With sheet music reading apps like forScore, you can also create set lists for concerts and gigs (your music is always in order) and easily annotate your music with your finger or a stylus.
You can carry your entire library on one small device (provided it’s in PDF format), you never need a stand light, and you can quickly import digital sheet music from iPad photos, screenshots, and online sources. The benefits of reading sheet music on the iPad are numerous. (The low resolution screen shot comes from a Facebook video shot by Michael Holmes.) You can see my setup in the photo below, which was taken during a rehearsal with the Washington Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble at Duke University back in 2015. While I was excited about the possibilities of the setup, I wasn’t thrilled with the size of the 9.7 inch screen and developed my own system of reading the music in landscape rather than portrait mode (using the forScore app, which would advance the music by half pages). I devoured Hugh Sung’s essential guide, From Paper to Pixels: Your Guide to the Digital Sheet Music Revolution, and purchased an AirTurn bluetooth foot pedal to use for turning pages. What follows is not an exhaustive technical review or a laundry list of all the music apps available, but rather a concise discussion of the apps and accessories that I use along with some tips for best practices, especially for trumpeters.Ībout four years ago, I began experimenting with sheet music on an iPad Air.
Many people have been asking me about reading sheet music on the iPad lately, so I thought I would write a blog post in order to share information with students and colleagues.