I have been thinking about getting rid of my paper music sheets and using a pad to read music while I play on gigs already for a while. I used my son's old pad a few times for that purpose but it was crashing down and it had just free software for reading music that allowed me to store very few compositions. I gave up quickly and never stopped using traditional music books and paper sheets. Until... until today :)))
This morning, I went to my gig with this pad we bought a few weeks ago. It was my husband who took those decisive steps. He will also use this gadget, so it is a shared thing and I hope he will write a little review of it and the other accessories we purchased at the same time. When they arrived we made them functional and added some of the apps we wanted to but then life got busy and I put aside the whole thing. 🙄
Luckily, my music sheets took the initiative yesterday evening to enter the digital world. Yes, I had to assist them a bit, for several hours. When it was so late and I realized that a few hours of sleep will be needed I closed the pad and promised the songs to continue the work in a few days.
The songs started to make a collection of themselves in the application for music reading called MobileSheets. If you are a musician you probably heard of it. If not, don't you worry. Through this post, you can finally meet the paid version of Mr MobileSheets.
The portal how to enter this digital realm is shown here. The songs that I already had in digital form in my laptop landed through some of these options in the space of this application, organized into setlists. But it was just a couple of tunes.
Papers, a lot of papers that I have been using for years, some thorn and slightly crumpled up got a scan. Like after a treatment in a beauty salon, they shined with a new appearance on the screen of this pad. No, it was not just a magical trick that happened in a moment.
This action lasted for several hours as I mentioned. Scan, crop, improve, store, name the file, copy, save and organize it into the appropriate setlist so this morning I can have it easier to find and play from it.
I am grateful for the willingness of the musical pieces to make my gigs nicer and easier. However, they let me know that turning the sheets in this form will be impossible for them. I should do that part by myself - while playing.
Well, I am using my both hands for playing the piano and one foot for the sustain pedal. Maybe I could turn the pages with my nose 😁 but it would be too funny for the audience. {hmm, yes , it would be cool but I am not an entertainer of that kind}.
I decided to stay professional and go with a Bluetooth Page Turner Pedal using my left foot. It is not even noticeable to the audience, just for my coordination system.
The first song was tricky. Turn the page with the left foot pressing the right pedal, (the right foot is busy for the whole time with the sustain pedal) and where there is the part that has to be repeated (as it happens many times - it was a way to write music to save on space and paper) then you press the left pedal. And then again the right when you need to continue. I messed up the direction a few times but played some invented notes in those moments to cover my confusion. It was fine and no major catastrophe happened during this first gig using just the pad to read my music.
What can I say after my first day of using it... The positive side is that it looks fancier than the paper sheets, it is comfortable and well organized, and I can decide before the gig what I want to play and prepare those songs in the setlist (at the moment I put just 35 songs for today and it was more than enough). The Bluetooth Page Turner worked well and it is just a question of time I will use it automatically. The battery level that the two hours of using the pad took was minimal. From 100% it fell to 92%. Perfect.
The negative side. I don't completely trust these gadgets and the app. What if it freezes down? The difference from reading from paper sheets is also that I could have two or three pages prepared in advance and see them and here you are seeing just one page. I will get used to it too, I am sure. The thing that worries me the most is that it is another screen that I use now. Is it good for my eyesight? 😬
All in all, I see it as a positive change, or addition as I will still use the traditional paper music sheets, sometimes combined with the pad.
