Any way to get musical notation into the Note field?

[jeebustrain]

My current gig is drumming with a band. I've been using just the Notes field with BH for cues and various other random things that I forget. One thing that I would love to be able to do is have a way to write out tricky little rhythmic figures without the need to import an entire PDF document.. Sometimes it's literally just 1 or 2 measures that I need to keep me on track.

My first thought was to write it out in a score program and insert a screenshot. The notes field doesn't seem to support image insert. My next idea was to utilize the ASCII codes to make a rough outline of the rhythms. It works and shows up fine in the web interface (albeit a bit small), but the characters are just [?] when I try to look at it on my iPad. Is there another simple/quick thing that I'm missing that might be able to get me what I need? The only other way I've been able to do it is to write it out phonetically with numbers, which kind of works, but is sometimes hard to follow onstage if I'm not in the right headspace.

EDIT: I just realized that the Lyrics field added the ability to insert images. I'm specifically using the Notes field in this case because I use the lyrics field as a keyboardist and I wanted to be able to save 2 sets of notes in the same song. Is there any possibility to add this to Notes? The ability to insert images would be amazing.

[arlo]

Why don't you want to put these images into the Lyrics field? I didn't understand your statement "I use the lyrics field as a keyboardist and I wanted to be able to save 2 sets of notes in the same song."

[jeebustrain]

Why don't you want to put these images into the Lyrics field? I didn't understand your statement "I use the lyrics field as a keyboardist and I wanted to be able to save 2 sets of notes in the same song."

Sorry. I don't think I explained it well enough. I play 2 different instruments in multiple bands. I use Band Helper (with multiple projects underneath) to manage it all. A while back, I asked about the best way to handle 2 different types of notes for the different instruments (my drum cues will be different than my keyboardist notes/lyrics). My keyboard notes are generally always attached as PDFs. Unfortunately, there's quite a bit of overlap with the songs. So after getting some advice here, I created a custom layout just for drums and only display the Notes field on the screen. It's actually worked really well for a while, whenever I have to add a song to my drumming gig, all I need to do is drop whatever notes I need into the Notes field and add it to my project.

If I start using the Lyrics field for all of this, I start to run into precedence/ordering issues because BH doesn't know whether to show my keyboard or drum notes based upon the project/layout.


As a side note, I did an experiment with the Lyrics field and wanted to know if I'm doing something wrong. I always edit songs/setlists through the web interface on my computer. I took a song and pasted an image into the lyrics field with some text. It seems to save fine. But when I sync and try to load that on my iPad, only the text shows. It seems to want to ignore the image. I believe I'm running the latest version of the app on my iPad.

[arlo]

To confirm, you use an attached document for your keyboard notes and the Notes field for your drum notes?

I can put embedding images into the Notes field on my wish list.

Meanwhile, you could either 1) use a different attached document for your drum notes, or 2) use the Lyrics field for your drum notes. Then instead of switching between two layouts for keyboard vs. drums, you could change Settings > General > Defaults > Documents to 1 or 2 to show the keyboard notes or the drum notes.

One caveat about using the Lyrics field for notes is that that's not a good idea if you are also keeping actual lyrics for singers. But in that case you could turn on Settings > Account Sync > Personal Sync > Lyrics and put your notes into the Personal Lyrics field, leaving the Shared Lyrics field for actual lyrics.

Regarding your side note, you would need to attach your images to the song as documents, then use the Image button on the Lyrics field to insert an image into the lyrics. See step 14 on this page for more info:

https://www.bandhelper.com/tutorials/adding_lyrics.html

[jeebustrain]

To confirm, you use an attached document for your keyboard notes and the Notes field for your drum notes?

yessir - my keyboard notes are usually way more involved, including lyrics and such, while the drum notes are usually a lot simpler, usually just containing start/stop notes and reminders for specific cues.

I can put embedding images into the Notes field on my wish list.

thanks!

Meanwhile, you could either 1) use a different attached document for your drum notes, or 2) use the Lyrics field for your drum notes. Then instead of switching between two layouts for keyboard vs. drums, you could change Settings > General > Defaults > Documents to 1 or 2 to show the keyboard notes or the drum notes.

that's an interesting idea. Let me fiddle around with that to see if I can make this work. Fortunately, I only need to do this for a few songs at this point, but I know more are coming.

One caveat about using the Lyrics field for notes is that that's not a good idea if you are also keeping actual lyrics for singers. But in that case you could turn on Settings > Account Sync > Personal Sync > Lyrics and put your notes into the Personal Lyrics field, leaving the Shared Lyrics field for actual lyrics.

Cool thanks. Yea, I got into the document thing a while back and have a process, so fortunately I haven't really had to use the actual lyrics field for much in the past, other than some quick impromptu things I've had to set up on the gig.

Regarding your side note, you would need to attach your images to the song as documents, then use the Image button on the Lyrics field to insert an image into the lyrics. See step 14 on this page for more info:

https://www.bandhelper.com/tutorials/adding_lyrics.html

that's the piece I was missing! Thank you. It would be cool to be able to paste it in via browser and have it work that way, too. Although I am aware that is a bit more complicated of an endeavor.