Background music gigs, w or w/o music?

[Jerusha Amado]

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I agree that this is bad form.

[adam-b-harris]

Another problem with using a fakebook on a gig is that somebody may come up, flick through your fakebook and ask you to play a piece in there that you may not be comfortable playing. If you have to use sheet music,

[barbara-brundage]

>If you have to use sheet music, a binder with photocopied sheets in is definately the way to go.

iPad! 🙂

[helen-rudd]

Barbara do you scan your music into the IPAD and use that as your “sheet music”. If so what a great use for it!

[barbara-brundage]

You know, Helen, I only got the ipad reluctantly, for a non-music purpose, but I can’t believe how great it is on a gig. With one of the apps for musicians (I use forScore, but there are others) you can not only replace big bag-o-tunes, but they have features like letting you set up “hot spots”, which are links within a piece, so that when you reach a da Capo or To Coda, you just tap and the music jumps to the spot you want.

Downsides: can’t see in bright sunlight, so it fails where it would be most useful, pages are a little smaller than on paper, and it’s a nuisance to get music into it, but when it’s suitable, it’s just great.

And then of course you have your tuner, your standlight, and so on with you, too, without bringing more stuff. With Square you can even swipe a credit card from a spacey bride who forgets the check.

[Christian Frederick]

Barbara… up until this point I was considering buying one of those music readers… but since the iPad, that sounds like a better idea. So after reading this, and since I’m a MacBook Pro – iPhone guy, iPad sounds like the way to go with apps! Thank you…..

[barbara-brundage]

You know, Christian, one of the ironic benefits I’ve found with it is that all those clients who totally can’t see why a $30K instrument has to be in the shade, they all get it immediately when I say, “But my ipad needs to be in the shade.” Zoop, off to the shadows I go, with no argument at all.

[adam-b-harris]

When I said “a binder with photocopied sheets in is definately the way to go” you have to remember that I haven’t done a gig with sheet music for years and we didn’t have any iWhatnow? back then. Even still i don’t think we got dem new fangled things in western australia.

[Sylvia Clark]

Adam, has anyone in Australia written a book about their playing experiences?

[adam-b-harris]

Sylvia, I’m out playing all the time, but I don’t play with sheet music as I don’t think its a good look and it leaves the possibility open for all sorts of nasty things to happen to the music while you are playing. As for the iPad, I think thats a wonderful application of the technology, but I’m yet to see an iPad out here, it hasn’t really caught on as being a must have gadget.

As far as a book of experiences goes, I haven’t seen/heard of anything like that, not for harp at any rate. I live in western australia, if you were to cut australia into 3 equal pieces vertically, WA would be the left bit. There are no harp shops in WA. I would be surprised if there were more than 6 players doing gigs. In some ways, it is a very primative and isolated place. I’ve started a bit of a blog about the kind of things that happen at my gigs on my website (http://www.AdamBHarris.net) but since I’ve started the blog, not much has happenned!

Things are much better on the east coast, with more people, more harpists, some shops and manufacturers (Andrew Thom, Denwar, Branden Lassels etc).

If I see any books on playing experiences, you will be the first to know.

have a great day

adam

[Philippa mcauliffe]

No Aussie book I have ever seen either.

[barbara-brundage]

>So have I got this right – you scan all your music and put it on the ipad (is that easy to do?) and there is some application that means a swipe of the hand turns the page??

Well, it’s very easy to put any music that’s in pdf form onto it. Creating PDFs is another story, really. There are several apps for musicians where you turn a page just by tapping the screen once, but they’ve also just come out with a bluetooth foot pedal, which sold out so fast I didn’t get into the first batch, so I’m still waiting on that. I think it will be fine for lever harp, probably not so convenient for pedal harp.

Personally, I don’t like the ipad much for ensemble music, because even with the enlarging feature in forScore (the app I use) it’s still smaller than print size, and if there are cue lines it either gets really small or you have far too many page turns and scrolls. Don’t forget the ipad only displays one page at a time, so for all music you have more turns, and turns where you aren’t used to them, to begin with. On the other hand, a tap is a lot faster than an actual turn, especially when it’s breezy.

I’m going to be doing a fairly extensive review of the ipad for acoustic musicians soon, and I’ll post a link to that here when it starts, if you’re interested.

[Christian Frederick]

Barbara… that would be a good topic for the hard copy of Harp Column…

[barbara-brundage]

Well, Christian, unfortunately one difficulty with that is that this is all changing so much so fast it’s hard to keep up, even online. 🙂

Georgina, one thing I should have mentioned is that scanning in printed bought music probably has all sorts of copyright ramifications. It’s not a problem for me since I mostly play my own arrangements, and they exist in Finale, which makes very nice pdfs very easily. But I have a few important things I did in MusicTime Deluxe before I got finale, and getting those pieces into PDF (since I can no longer open the original files on the computer) is time-consuming and labor intensive, even on a mac, where you can easily make a pdf from any file in any program.

[Philippa mcauliffe]

Thanks Barbara – looks like first we should see if

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