If your worship team is still shuffling through paper binders, Music Stand might be the upgrade you have been looking for. This digital music reader from Planning Center connects to your Services account so musicians can view chord charts and sheet music on a phone or tablet, and flip pages hands-free with a Bluetooth foot pedal or facial gestures.^1
Musicians can annotate charts with highlights, drawings, and text notes, saved per user, and can view or merge other users' annotations.^1 Worship leaders can link devices through Sessions, turning pages on one device and syncing every connected screen.^1 A built-in audio player lets musicians practice along with recordings and loop sections, and a metronome changes tempo as they advance through songs.^3 The app works offline with the last 10 plans, and charts can be imported into Services from CCLI SongSelect, MultiTracks, and PraiseCharts.^1
Version 5, released on iOS in October 2026, brought a redesigned Liquid Glass interface, a Dark Inverted option that flips PDFs for dark-mode reading while keeping annotations sharp, and a new media player.^4 Facial gestures, added earlier, turn a page with a mouth movement, a wink, or a head twist.^2
Planning Center was co-founded in 2006 by Jeff Berg and Aaron Stewart, who first built worship-planning tools while on staff together at a church in Southern California.^5 In 2024 they formed the Ministry Centered Foundation to ensure Planning Center can never be acquired. At the company's 20th anniversary in June 2026, the founders described two decades of "choosing churches over investors" and "the long game over the easy exit."^5 Co-founder Aaron Stewart says of Music Stand, "This is how I practice my stuff every week."^7 The Music Stand page says Planning Center is trusted by over 78,000 churches.^1 The app download is free; churches subscribe through Services, where Music Stand is an add-on.^1
Why Christians Love It"Two years in and I really would not go back to paper. The screen is clear, they get the music before Sunday so they can rehearse, and being able to change keys on the fly makes last minute rehearsal changes so much smoother."^8
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