Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum So, you're using a tablet?

It works great for me.

Setup

iPad 2, running ForScore (~$10) and using an AirTurn pedal (~$100).

How it works for me

My musical memory is poor and, when I do try to commit things to memory, they're not more secure than reading, due to bad nerves. I am and have always been pretty wedded to the printed page.

Problems with being a sight-only player include: having to move hands to turn pages and inability to fit longer pieces on a music stand.

The tablet fixes most of that. It lets me

* Carry all of my printed music around
* Annotate the music to some degree
* Manage page turns hands-free

The music is stored on the iPad itself as PDFs. How do I get it there? Using DropBox (free).

DropBox is like having a computer hard drive in the cloud. Once you install it, it looks like any other disk on your computer. If you drop things there, other devices, like your iPad, can see the files there. ForScore has DropBox integration, so I have two main methods for getting music on ForScore.

* for public domain music on imslp.org, which includes most ragtime and lots of classical, I just download the PDF and put it in DropBox

* for music not on imslp.org, my work's copier can scan pages to a PDF file, which I then put in my DropBox.

ForScore has other ways to import music, such as using the iPad camera to take pictures of the score, but I really haven't used these.

Basically, all my music is in DropBox, ForScore imports that, and there a local copy on the iPad.

Drawbacks

* The music is much smaller and can be pretty hard to see sometimes. If Apple releases a larger format iPad, I'll definitely get it, since the only thing I use the iPad for is my music

* The AirTurn is good about turning music forward or back one page, but not good at all for multiple page turns. You can arrange the layout of the music in ForScore (by duplicating pages) so that you can just keep turning forward, but if the music isn't thoughtfully laid out, it can lead to real awkwardness. Fortunately, most ragtime pieces are usually very well laid out.

* You'd think it'd be easy to use your foot to turn pages. It's pretty tricky, actually. If you mis-turn, it can be really hard to recover.

* If you need to do complicated pedaling (sustain/sostenuto plus una corda), you don't have enough feet to do it and also turn pages.

* Battery charge. Not a dealbreaker, but you do want to make sure you're charged up before taking your iPad to a lesson or a performance. ForScore will also cease to be very useful soon after the apocalypse comes.

* You not-infrequently get delayed going through airport security.

* Teach is very suspicious of my newfangled contraption.

Thanks Whizbang, very informative.

What do you do when you want to write in fingering or expressions marks? Or when your teacher wants to do it? I know my teacher would never get the hang of it. Is it as easy as picking up a pencil on paper?

Sam

Good review for iPad, ForScore and Bluetooth pedal.

I use a similar setup - iPad, ForScore and PageFlip's "Cicada" Bluetooth pedal. I agree with most of your plusses and minuses as well.

FYI - Apple supposedly will be releasing a larger iPad in a few months, which will make things a bit easier to read.

Also, if you haven't noticed yet, ForScore will allow you to display a score with the iPad in Landscape (ie - horizontal) mode. This increases the size of what is displayed, but will display only half of each page at a time (effectively doubling the number of necessary foot-pedal presses). ForScore adjusts automatically as you change the iPad's orientation.

I also wanted to point out that there are many "scanner" apps available for iPad. I use "Scanner Pro" to easily scan printed scores and save them to PDF. I then transfer them to Dropbox and proceed as you do.

FYI - ForScore DOES allow editing in-app, but it's a bit kludgy. One problem is that, if you change the iPad's orientation, while the score itself will adjust properly, your notes/edits will NOT. (If you don't change orientation, there is no problem.) At least that's the case with my version. (I have not updated ForScore to the last few versions....)

I generally make my final edits onto a printed copy of the score, then re-scan it into PDF/Dropbox/ForScore.

By orientation, do you mean portrait vs. landscape mode?

It's not as easy as pencil on paper.

ForScore supports annotations. You can use a pen or highlighter tool to draw over the score, use a variety of 'stamps' (including finger numbers), and bring up a keyboard for typing.

During lessons, I'll frequently use the highlighter tool or keyboard and occasionally the stamp tool for finger numbering. (Press and hold the screen, select a tool from the menu, draw on screen with finger or press where you want the stamp, hit Done to get back into performance mode)

Anything complex, I'll defer, though, because using the tools is more time-consuming than writing on a paper score.

Teach never fiddles with the contraption.

Annotations adjust when you reorient the tablet in my version.

Yes.

If the iPad is vertical, it fits one page of music to the screen.

If the iPad is horizontal, it displays half the page. If the top half is displayed and you turn the page, the view pans to the bottom half of the page.

There *might* be a setting for a two-page side-by-side view when the iPad is horizontal, but I don't know how you'd read the resulting small score in practice.

If you really wanted a big screen you could just build a cheap PC and a 24" monitor with a stand on an articulated arm. It probably wouldn't even be that much more expensive than a iPad. It wouldn't be portable though...

