I attended a chamber music concert this evening. A couple of the musicians in a sextet had iPads or the equivalent on their stands (violin and cello) instead of paper sheet music. How does this work exactly? I never saw the violinist touch the screen to advance the music. Can you set it up so the music scrolls down at the proper speed? The accompanist who plays for my college choir sometimes uses an iPad, but she does touch the screen to “turn the page.” This could certainly simplify the job of the orchestra/choir librarian.
They may be using foot pedals like this.
Could have been using using a pedal-operated page turner, connected to the tablet via Bluetooth, like this one: iRig BlueTurn page turner - Overview - YouTube
Moved to Cafe Society.
Colibri
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OHHHH! <light bulb over head> I do recall the stagehand putting something on the floor. There was a cellist, and I assumed it was an anchor for his end pin. But now that I think of it, there were a couple of those little things on the floor.
I’ve been trying to get my wife–the church music director/pianist/organist/handbell director–to use a system like this, but she’s a Luddite (they worship Ludds).
Glory be to Ludd. Amen.
On our last cruise, there was a string quartet and they all used electronic pads and the pedals. Interestingly, at one point, the violinists swapped pads. Maybe they decided to switch the parts they were playing for that selection?
If you’re playing lots of music that you have to read, a tablet is the way to go.
You can find the piece quickly and it’s backlit, a godsend in most places. Even mediocre players like me with just 20 simple childrens’-mass songs love them.
I can see where the backlighting would be fantastic.
What software do you use? Where do you get the music? Is it like books, where you go to the sheet music site, and you can order a paper copy or a digital copy?
Hmm our church uses ipads as music sheets when playing music.
Seems like a good idea that’s more efficient.
Well, it depends. You need power. You need accessories. If you drop it or it falls, you could break a $1,000 gadget.
A standard ipad cost $330.
I use an iPad while singing. My current sheet music collection would be about a foot and a half thick on paper, but it all fits on the iPad. Works very very well.
Except that one time the alarm started ringing during a performance…
Yeah could be. I figure they have basic ones or maybe each person brings their own.
I am a pianist who spends hours a week in rehearsals or performance.
I have an old-ish iPad that I do put music on. For things like lead sheets it’s just as good or better than having a book or binder.
For piano music on a grand staff, it’s a little small to read. The new iPads are much larger and come fairly close to 8.5x11, so are probably quite legible.
That said, I have 25 years of practice with page turning paper, and it’s a pretty fool-proof process at this point. Going digital in mission-critical situations adds a layer of stress, a layer of distrust, and a layer of inexperience that is not acceptable to me.
Also, with a single screen, I’m “turning pages” twice as often as with a book/binder, which is a fairly significant disruption. And, with a lot of my playing coming out of musical theatre scores, there are often times when pages might only have 2-6 measures. With 2-up, that’s playable; with 1-up, it’s ridiculous.
That said, there are many benefits to digital music. One of the largest, for ensemble work, is that notes/edits can be made to a master and arrive on the musicians’ stands automatically, without having to print and distribute new copies to an orchestra.
For me, other than a few specific circumstances (jazz sets where I’m reading lead sheets), the benefits haven’t outweighed the drawbacks, yet.
Eonwe, your points about the risks of using digital music are very well made. I was wondering about transitioning to using a foot button to turn pages after thousands of hours of learning to turn pages by hand. :eek:
Dumb/naive question: how do you get the music on there? Scan it? Or buy a digital version?
^ Scotch tape.
Alright, I’m goin’.
Caveat: some of the legalities of this are murky, but I’m describing pretty common workflows. I am not recommending anyone do any of the following.
[ul]
[li]Some I’ve scanned, though that’s a pretty laborious process, as you could imagine, particularly for things that are bound.[/li][li]Some I’ve bought digitally.[/li][li]Some books or songs I own paper versions of (or have a license to use), but I’ve found copies of online.[/li][/ul]
It’s all pdfs (though image files also work), and I use the app forScore to access it all, build set lists, and basically manage the files. I store some of it on my iPad, but use Google Drive to store my archive and can access it all from within forScore (well, Google recently removed the APIs that forScore used, so I’m looking into migrating to Dropbox).
Like any media library, a great benefit of going digital with sheet music is meta data and searching. I’ve got thousands of pages of sheet music at home. I can’t count the times I’ve spent money on music for a song I already had, but couldn’t find because it’s buried in a compilation collection I didn’t think to look in, or more literally buried in a stack of books/paper I didn’t explore thoroughly enough.
Or, maybe I have a lot of arrangements of “Luck Be A Lady” and want to decide which is best for a particular gig. At the moment, I generally go with what I can find first. How great would it be if I could just type “luck be a lady” and get all the versions I’ve got in my collection to show up.
Or, search “broadway belt” and get everything I’ve tagged appropriately.
But, again, to get everything in digital format is a lot of work; I’d need to take a six month sabbatical to make the transition 
I’ll also add that, aside from re-learning how to page turn, another way in which I’m stuck in the paper world is making notes . . . apps like forScore let you make annotations and display or hide them . . . it’s super powerful. But, it adds processing overhead, and I distrust anything that makes the computer work harder at loading and displaying music. And, I can be much more precise, legible, and quick with a pencil on paper than a stylus on my iPad.
Scotch tape doesn’t stick well enough, so I go with a stapler. 