Top 5 Apps for Choir Leaders

In our ever-digital world there are thousands of apps that can help and support our daily lives. This means there are also many that help the choir experience.

Here are our five go-to apps for running choirs, a list that will also prove helpful if you sing in a choir, play an instrument, or just love to jam!

ForScore

This app changed our professional lives. It houses digitised versions of all our sheet music ready for us to annotate them, share notes, make set lists for each of our choirs, rearrange pages in-app, link repeated sections together (no more turning pages to signs and codas!), and so much more! It has also released our backs from a life time of pain from carrying heavy folders of music, it allows us to pull up a song whenever someone fancies singing them, and saves us from the precarious page turns that come with sellotaped scores! 

It comes with an on screen piano, an audible and visual metronome, and works beautifully with the Apple Pencil.  While ForScore costs £14.99 to purchase, it is without a doubt the greatest £14.99 we have ever spent!

Beat Keeper and Pitch, Please!

ForScore comes with some handy supporting apps, our favourites being Beat Keeper and Pitch, Please! The former allows us to work out tempos by tapping our iPhone or iPad screen along to a song, while the pun-tastic other gives us a virtual pitch pipe ideal for gigs where we don’t have a piano. 

ABRSM Speedshifter

Speedshifter changes the speed of an audio recording (such as a backing track) without altering the pitch of the song. It’s fantastic if you want to slow down a song while it’s being taught, something that’s particularly valuable when teaching movement, or break down a riff or difficult phrase in the melody.

Voice Memos

Having a way to record on your phone is invaluable. The iPhone’s Voice Memo app is a brilliant pocket tool for doing just that, and there are many other free and low-cost apps with similar functions out there. Recording rehearsals so you can listen back, take notes and share recordings with choir members is a great way to aid your singers’ experience. We encourage our singers to make their own recordings too, especially when you’re note bashing their part.

Spotify

It’s undeniable that Spotify has changed the way we consume music. While we might not savour albums in the way we used to, it has opened us all up to a way of discovering music we never had before. When you lead or sing in a choir, it’s an invaluable source for finding different versions and arrangements of songs you’re doing… and getting distracted along the way!

Do you have any favourite apps you or your choir couldn’t live without? If so, let us know in the comments below!