The difficulty of writing on the score would probably be a deal breaker for me, since I write in a lot of fingerings.

And at this point in my playing, I rarely work on more than 3 pieces at a time anyway, so having everything in digital form is not really a plus.

Sam

I use a Samsung tablet and a program called Mobile Sheets.
I can do notation, highlighting, etc.

I like that it's easy to set up set lists, groups, music by genre, composer, key, pretty much any way you want to slice it. I also use an AirTurn and agree it takes a little while to adjust to using the pedals for page turns, but it's worth learning.
As for pieces that require going back to a certain part of the score, Mobile Sheets lets you embed a special icon any where on the music, which when you tap it immediately takes you back to wherever you anchored it.

The Mobile Sheets program was something like $10.00 for the registered version.

The only pain has been scanning the music, but luckily my Kathy has been kind enough to take on that duty.

Overall I love having lots of music readily available in a device that has built in back lighting.

When I/we do a gig I make set lists for the gig, and also print out sheets of the songs I have stored so people can ask for requests (of music I know I can already play :-)

Well - Wouldn't you know it -- A few hours after sending this response my Pageflip Cicada has FAILED! The right pedal seems to be be dead (ie - ForScore only responds to the left pedal (which I use much less frequently)).

I'm awaiting an e-mail response from Pageflip, but thought that I'd ask this here in the meantime ---

1. Any ideas on what to try to get the right pedal working again? (Bluetooth says that it's successfully connected.)
2. Is there a way to use the LEFT pedal as the right pedal? (I could live with only one usable pedal as long as it turns the pages FORWARD)
3. Can anyone recommend a relatively cheap external pedal that I could connect to the Cicada's right-hand 1/8" jack to try?

Thanks.

It sounds like it might help to use MuseScore or another editing program to get the size and page breaks the way you want them.

On the top right of the Cicada you'll see 5 little buttons with labels like Pg Up Pg Dn, left arrow right arrow, etc. Press the Pg Up Pg Dn button and a red light will come on. Now try your pedals. If that doesn't work, try the other buttons.

Reading all this stuff reminds me how lousy my eyesight really is. The good news I guess, is its always been that way!

Im writing this on a tsblet . . which cannot spell at akll. ... But at least i dont have to worry about punctustion. .

Thanks for the suggestion, but that didn't work.

PageFlip responded to my e-mail (quickly, to their credit) and said that my only option is to try an external pedal with the Cicada OR to replace the unit. Since I own a Yamaha FC4 pedal, I'd like to try the first option, but I need to find a 1/4 inch to 1/8 inch adapter for it to fit. My local Radio Shack doesn't have any in stock.

Thanks again for the suggestion.

Well, I tried adding fingering to forScore and it wasn't that bad - and it generally stayed where I put it when going from portrait to landscape. So I guess it's not that bad to add fingering. Maybe I will invest in some way to turn the pages and give it a try.

Sam

I started with an iPad and ForScore, and I also tried 3 or 4 other iPad sheet music apps. But I dumped them all.

Now I use an Android tablet. I bought a Samsung 12inch tablet that is essentially the same size as paper sheet music, but cost less a smallish iPad.

My Samsung Tab 12 has a memory slot so I added a large additional storage card for about $20. (In contrast, an iPad is not expandable so must be purchased with whatever maximum memory "might" be needed; I saved hundreds of dollars by using an Android tablet instead.)

My Android sheet music app is Mobile Sheets Pro, very highly recommended. It provides many ways to tag, organize, list and work with music, plus custom capabilities including additional data fields and custom lists/views. I do not have a single bottleneck or "wish"

Well, I had some wishes but they are now features. The app's developer Mike Zuber is very open to questions and suggestions. In fact, the current version of Mobile Sheets has some capabilities I suggested to Mike specifically to overcome frustrations with my iPad experience.

Also, Mobile Sheets Pro includes a PC app to manage the music files on a laptop/desktop, very slick.

And being Android, my tablet easily connects to my laptop and desktop PCs (impossible with an iPad without buying yet another app to bypass the failings of Apple's iTunes).

I have but rarely use a bluetooth pedal. It's usually easy to poke the screen when I want to turn the page.

While Mobile Sheets Pro can do on-screen editing/cropping of music, that's not a long-term solution because the changes are tied to that song in that app.

Instead, I create optimal PDFs first, then load them onto whatever device(s) I'm using. I have devised a procedure to scan to pure black-and-white for max clarity and small file size, then I straighten and crop, then save as PDF. It's a one-time, but by making each PDF "perfect" I'll never have to do it again, even if I change devices. In fact, I keep the PDFs on my tablet and on my laptop, just in case, and also on my desktop. Because every PDF is self-contained, all copies are identical.