How the Band Builder works in Band Pencil

Available with any of the following subscriptions:
✓ Premium
✓ Ultimate

Band Pencil's Band Builder allows you to keep track of which musicians have been booked and who's still left to book in.

Adding a band templates

To get started you'll need to add a band template. To add a new template, edit a template, or duplicate a current template:

• Navigate to the bands page
• Click + New Template on the right-hand side
• Enter the name of your template (e.g. 4 Piece Jazz Quartet) and click Add

You can add a default template to your band, so when you add a new event the band template will automatically be added to the event.

Three things you need to be aware of:

1. Deleting instruments

The template can be linked to more than one event, so be careful when adding and deleting instruments - remember - you can always duplicate the template.

2. Multiple roles or instruments

To assign a musician to multiple instruments, separate the instruments by a comma e.g. "Trombone, Piano". The musician will now fall under the Trombone and Piano columns.

If you want a member to just show with one role/instrument on the band builder, when assigning a member to an event, remove all the roles/instruments from the Roles/Instrument field, but the one you want to show. If you need two trombones in your template, simply add trombone twice as an instrument and the band builder will do the rest!

3. Instrument names need to match

For the band builder to correctly match the musician with the instrument, the instrument needs to be exactly the same as the instrument tagged to your musician. For example, if your Band Builder instrument is "Trumpet/ Flugelhorn", the instrument for the musician needs to be "Trumpet/ Flugelhorn". Once the musician is assigned to the event you can change their instrument to make it match with the template.

Adding a template to an event

Once you've added a template you can link it to an event, to do this:

• Navigate to your event and click on the Musicians Tab
• Now click on Band Builder and select the template you want
• Add your musicians and watch the builder fill up.

Seeing the overview

You can see your line up on the event and on the event overview page. 

When you hover over a musician it will tell you their current availability status and instrument.

We also have a colour coding chart:

• Green - Confirmed their availability as available.
• Orange - Confirmed their availability as not available.
• Blue - Not confirmed their availability.

Where there are no musicians booked (and there should be one) it will say MISSING. If no musician needs to be booked for that instrument a dash "-" will be shown. If you have someone who is assigned to the event, but the band builder can't match their instrument, they will be shown in the Extras column.