Musician using iPad/tablet during performance instead of sheet music

Cafe Society
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My wife and I perform as a piano/bass combo at church, and we love our iPad sheet music.

Like others, we use forScore.

She has a gigantic supersized iPad on the piano, so she can see two pages side by side, and years of super ninja skillz at flicking pages means she simply reaches up and taps the edge of the tablet to flip the page.

I use a smaller iPad that I rest on a music stand. I can’t turn pages and play the bass at the same time, so I have the PageFlip Firefly. I can toe-tab forwards and backwards through my music.

It is lightweight, has little lights on it to let me know it’s alive and make it easy to see in the dark. It runs on regular batteries forever, so no need to recharge it.
I used to use an AirTurn pedal, similar to this, but the build quality was pretty dodgy, it had an internal battery with the ubiquitous USB charger, and the USB port came out one day.
PageFlip has been going strong for a couple of years now, with zero complaints.

We probably have 1000 pages of sheet music on our iPads, and we keep all of our setlists in forScore, tracking what we play each week (10 songs, counting the regular ones). This is nice because I can go in and see “When was the last time we played ‘How Great is Our God’?” and it will show which setlists have that song in it.

This is all above board too–most churches belong to CCLI, a Christian copyright licensing organization,
and they have a premium paid service called SongSelect where you can download all kinds of contemporary Christian sheet music in PDF format in any key you desire.

ETA:
I forgot to mention one of the best parts of forScore: I use my Apple Pencil to write my bass lines all over the music. I can write all kinds of cheat notes on the pages, just like real music, in multiple colors. And if I want, I can share my marked up music with my wife via AirDrop, though she usually erases all of my bass annotations, since that’s not really useful for the pianist.

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THIS is what I was looking for. (That must be the app Lincoln used, right? :wink: )

Definitely this. I sing in two choirs, and I make myself notes ALL OVER my music. This would be a real drawback. I guess if you scan your own copy and it has pencil notations… but then you can’t add to them.

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I play bluegrass/folk music, and several folk will use iPads - especially for lyrics.
(Most of our music just isn’t THAT complicated.)
I’ve seen programs that scroll the lyrics at whatever pace you set, avoiding the need for page turning.

As to how do you get the music?
A huge amount of what we play is public domain.
I’m often hearing people asking someone else with a device to airdrop it to them, or see them taking photos of paper music.

The iPads seem useful to the extent you can readily take notes and highlight things.
But as a bass player - and someone who prefers his music as non-electric as it can be - the folk who use iPads generally seem to be piddling around with their devices a hell of a lot.
(Yeah - I admit some people mess around with their paper sheet music, so it isn’t JUST an electronic thing…)
And one of our band members uses his as a crutch - instead of learning his parts by heart.

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See my note above.

I use forScore for all of my bass accompaniments and I scribble all over everything, sketching out bass rhythms, drawing coda and fermata symbols, sketching tabulature next to a tricky section, and even whiting out unwanted sections of the page or artifacts of the photocopy / scan process.

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I play piano and own an iPad, but the two have never met.

So, dumb question:

Suppose I just took a photo with the iPad of each page of a piece, then stored each page into an album named with the title of the song.

Is this practical?
mmm

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It could, but would be clunky. You really want an app that will properly crop, adjust contrast, remove distortion, all in a manner that is appropriate for printed work, kind of like how a photocopy looks.

forScore is pretty darned cheap, and you can use its internal “scanner” tool to take pictures of music and convert them to PDF internally.

I actually use a different app to create sheet music PDFs though, an app called Scanner Pro.
It makes short work of quickly photographing the pages of a song book and converting them to properly sized and cropped PDF documents. Scanner Pro will easily store the docs in iCloud or other cloud services, and forScore can import from cloud services.

This app is excellent for creating PDFs of receipts and other documents, immediately backed up to the cloud and the physical paper pitched.

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I did not realize it did this. Game changer.

This looks worthwhile too (and cheap). May get it for non-music scanning.

Thanks!
mmm

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Most of what I was going to say has already been covered…but I’m not one to let that stop me. :smiley:

I’m a jazz singer. I abhor having anything in front of me during an actual gig*, but one of the main reasons I bought my first iPad was so I could take it to piano bars (where there’s usually just one instrumentalist) instead of carrying a big binder with all of my lead sheets. That was back when I was first starting with jazz: these days I’m more likely to go to a jam session than a piano bar, and at jam sessions you need to bring multiple copies of your lead sheets/charts because there are multiple instrumentalists. So, I’m back to paper for that.

But, like several others have mentioned, I’m a fan of the forScore app on my current iPad. I make my lead sheets myself, using a a free program called MuseScore), then I save them as PDFs and upload them to Google Docs. It’s super easy to download them to my iPad/import them into forScore, where I can tag everything and build set lists. I like being able to see/search my repertoire by time feel, composer, etc. And having set lists makes it super easy to practice before a gig – though I also use an app called iReal Pro for that (if you’re at a jazz gig and see any instrumentalists looking at their phone or a tablet while playing, they’re probably looking at iReal Pro).
*If I don’t have both the melody and lyrics memorized, I don’t know the song well enough to be performing it. Plus, looking at a piece of paper means not looking at/connecting with the audience.

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(Slight tangent)
iRealPro for the win.

That’s the go-to app for jazz cats. It doesn’t do the notes but it lets you create chord charts and there are thousands of cord charts online for iRealPro.

And it has band-in-a-box accompaniment, so you can have it play a full backing band for whatever jazz instrument you play (e.g. bass in my case).

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This is a very informative thread! :slight_smile:

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I use an Android tablet and keep my sheets in an app called Mobile Sheets Pro. I have thousands of pages of sheet music on it, mostly fake books. I can make notes, organize into collections and set lists, etc. Love it.

Here’s a question for y’all, but first some background. I have a fake book of trad jazz tunes that a friend modified. You can go to the table of contents, tap on a song and it goes directly to that song. What is that process called and how do you do it? I have many other books I’d like to do that to.

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<continued tangent>

You can also tell it which backing instruments to play, which is the best thing about iReal Pro for me. Singing over a full band is great for general practicing, but lately I’ve been working on improving my time/swing feel: being able to sing over just a bass line – or, sometimes, just drums – is huge (yuge!).

</continued tangent>

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Update on the forScore front…

I have had my eye on the new iPad Pro 11 inch model with the Apple Pencil 2 for some time now.
The other day I finally gritted my teeth and traded my old iPad Pro in on this new setup.

There are some things I am displeased with, such as no more headphone jack, yet another design for the charger jack (USB-C, making my Lightning charger useless), and the insane price. But all of that is counterbalanced by the super smooth functionality of the display and the Apple Pencil 2.

They have fixed a few annoyances of the original Pencil: there was no place to put it, it looked stupid when being charged by having its connector stuffed up the tailpipe of the iPad, and there was no way to erase.

The new Pencil attaches firmly to the side of the iPad with strong magnets. It charges wirelessly from the iPad while clinging to the side like a koala bear.

Finally, the pencil detects a gentle double-tap with your forefinger anywhere near the tip. When you do this, forScore (and other drawing/writing apps) swaps between ink and eraser, and then back when you tap-tap again.
This makes a huge difference in ease of use. I can write my bassline or other cheat notes all over my sheet music, quickly erasing and rewriting.

The price is still way too high.

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Thanks to this thread I wasn’t taken aback last week when “A Far Cry”, a chamber group based in Boston, performed a concert with all the musicians using iPads rather than scores. Most of them had some kind of foot pedals, as you can see in the linked video:

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What beautiful music!