Printable setlist template

A template is an empty grid. You still type every title into it, and then you are laying out a document at eleven at night with a gig in the morning. The typing was never the hard part.

The failure comes later, on stage. A setlist typed in a word processor prints at body-text size, because that is the size a document is for. Six feet away, in coloured light, mid-song, out of breath, that is a grey block. So you bump the type up, it spills to a second page, and page two is on the floor by the third song.

What matters on a stage sheet is small enough to list: big type, titles only, numbers so you can find your place, nothing else. Every extra thing on the page costs type size, which is the trade a blank template hands to you and this one works out for you.

The band sheet on the mic stand and the sheet the sound engineer is holding are not the same document, and printing one for both is how the desk ends up guessing.

• Stage. Taped to the monitor. Titles only, keys in the margin, readable from six feet. Type auto-shrinks until they all fit.
• Band. What each player holds. Key, capo, tuning, who sings it, the tempo to count it in, and how long it runs.
• Tech. For the desk. Durations and a running clock, so sound and lights know when a cue lands and how deep the set is.
• Custom. Your own columns. Pick what goes on the sheet. Title is always there; everything else is yours to add.

Same songs, same order, one edit. Change the running order and all four change with it, which is the other thing four separate word processor files will not do.

The desk's copy is the one bands get wrong, and the fix is mostly about leaving things off: what to give the sound engineer.

The stage sheet has no font-size box, on purpose. It measures the page, counts your songs and prints the largest type that fits the page it is printing on. On a Letter page in landscape, which is how the stage sheet prints unless you turn it, 12 songs come out at 34 point. For scale, this paragraph is 12 point. Long titles cost width, so yours may land a little under.

A long night still fits: 36 songs on the same page come out at 21.5 point, splitting into columns where that buys size back, and still on one sheet. That is the territory a whole pub night lands in, and the count a three-hour booking actually comes to is a subtraction rather than a guess: how long a 3-hour bar gig setlist should be.

It stops at 16 point and will not go smaller. Below that you are not reading titles from across a stage, you are guessing at word shapes, so instead of shrinking it says the sheet needs two pages and tells you what to turn off. Being told in the kitchen beats finding out under a wedge monitor.

Print goes through your browser's own print dialog, so choosing “Save as PDF” there gives you a file to send instead of paper. Letter or A4, portrait or landscape, and the stage sheet will pick the orientation that gives bigger type if you let it. Which way it goes depends on the set: turn those 12 songs portrait and they come out at 41 point, while a 36-song night is better off landscape.

The top of every sheet carries the setlist name, the band, the venue, the date and how long the set runs, because a sheet that could be last month's is a sheet somebody has to check. Set headings appear when there is more than one set. Breaks are a switch, since a break takes a whole line and lines cost type size.

If what you actually need is text rather than paper, the same dialog copies the list as plain text for the group chat, or exports a CSV.

While it is looking up your songs it times them, because the sheet and the slot are the same problem. A set that prints beautifully and runs four minutes over is still a set you get waved off in the middle of.

There is more on that arithmetic, including the gaps between songs that almost nobody counts, in how many songs fit in a 45-minute set.