Charts/lyrics/musical scores sent to iPads/monitors for live ensembles

Gmix's icon

I have been thinking for a while about the possibility to send charts/lyrics/scores to an ipad or bunch of ipads on the fly during live performances so everyone in my band can literally be on the same page. I've been looking into the different notation externals that have been developed in recent years for max (note~ and bach objects), and I imagine that with these and perhaps something like Fantastick, it shouldn't be too hard to come up with a Max patch that is capable of sending this information dynamically. Ideally the patch would identify one ipad as the conductor/band leader, and that device would have a page specifically for "calling" tunes, which can be arranged sequentially in a "set list" or called as desired from a "master list" of all available tunes. Then all additional users would be able to log in as their instrument/role in the band (for example, if you logged in as "lead vocal," you would get lyrics to the song, or if you chose "bass" or "keys" you would get a lead sheet or melody parts)... If you wanted to get even more complex, and your whole band was playing to a click track, you could even have midi triggers from Ableton cue up different sections of a song (like flipping pages in a score automatically or scrolling through lyrics so you can show different verses and choruses in larger font sizes and display them sequentially). Or instead of worrying about a click and having to use in ear monitors, you could simply set up different cue points in each song whereby the "conductor" could press a foot pedal and manually update all the other ipads accordingly. I'd love to get started on something like this myself, because it would be extremely useful for my wedding band, especially when we need to bring in substitute players. I've seen vocalists use similar foot pedal controlled apps for the ipad to scroll through song lyrics, and I'm sure I could come up with something just as good using Max. If no one else can think of any kind of project like this that is already underway, I'd love to get some ideas and suggestions of how we could make this a reality. Thanks a bunch, happy picking/patching/plucking/banging/strumming/what have you!

-G