PA4X External Video

[Rufus]

Question about sheet music storage. I have a PA4X mainly for home use. But I will have people over post-covid to play along and/or kareoke nights.

So far I've been using physical songbooks/fake books for chords & lyrics for the songs I don't have memorized. So when playing a song, I conveniently choose the song settings from the PA4X, but then have to remember which of my 20 physical books the music is in. I also have random sheets of paper I've printed for songs that aren't in any of my books. Not sustainable for what I hope will be an expanding library of songs.

So I'm trying to figure out a better long term solution. The old-school way would be to make a copy of all songs I play and put them in a binder. At least then they'd all be in one place.

I'd like to set up an external video monitor for others to read chords & lyrics as they play/sing along. In theory I could use a portable monitor (basically a tablet) and put it on my music stand and read all of my music out of the PA4X. But then my music books would be useless; I'd have to make all new text files for every song.

Or I could make a physical binder for myself, but also load lyrics chords for others to see on the monitor?

Or is there a better way altogether?

Any advice is appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Biggles]

Rufus
It is a case of reading from page 91 of v3.1 of the manual, if this is what you are after then the text describes what to do.

There is a video output socket to the rear of your 4X and as yours is a recent purchase it should have an HDMI socket so its an easy task of connecting up a monitor or a TV, the downside is the display resolution is pretty crappy on a big screen.

An alternative is to store your sheet music on your tablet and using an App like On Song you can catalogue your music and a Bluetooth foot operated pedal can be used to scroll and page turn the music you are using.

 

[Rufus]

Thanks Biggles. I've read through the manual and got the Lyrics function to work on my PA4X. But even with the smaller text setting it can only display 8 lines of text. If I want to see lyrics with chords above this would essentially only be 4 lines of text.

Therefore I'm leaning towards the old fashioned method. A big binder with sleeves for each song. Each song will be a word doc with chords and lyrics. Then I'll make another word file with just lyrics to upload into PA4X, because it would be fun to be able to display lyrics for a kareoke night.

Would take some work to set up but it's the best I can come up with. Still open to suggestions others may have. Thanks.

 

[Biggles]

You could always have a large iPad with an App like On Song in use, a foot operated bluetooth pedal can operate page progression.