Automation and Guitar practice

Thought I would share a recent simple, but useful automation of mine used while practicing guitar.

I use the wonderful app forScore to save all of my guitar tabs. In addition to the tabs, forScore allows a song to be stored along with the tab. Nice one stop destination… pull up the tab, tap on play and begin practice/play along.

My workflow has been fragmented when I have another reference file that I want to be accessible while I’m playing. The common example of this is a YouTube video I’ve saved locally on my iPad. To access I have to separately open Files and then navigate to the file of interest.

Thanks to this shortcut posted by the MacStories team, I realized I could deep link within forScore to the video file on my iPad. By doing that I now simply open the tab in forScore and tap on a button to open the video. So much faster and in context! Perfect automation.

Setting up a new deep link:

  • Run the FS Bookmarks shortcut
  • The prior step will add a URL with link to the file to the clipboard
  • Open the tab of interest in forScore
  • Tap on the briefcase icon in upper right and then choose Buttons
  • In the Button Settings window choose Open Link
  • Tap on the Link entry and then paste the clipboard entry
  • Tap on the tab in the location where you want the button to appear
  • Tap Save

I hope this helpful for somebody else. BTW, if you have a Shortcut that will help me improve my guitar skills, please share! :wink:

Cheers! — jay

Does this app actually work with tabs, or is it just sheet music? I only saw sheet music on the website, but I’m always looking for a better way to organize my guitar tabs/chord sheets.

Right now I use SongBook which works okay.

forScore does not have any dedicated “tab” features to my knowledge. It is sheet music oriented (PDF), but don’t let that mislead in terms of its rich capabilities. I’m not familiar with SongBook… I’ll have to learn more about it.