Digital score with Bluetooth pedal

twocats · 2024-05-27T15:50:01+00:00

I switched from paper scores almost exactly a year ago while preparing a major chamber music piece for a workshop and it has changed my life. I don't think...

twocats

Sgisela I will mention that Forscore and Newzik (which is what I use) both have a ‘half page’ turn feature

I'm going to look into this today and see if I like it! It may solve some issues like trying to turn pages while doing una corda and I can just turn it during a break.

danno858

twocats yes it is. $9.99 a year. But you can try for one month at a time for I think $2.99. I tried it for month and was hooked. So I bought a one year subscription

twocats

danno858 what's it called? I may look into this at some point, but not at the moment, weeks before my workshop.

danno858

twocats ForScore

twocats

danno858 oh I see, I do use forScore but I had to look pretty hard to find the subscription upgrade for Pro which has gesture support. I'll look into it for the future, can certainly think of worse things to spend $10/year on!

danno858

twocats I kept having bad luck with a Bluetooth pedal. So I decided to try forScore because I read somewhere it worked well with face gestures.

What’s nice too is I can save sheet music I buy with the Henle app in pdf format and then upload into forScore.

Jane

Confession time...
I use forScore to add fingerings very neatly to my scores.
Then export as PDF.
And then PRINT them and put the pages on my music stand to play. 🙄

danno858

Jane I still use paper as well. But I like the auto page turn function so much

twocats

Jane I use forScore to add fingerings very neatly to my scores.
Then export as PDF.
And then PRINT them and put the pages on my music stand to play. 🙄

Hahaha! My fingerings are scribbled not so neatly in. But if I think it doesn't look good enough, at least it's easy to cleanly delete and rewrite! 🙂

Jane

twocats
I use the numbers from the annotation stamps palette. It's tedious but looks nice once it's done.

@Dan - most of the pieces I print out are 4 pages or less so I can kinda put them all side-by-side on the music rest. No page turns is easier than easy page turns!
Although I also printed out a 10-page piece I was working on last year.

Here's an example page:

Pallas

Jane I use the numbers from the annotation stamps palette. It's tedious but looks nice once it's done.

Oh. My. Goodness. Thank you for mentioning this. I've just been scribbling, and I'm going to try this right away. Thank you.

Jane

Pallas
A few things I need to scribble free-hand, like the red line in measure 71 reminding me to take the D with the right hand. Although I used the stamps to add the "m.d." next to the note.

As a hint - if you're lining up numbers vertically for a chord, the ruler tool in forScore can help the alignment.

rogerch

Thanks for this thread! I've been buying big anthologies of sheet music such as https://www.halleonard.com/product/50601558/the-giant-book-of-intermediate-classical-piano-music for sight-reading practice, and the page turns are a real bummer. Prior to buying my most recent anthology I spent some time researching digital sheet music but it got complicated so I gave up and just ordered the printed book. This thread has inspired me to take the time for research so I can transition to digital before I need to order more sight reading material.

I'm locked into the Apple ecosystem so I will either use my old iPad Pro or more likely get a new one. forScore looks pretty good as it uses iCloud for storage, but twocats's note about having to crop every page when importing is giving me pause. These books I'm using for sight reading have hundreds of pages! I don't want to resize them all! Does newzik also require cropping? What about other apps? Is this issue somehow specific to Henle sheet music?

Thanks!!

twocats

rogerch the Henle exports have an empty space border (I guess actual paper pages also do) as well as a line of text at the bottom with the Henle source info. I could definitely still read it without cropping but I want to minimize the dead space if possible. You could always do a gentle crop on one page and then "copy to all". In my case I really want the crop as tight as possible so I have to do it manually.

I think the 12.9" iPad is a decent size but if they come out with a bigger one, I'd definitely be tempted to upgrade... depending on the price tag 🙂

rogerch

twocats Thanks twocats, that is helpful! I should quit doing internet research and asking questions and try out some of the apps on my current iPad to see for myself. 🙂

twocats

rogerch happy to help! I think most apps have a free trial 🙂

twocats

Sgisela ‘half page’ turn feature

I tried this today and it was helpful to practice a page transition! I would never use it to play through a whole piece though.

MRC

It's worth mentioning that there is a huge library of scores on IMSLP, including critical editions such as the Bärenreiter Neue Mozart Ausgabe. There's also a growing number of scans of first editions and composers' manuscripts.

I've cropped thousands of pages with ForScore: it's no big deal. I've set up a gesture (press and hold with three fingers) which brings me directly to the crop screen. ForScore immediately and automatically crops away any empty margins. It's usually fine like this, but if I want, I can adjust it manually. Staying in the crop function, I go through the score and crop each page in turn, then save the whole piece. It's a matter of seconds for each page.

BartK

I was considering going digital but I already invested a lot into paper sheet music. If I have Henle books do I have to buy the scores again digitally?

I have a very old tablet but I doubt it will be good enough for reading sheet music. For personal reasons I have a deep dislike of Apple products (no offense to the fanboys 🤣) and I'd like to know if anyone has some different tablet suggestions for that purpose.

bSharp

BartK I'm not a fan of Apple either, but I do have an Ipad Pro. The only thing I use it for is ForScore. If Android supported it, I would have probably got a Samsung tablet. I recall reading thought that the Samsung has an aspect ratio that wasn't ideal vs the Ipad. That what was a while back and could certainly be different now. Even so, if I got Android instead of Ipad, the tablet would only be used to read music.

Note, you can run pianoteq on an Ipad and I've played with that from time to time, but not consistently to say it's a use case for my Ipad.

ErfurtBob

BartK I am using a Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 + with Mobilesheets, and very satisfied with it. Especially since playing in a Big Band with lots of music and some of the songs having 8-10 sheets of music. (This was the reason I started using a tablet). I use a Moukey bluetooth pedal with some delay set up, so I don't accidentally turn 2 pages in a row.

twocats

BartK If I have Henle books do I have to buy the scores again digitally?

Unfortunately yes, unless you scan them in.

BartK For personal reasons I have a deep dislike of Apple products (no offense to the fanboys 🤣) and I'd like to know if anyone has some different tablet suggestions for that purpose.

The Mobilesheets app is good, and that's what I used on the e-reader. I actually prefer some of its features to forScore but I already had the latter paid for on my iPad a long time back. Perhaps a Samsung tablet? I heard they make good ones and I'm very happy with their phones.

Sgisela

BartK If I have Henle books do I have to buy the scores again digitally?

What I do with my books is I use a scanning app on my phone or tablet to take a picture of the sheet music and then convert it into a pdf. Forscore and Newzik both have a scanner built in as well… not sure about MobileSheets. But I find the dedicated scanner apps give me better results with not much more work. Anyways, I don’t scan the whole book, just any pieces I’m going to work on. But over time, the library builds up!

« Previous Page Next Page »