The Best Sheet Music Apps for Your Worship Band
Written by Kirkland Russell
Creator of Worship Start
Printing sheet music is not only a waste of paper, it’s also a way of the past. There has been a huge push to go digital, and lots of sheet music apps have been released to help make our lives easier. Some are expensive, some are higher in quality, and some are neither of those things. And it is important to learn about the best options that work for your own Church context, whether you have musicians of varying skill levels, your band is small, you have limited access to technology, or even if your Ministry has a tight budget. So here is our breakdown of the top 5 apps for running sheet music at your Church—judged by quality and pricing.
Worship Start Review: Best quality, higher cost.
Price: Minimum $14/month for Planning Center Services + $2-$7/month for Music Stand App
Compatibility: Apple + Android
If you can afford Planning Center Services, the Music Stand App holds the most value in any sheet music software available for Worship music. It seamlessly synchronizes with the Planning Center Services by automatically pulling and organizing all song lead sheets for you in set order, according to your song flow created in the Services app. Not only can musicians see each individual lead sheet and swipe to switch songs, but they can also view the entire service flow and schedule. This is a powerful feature that helps all musicians know what the timing will look like for each Church service, and they can view everything on Apple and Android devices.
The only limitation is that musicians can’t transpose keys on the fly unless an admin goes into the back end of Planning Center Services and changes the key there.
2. OnSong App
Worship Start Review: Great Quality, affordable price.
Price: $29.99
Compatibility: Apple only
OnSong is a great option for your Worship team’s lead sheets. It comes loaded with tons of features and accommodations, such as easy transposing and capo for those last minute key changes, importing songs from Dropbox/Google Drive, chord highlighting/font sizing options for better visibility, and wireless sheet music sharing through email or bluetooth. Although the cost upfront is a flat fee, and it is built for apple users, the great thing about OnSong is that not everyone on your team has to purchase it and not everyone has to have Apple products. All it takes is one person to have it. Once you’ve created your Worship set, you can email a PDF of your entire set, after which Apple and Android users can open, view, and scroll. What’s even better is that OnSong offers controls for lighting, lyrics, and even a metronome for your whole band.
The only drawback is that making your own lead sheets can be time consuming, especially without the OnSong Console. For OnSong to read and analyze your sheets correctly, you can make them using “Text Edit,” save the files as “.txt” into a dropbox folder, and manually import them into your library from within the app. If you don’t want to make your own sheets, there is a Planning Center Integration, and a SongSelect integration.
3. ForScore App
Worship Start Review: Great quality, affordable price.
Price: $14.99
Compatibility: Apple only
ForScore is perfect for any musicians at your Church who read actual sheet music instead of lead sheets. It comes packed with amazing features such as annotation, wireless sharing, set list organizing, bookmarking, half-page views, MIDI configurations, a built-in document scanner that imports directly into your library using your device camera, and much more. The app is also optimized for use with Apple Pencil and for “Encore,” an app that allows you to read sheet music seamlessly on your phone.
The slight downside to ForScore is that it heavily favors keyboardists with its grand staff notation style. For guitarists, singers, and other instruments in the band they are left with PDF documents, which doesn’t translate as well.
4. Mobile Sheets Pro App
Worship Start Review: Good quality, affordable price
Price: $18.99
Compatibility: Android only
Mobile Sheets Pro is very similar to ForScore in the way that it favors sheet music as opposed to lead sheets, and also shares a lot of fantastic features. The best selling feature for Mobile Sheets is a free companion app for PC that makes it easy and simple to create and edit songs. And for the price it is, this app is great value for Android users.
Similar to ForScore’s limitations, Mobile Sheets was built and designed for a grand staff notation. You can import PDFs, but you can’t edit the contents of those files within the app.
5. Band Helper App
Worship Start Review: Great quality, higher price
Price: Tiered subscription accounts, ranging between $6-$12/month.
Compatibility: Apple + Android
The Band Helper App looks like it was designed for cover bands or individual music groups, but holds great value for Worship teams. With different tiers for pricing and for band size, the minimum cost of $6-$12/month is more affordable than Planning Center. Although this app doesn’t look as aesthetically pleasing, it comes with just as much features as any other app with lots of other stand-out features, including a stage plot builder, availability requests, event change notifications and reminders, an Income/Expense Tracker, practice logs and a Payment Share Calculator. So its basically a “songbook” app on steroids, providing you with audio, video and MIDI integration, automation options for hands-free operation, an option to design your own screen layouts, and a repository for all your repertoire, schedule, contacts, and finance info to seamlessly share with your team. There is a LOT that you get here.
The only limitations with Band Helper is that you must upgrade your account to access a lot of its flagship features, some of its features only work with iOS, and the interface looks and feels clunky.
