Use a Bluetooth page turner or foot pedal for lyrics and chords

Page turners that act as a Bluetooth keyboard work, and that's most of them, such as those from AirTurn, PageFlip, Donner and iRig BlueTurn, since Stage Friend reads the keys a keyboard sends. What a pedal can send differs from model to model and from mode to mode, and there are far too many models for us to have tried them all. So before you sign up, try yours on our page turner test, which reads the pedal in your browser with the same key reading as Stage Friend; inside the app, Try your keys does the same.

Pairing happens on your device, not in Stage Friend. Turn the pedal on and pair it in the Bluetooth settings of your iPad, Android tablet, phone or computer, the way you would a keyboard, then open a song in Stage Friend and press the pedal. The pedal acts on the chords and lyrics page, so that's where you'll see it work.

Most pedals work the moment they're paired, because Stage Friend already knows the keys page turners send. Page Up, Page Down and Space scroll about a page, keeping a few lines of the last one so your eye finds its place, while the up and down arrows scroll a few lines, and Home and End go to the top and the bottom of the song. The left and right arrows change song. Many page turners have a mode for each pair of keys, so the pedal's mode decides whether it scrolls or changes songs.

Pedal & keys lists every command with the keys that run it today, in three groups: Navigate, Autoscroll and metronome and Gig. Besides scrolling and changing songs, a key can open or close the menu, start or stop autoscroll and the metronome, and pause or resume following someone in a live session. Change gives a command a key of your own, and Choose key gives one to a command that has none yet. If the key already does something else, Stage Friend asks before it moves the key, since a key only does one thing. Reset to standard puts the standard keys back and keeps your custom commands.

Two pedals aren't many keys for a whole gig, so a common setup gives one of them two jobs: a press scrolls, and a hold or a double press goes to the next song. Pedal & keys is in Settings, and also in the three dots on the chords and lyrics page, so you can set it up with the pedal already at your feet. Tap the box beside a command and press, double press or hold the pedal, and that's the key from then on.

One key can do up to three things: a press, a double press and a hold. Every pedal can send a press and a double press. A hold works only when the pedal keeps sending its key while held down, which on some pedals depends on a switch, often marked Repeat. Check yours on the page turner test or in Try your keys, and use a double press if a hold doesn't come through. Presses that only scroll never wait for a second press, so page turns stay instant, and while you hold a key that has a hold set, a ring fills to show when the hold will run.

Once Scroll down or Scroll up has your own key, a choice of how far it goes appears beside it: A few lines, Half a page or A full page. A few lines keeps your place in a dense chord chart, while a full page suits a lyric sheet you read in big blocks.

At a gig with audience voting, a pedal can tick off songs and clear votes. The Gig commands work when the song is opened from a gig, for band members who run the gig live. Mark as played checks the song off, and a second press takes the check off again. Reset votes clears the song's votes, and Switch setlist and votes jumps to the most voted song and then back to where you were in the setlist, as long as voting is on for the gig. Reset a song's votes explains what the audience sees.

Between songs at a request gig, the same few things happen every time, so they can share one key. New custom command puts up to eight commands on one key, run in order, and you drag a step to move it. The example Played, next, which Use this example adds for you, marks the song as played, resets its votes and goes to the next song. If one step can't run, the rest stop there and a message says which step and why.

Better to find a pedal in the wrong mode at home than at the soundcheck. Try your keys, at the top of Pedal & keys, shows a made-up song and setlist that react to your pedal, and each press names the command it ran, while nothing real changes. Your keys are saved on each device, so set them up on the one you use on stage. Then play a setlist song by song, or start autoscroll from the pedal.