WieWaldi Never used sheet music on tablets
I have been using forScore on my iPad for musical scores since… well, for probably close to 10 years now. It is a PDF reader, so whether you make your own PDF from a physical score, or buy a PDF as a digital download, whatever the source, if you have a PDF, you can open it in forScore. But it is far superior to a non-music app for reading PDFs. It allows annotation, creation of set lists, hot buttons that you can set up for repeats and codas, it has a metronome… And there are probably tons of other features that I don’t use.
Many of my pieces are quite long, right now the longest one is 11 pages I think. I have an iPad Pro, think it’s 11” so the screen is about the size of one page of music.
When I first switched to the iPad, I did find the size a little hard to get used to. I used to print out music and tape the pages together so I could see four or more pages at once. Recently, I pulled out one of those scores and found that not having all the music front and center, in other words, having the score spread out from left to right across the music desk, felt harder to read, compared to having the iPad directly centered and not having to look left or right for the compete score.
So ultimately, I think it’s all in what you get used to. I thought I might try paper for this upcoming concert, but I realized that I probably don’t ever want to go back to paper. There are pros and cons to both formats, but for me, the pros of using the ipad for the score far outweigh the cons. Even with the risk of a double page turn.
