using a tablet instead of sheet music

[Gretchen Cover]

Barbara Brundage has a great blog on using an Ipad in place of sheet music. However, I find the Ipad

[Saul Davis Zlatkovski]

I can’t imagine swithcing to a computer. It will open up a whole new world of complications, seems to me. How long does the battery last? How do you turn pages? What if it fails? Doesn’t seem reliable to me. I would spend the money on a multifunction printer with an 11×17 flat bed screening area so you can photocopy music as needed to solve page turns.

[Gretchen Cover]

Saul,

I can’t imagine not using a tablet.

[tony-morosco]

Saul, a tablet isn’t really a computer. At least not in the sense that people seem to think. They don’t suffer the same kinds of problems that, say, a laptop can have. They are extremely reliable.

My iPad, if I start with it fully charged and use it just for sheet music, can last, well, I don’t really know because I have never been able to play that long. On average the life span of the battery is about 10 hours. Starting with a fully charged battery there is virtually no way you can run out of battery in one gig if you are primarily using it for sheet music.

You can turn pages any number of ways. Of course you can turn pages by simply touching the screen, easier than turning an actual paper page. But you can also use a foot switch so you can turn a page with a foot tap as well.

There is nothing wrong with using paper music, but people have been using computers and electronics to make music for a very long time. It isn’t a new or untested thing. After all, half of what makes a synthesizer work is a sound module that is just a computer dedicated to interpreting input from a MIDI controller and translating it to digital information that gets reproduced as sound. I still have an old one from the 80s that takes floppy disks yet still works reliably.

I know people who use computers to handle all sorts of performance needs, from sound mixing to controlling lights.

Not suggesting that anyone needs any of that. Just pointing out that use of computers, electronics and the such as part of a live performance is not new, and not nearly as unreliable as you might think. Not only are there ways to make it work well, but there are plenty of resources to learn how to do that from the people who have been making it all work well for decades now.

[Gretchen Cover]

Tony, thank you for your comments. Now moving along to the original questions…

What bluetooth foot pedal are you using?

[barbara-brundage]

Forscore is not available for either mac or pc, only for iPad. There is a program called musicreader that would work in windows 7, which is made by the people who make the airturn.

[tony-morosco]

I use an airturn foot switch. I almost went with the page flip, which is cheaper, but with the air turn you can position the foot switches which you can’t do with the pageflip.

[Author]

Posts