Using tablets on stage

Tablet or phone?

The answer depends on where you stand: the distance between your eyes and the screen. A seated guitarist manages fine with a phone; someone standing a step back from a microphone will find anything under ten inches tiring.

For chords and lyrics, ten inches is more than enough. Reading staff notation from PDFs is a different story: there the whole page has to be visible at a glance, and 12.9 inches genuinely helps.

Legibility: size, contrast, dark mode

Whatever reads comfortably in the rehearsal room will feel small on stage. The reason is simple: the device is further away, the light keeps changing, and your eyes are busy with the audience and the rest of the band at the same time.

• Set the font size from playing distance. Put the device on its stand and look at it from where you will actually stand; a size chosen at a desk is almost always too small.
• Use a dark theme. In a dark room a white background dazzles and ruins your night vision; light text on a dark ground reads better and does not spill into the audience's eyes.
• Turn off auto-brightness. Stage lighting makes it jump on every colour change — lock it to a fixed level.
• Make chords stand out. A layout that separates chords from lyrics by colour or weight stops you losing your place when you glance up and back.
• If you only sing, hide the chords. On a vocalist's screen they are just clutter.

If stage lights hit the screen directly, a matte screen protector is the cheapest effective fix. A glossy screen behaves like a mirror under an overhead spot.

Stop the screen from sleeping

The most irritating moment on stage: you look down after a long instrumental section and the screen has gone dark. Every minute you do not touch the device counts as idle time to the operating system.

• Turn on the app's keep-awake setting. A good stage app disables the screen timeout by itself while a song is open.
• Otherwise extend it in system settings. On Android: Display → Screen timeout. On iOS: Display & Brightness → Auto-Lock → Never.
• Put it back after the show. Leaving it on “Never” will drain your phone all the following day.

Silence notifications

A message banner covering the top of the screen in the middle of a chorus is not something you forget. Putting the device on silent is not enough — notifications have to be hidden visually too.

• Turn on Do Not Disturb. It silences the sound and the on-screen banners.
• Consider airplane mode — with one caveat. It also kills Wi-Fi and Bluetooth; if you sync with the band or use a wireless page-turner pedal, enable airplane mode and then switch Wi-Fi or Bluetooth back on by hand.
• Disable automatic updates. An app update starting mid-set costs both battery and attention.
• Lock screen rotation. A tablet angled on a stand can flip between portrait and landscape at the worst possible moment.

Battery and charging

A tablet with the screen permanently on and brightness up uses far more power than normal. A ten-inch tablet starting at 100% will usually see out a two-set night — but soundcheck and the wait beforehand come out of the same battery.

• Go on stage fully charged. Plug it back in after soundcheck.
• Carry a cable. Finding a socket at a venue is usually possible; finding a cable is not.
• A power bank is the safest backup. Connect it before you go on and strap it to the back of the stand.
• Route the cable so nobody trips on it. Cable management on stage is a safety matter.

Stands and placement

Where you put the device matters more than which device you chose. A screen at the wrong angle is both unreadable and a reason to turn your head every time you glance at it.

• Place it just below eye level. It should not come between you and the audience, but you should not have to lean in either.
• A mic-stand clamp is the most practical mount. Vocalists need nothing else.
• A music stand works too. Add a non-slip holder if the tablet sits on a classic desk stand.
• Check how tight the clamp is. Stage vibration will slowly walk a loose clamp downwards.

Turning pages with your hands full

This is the screen's real weakness: turning a paper page takes a second, but on a screen it is genuinely hard when both hands are on an instrument. There are three answers:

• Auto-scroll. A fixed scroll speed matched to the song works well for pieces that hold their tempo.
• A Bluetooth pedal. Foot pedals send keystrokes, so they work with most apps. For wind and string players this is the only realistic option.
• Fit the song on one screen. The simplest answer is often the best: drop the font one step so the whole song fits, and the page-turn problem disappears entirely.

Read your set once in rehearsal using your actual stage setup — same font, same stand, same distance. That is where you find out how many songs fit on one screen.

Have a fallback

Devices get knocked over, apps close, batteries drain faster than expected. It is rare — but when it happens you are halfway through the night.

• Keep the same repertoire on a second device. Your phone is the tablet's backup.
• Make sure the app works without internet. Venue Wi-Fi is often absent or collapses in a crowd; your songs should live on the device, not in a cloud.
• For important nights, carry a paper copy of the setlist. Titles and keys only — one page is enough.

Staying on the same page as the band

Once everyone reads their own screen, a new problem appears: who moves to the next song, and when. Paper setlists never had this issue, because the list was shared and fixed.

The fix is to let the devices follow each other: when one person — usually the band leader — picks a song, every connected screen moves to it, in the same key. That can run two ways: over the same Wi-Fi network, or straight over Bluetooth when the venue has no network at all. Choosing something that does not depend on an internet connection matters; in a packed room neither mobile data nor venue Wi-Fi is dependable.