The Gig You Called Back From Because You Couldn't Remember the Capo for the Third Song in Set 2
It happens. You're at a house concert in D standard, the host has asked you twice already if you're ready, and you're standing in the back trying to remember whether "Blue Ridge Mountain Home" runs capo 2 in G or capo 4 in E for the key the other guitarist plays it in. You had it in your head during rehearsal. You don't have it now.
Proficiency ratings don't prevent this. Rehearsal doesn't fully prevent this. But a structured record that travels with you and gives you the Key, the Capo Fret, and the Chord Progression in the same entry as the song — that prevents it.
How the Repertoire Library Powers Every Set You Build
The linked Repertoire library is the foundation. Every song gets its own record: the key it lives in across six string positions, the capo fret, the chord progression, the instrumentation requirements, and the Proficiency rating that tells you honestly whether this song is gig-ready or still living on the Practice List rotation.
The Proficiency field runs from "Just learning" through "Need music to perform" and "Partially memorized" to "Solid memorized." That gradient matters for set building. When you're constructing Set 1 for a two-hour outdoor show in D standard and you're pulling songs from the Repertoire library, you don't want to accidentally slot a "Need music to perform" song into position three. The Proficiency field is the filter that prevents that mistake before the set list is finalized.
Collaboration Tag — tracking which songs work with Bear Right, Bluegrass, Marty Mootz, Kevin Gibbons, and others — is the field that transforms a solo repertoire into a flexible session catalog. You're building for a jammer context? Filter Bluegrass Tag and Bluegrass Jammer = true and you've got the intersection of what you know and what fits the session. You're playing a full band show with a specific lineup? Filter by the collaboration tags that match who's showing up, cross-reference against Instrumentation Options, and your candidate pool for each set is already narrowed before you start sequencing.
The Four-Set Structure Isn't Just Organizational Nicety
Set 1, Set 2, Set 3, and Encore as separate linked entry fields — each drawing from the same Repertoire library — means your set structure is live-linked to your song data. Change a song's key in the Repertoire record and every set list that includes it reflects the update.
The Encore field changes how you think about the end of the show. An encore shouldn't be an improvised decision made in the moment based on crowd energy. It should be a pre-selected song that you know cold, that fits the key and energy of how Set 3 ended, and that you've confirmed works acoustically if the full band steps back. Having it pre-loaded in the Encore field means the decision is made before you walk on stage, not during the applause.
Line Up as a contact field links the personnel for the event to the set list record. When you look back at an event three months later trying to remember who played bass that night, the answer is in the record — not in a text thread you can't find.
Solo Play — Solo acoustic works vs. Needs instrumentation — is the field that makes the Repertoire library safe to use across contexts. You're at an open mic, solo, and you need to quickly confirm which songs stand on their own without a rhythm section. Filter Solo acoustic works and you have your shortlist. The Doc Type Inventory field tells you whether your lead sheet is a scanned PDF you can pull up, a guitar tab PDF, or still paper-unscanned sitting in a folder somewhere.