrangement and production I'll tweak the spreadsheet and keep it up to date.
I also copy the spreadsheet to a new tab, rearrange and resize it so I can print it out one one page (lyric-heavy tracks take two). There's a bit of messy cutting and pasting in this, but I've got quite quick at it and it means that while recording I can have all this information in front of me without using any screen real estate. When I've finished the last of these printouts, often with scribbled notes all over it, goes into a folder in case I need to do a remix.
I look forward to giving Songcraft a go!