An e-mail from a pianist...
I received an e-mail from Anne Allen of Beaver Dam Baptist Church asking about using the tablet for sheet music. I loved the way she described the challenge...
I am a church pianist and I play for a lot of banquets, weddings, funerals, etc. in addition to regular worship services. I am tired of schlepping around huge notebooks of music and so I bought a tablet last weekend. I thought I could load scanned pdfs onto the tablet and play from there. Bottom line, I can read the music but you have to swipe upward to advance the page – not an action that comes easily to a pianist who is used to swiping left and right……
Because I am not a musician, I had never thought about the "how" of it before. I had simply seen the cool iPad music stands my church's worship team uses.) So, I started asking my "worship leader friends" about using tablets for sheet music, but was unable to find a pianist using a tablet in this context. The guitarists were using it for chord sheets--not sheet music. (Which led Anne and I to wonder if using tablets for sheet music was just an urban myth.)
As it turns out, Anne did a bit of research and wound up with an iPad and an app called ForScore. She reports: It does exactly what I need for it to do. I used it during yesterday's service and it worked great The page turns are just like a regular page turn and the music is a little smaller than I'm used to but there is not enough difference to bother me. You also have the option to crop the pages so I did that with yesterday's service and made them as large as they could be and it worked just fine. I can't wait to use it the next time I play for a 2 hour banquet – no more honkin' notebook to carry !
So how would you make this work without the sheet music app?
If you want to use PDF's without a sheet music reader, it is possible. Danielle Thorpe of Torch Church sent me a link on how to use the settings for Adobe Reader for iPad so that you can swipe from side to side. http://www.wondershare.com/pdf/how-to-use-adobe-reader-for-ipad.html. You could also open the PDF file with the same technique using the Kindle App whose automatic default for turning pages is a flip from side to side.
Looking for a central place to store all of that sheet music? Check out Dropbox which provides cloud storage accessible from your desktop or laptop computer, tablet or web browser. You can save and organize all of your music as PDF's in a single location.
