Follow Me lets one device lead all the others. Start Play Mode on your phone, and the tablet on the stand and the laptop by the mixer open the same setlist at the same song. Change song on the phone and they change with it; start auto-scroll and they scroll along. In a band, the same thing happens on every member's device. There is nothing to pair and nothing to set up per device: if you are logged in and online, it follows.
Turning it on
Follow Me is one switch for your account, in two places:
- Settings > Features > Follow Me across your devices.
- Inside Play Mode: open the gear (the setup sheet) and flip Follow Me under its own heading. Handy when you are already on stage and want the second screen to catch up.
Flipping it on inside Play Mode makes that device the leading one right away. Flipping it off on the leading device ends the session, so every follower leaves Play Mode.
Which device leads
Whichever device you press Play on leads. There is no setting for it. Start Play Mode on the phone and the phone leads; walk over to the tablet and press Play there and the tablet takes over, while the phone quietly becomes a follower.
The Play Mode header says which one you are holding: Leading on the device that leads, Following on the ones that follow.
In a band
In a band workspace, Follow Me works across people. When a member with Follow Me on presses Play, every member's device opens the same song, and follows every song change and every auto-scroll start and stop from there. The header on the others says Following with that person's name.
- Band leaders and members can lead the set. Viewers and guests follow, but never lead.
- Whoever pressed Play last leads. There is no fixed leading device, and the band leader role does not come into it. If the bass player starts the set from her phone and later you press Play on yours, yours takes over, and hers becomes a follower.
- Follow Me is per person. Your switch decides whether your Play presses lead the band. Leave it off and you can rehearse a song on your own without moving anyone; you still follow when someone else leads.
- Only in that band. A device sitting in your personal workspace never follows a band rehearsal, and a device in the band never follows what you play at home. Each device follows the workspace it is in.
What a follower can do
A follower is a full Play Mode, not a mirror. Text size, the metronome, chord diagrams and your capo all work as usual on each device.
Auto-scroll follows, and every sheet lands together. Start auto-scroll on the leading device and every follower starts scrolling too; stop it and they stop. Each follower paces its own sheet to reach the bottom at the same moment as the leading device, so a member with chords hidden, or bigger text, or a smaller screen, reaches the last line with everyone else. That is smart speed on the band's clock, and like smart speed it steps aside when you have set your own speed for a song: your speed leads on your device. Tapping play or pause on a follower only changes that device, until the leading device's next play or pause.
Flip a page on a follower (swipe, tap an edge, use the chevrons or the song picker) and it stops following for the moment, so you can glance at the next song while the leading device is still on this one. In a band, that glance moves nobody else. The header says Paused and a pill at the bottom says Following paused:
- Tap Rejoin on the pill to jump back to the leading device's song, at the spot it is reading. A device that joins mid-song lands there too.
- Do nothing and the follower rejoins on its own the next time the leading device changes song.
- Tap the × on the pill to stop following on that device for the rest of the session. It stays where you put it until someone presses Play again.
The countdown follows. When the leading device reaches the end of a song and the end-of-song pill starts counting down, every follower shows the same countdown, synced to it, with the next song's title, capo and key. Nobody advances on their own: the leading device's move lands and everyone follows it. A follower's own pill (when it reaches its own bottom) waits for a tap instead of counting down.
Leaving
- Exit on the leading device and every follower exits with it.
- Exit on a follower and only that device leaves. The leading device keeps playing, and that device stays out until someone presses Play again.
Good to know
- Requires an internet connection, on the leading device and on every follower. Follow Me travels through Fretlist's servers. Offline, Play Mode still works on each device; they just do not talk to each other. Making this work on a stage without internet is the end goal, but not there yet.
- No venue WiFi? Use a hotspot. Nothing here needs the venue's network. If your phone has signal, turn on its hotspot and put the tablet on it; Follow Me works the same.
- If the leading device disappears (a dead battery, a closed app), followers keep the last song up and stop reacting after a few minutes. Press Play on another device to carry on from there.
- The switch is one setting for your account. Flip it on the phone and Settings on the tablet shows it flipped, live. The same now goes for "Show chord diagrams" next to it.
- Same workspace. Devices follow within the workspace they are in. A tablet left in a band workspace will not follow your personal setlist.
- An editor is never interrupted. A device sitting on the song editor or the new-song page does not jump into Play Mode.
Related
- Performing with Play Mode: everything else on the stage view
- Installing the app: put Fretlist on the tablet that lives on the stand