Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Anyone Using An iPad For Sheet Music?

Yes, you'll have to put a bit of effort into this! No way is an unmodified screen going to just neatly fit on an unmodified piano in a stable and convenient manner. But it will be possible.

It could be done with a swing-arm mount. I installed one of those for my wife (for general computer use, not with a piano).

Her 20" monitor is on a swing-arm mounted to a table beside her chair. The arm is adjustable up/down/left/right.

The arm's base can be mounted to any horizontal surface (a table) or to a vertical one (a wall).

This would be viable for a digital piano ... if the physical arrangement allows. And it's not expensive. The arm was $190 way back then, but there are $100-$130 ones available now. And the monitor was only $100.

Im thinking of getting an Ipad 1 for sheet music. My main reason being the gigs i play at weddings are often outside, and the wind is a killer for sheet music. So hoping the iPad 1 could resolve this problem, but seems like most here dont think its a good idea. sigh, guess its pegs for now.

Given your (outdoor) circumstances, I think you very well COULD use the Ipad.

Granted that it's a bit small, and so, indoors, you could do better. But if you MUST operate outdoors, you just sacrifice size to gain wind-proofing.

If it were me, I'd need to use more powerful eyeglass lenses to read from an Ipad. But you might not have that problem.

Since starting this thread I've done a few simple simulations of using an iPad on my computer monitor. I've taken pdf's of sheet music and displayed it the same physical size as the iPad screen on the computer monitor, and looked at it from the same distance I would have at the piano.

The portrait mode, a full page of sheet music displayed at one time, looks just too small to me. It might be all right once I had played a piece enough times and I just needed the sheet music to prompt me along. But I think it would cause eye strain and probably detract from my playing enjoyment.

Turning the iPad into landscape mode, where about a half page is displayed, looks pretty good. I'm not crazy about having twice as many page turns but I think I could get use to that (using bluetooth pedals to change the pages). The problem I see in my simulation is that the music is not always evenly divided into the top half and bottom half of the page, and the iPad display form factor (4:3) isn't exactly a half page. So when you take simple scans of the sheet music and then do a page forward or reverse on the iPad, it wouldn't move exactly by half pages of the sheet music and even if it did, it wouldn't always line up correctly with the position of staves and some notes wouldn't be visible. i.e. after each half page flip, you would need to move the display of the music a few "lines" up or down, which isn't practical.

The only way I see to fix that problem would be to "prepare the pdf's" in advance by splitting them into new pages that each contain exactly what you want to see on the iPad each time you flip its page. i.e. you pre-edit the pdf's on a computer by splitting and positioning the content of the original pages. I haven't tried doing that yet, but it seems like it might be quite a bit of not-fun work. But I'm going to try and see if I can come up with a simple process to make that painless. I think that is my next step.

I appreciate all of the comments about using a regular computer monitor. I really wish that were practical in my case because I would love to have a large display. But I can't see anyway to place a monitor on my particular piano, and somehow suspending a large monitor over the piano using "arms" etc. is simply not going to look good in my living room (imagine a small baby grand sitting in the middle of a rather formal living room).

I think gigging is a place where an iPad can really make sense. As Macy alluded to, it will work best if you "pretty much" know the pieces and just need occasional reference, or else, yeah, you'd probably have to create custom PDFs as he talked about, if you want everything large enough to be easily readable. But compared to sheet music, it's a cleaner look live, and you can have every piece in your repertoire available at a moment's notice instead of having to keep sheet music available and organized.

However, I would worry about the screen readability outdoors... you'd have to take sunlight into account when you set your stuff up to be sure you could find a way to keep it readable. That's an issue you don't have indoors.

There are some really nice iPad apps for this sort of thing. Check out DeepDish GigBook.

I've been experimenting with using pdf's as sheet music on the ipad 3, wich only seems to work out fine with certain files. With some it works perfectly and you can swipe throught the pages very nicely, with other files it takes minutes to load a page, and going to the next page takes ages as well.
It probably has to do with the resolution of the scans?
If anyone knows of a program that can 'vectorise' huge scanned pdf's into something that is useable on the ipad, please let me know!
I was quite dissappointed actually as I had high hopes for using the ipad as a replacement for the tons of scores I print.

I use MusicReader, which came with AirTurn, the wireless footswitch page turning system.

How does it work in iPad landscape mode with "half pages"?

Pol: There are programs for that ... but they're expensive, several hundred dollars or more.

There's also VectorMagic.com
I can't tell you how well that will work, but it's free.

It accepts image files and converts them. You'd have to first capture your PDF scores as image files ... not difficult with any screen capture utility. But it would be tedious if you have many of them.

I wouldn't use it for music that I am actually learning (only one page displayed at a time, lack of ability to write on the page), but an iPad + IMSLP = an infinite supply of music for sight-reading. It's an amazing resource.

I have the new high-resolution iPad; I don't know if the music would be noticeably harder to read on the earlier ones or not.

The one where the display over-heats and dies?

Sorry. But it is so :-(

Ha! What alarmist blogs have you been reading?

I have a new iPad - I use it for websurfing, reading (Kindle, iBooks) movies and other information apps and it hasn't heated up noticeably. Maybe if you play 3D first person shooter games it could be a problem, but sheet music?

Apple are claiming it's a manufacturing fault affecting only a very few units. iPod 3 owners, of course, are firmly in denial :-) Let's see if there's a recall.

I'm using the Steinway Étude app as well as the Yamaha app called NoteStar on my iPad 2. NoteStar is terrific. You can listen to the music played to the shertmusic.

After figuring out a relatively easy way to convert sheet music to 1/2 page pdf's to use the iPad in the landscape mode for bigger scores, I went to buy a 32 GB iPad today and found out the Apple Store and Best Buy are sold out. Looks like l will have to wait a couple of weeks to try it.

Congrats Macy! Yes, when new version of iPads are released they tend to fly off the shelves... Enjoy your new toy when you get it! There are so much more to do with it than using it for sheet music. I enjoy using it for playing along YouTube videos. You can even use it for slowing down music in your music collection while keeping the pitch. That comes in handy sometimes too.

Consider getting a 10 inch Android tablet. I like Apple products as much as the next person, but a larger tablet in landscape is slightly wider than typical sheet music. Much easier to read than an iPad. Plus you can carry your music around on microSD!

You think a 10.1 inch screen with 1280x800 resolution is easier to read than a 9.7 inch screen with 2048-by-1536 resolution? I think I'll stick with Apple, their software, and their support.

Hmm, a 10 inch tablet would be nice... not that i could justify the expense when I already have an iPad...

I use the forScore sheet music app on my iPad. I do not play new music or in-progress pieces from my iPad, only pieces I already "know" and just want the score there as a comfort thing. Also, I love using the iPad for reading a score on the bus or something.

I would imagine that for professional musicians, the iPad would be very useful. But! I don't know about outside, I haven't tried it myself, but if it's too bright, it might be harder to read the screen.

Still, in spite of using and enjoying the sheet music app on my iPad, include me in the group of people who ultimately prefer paper for musical scores.

Even a 10 inch or 20 inch screen probably wouldn't change my mind. I lkike to cpy sheet music onto A3 (or 11in by 17in) sheets (two pages to a sheet) and make an accordian style "booket" so that I have have 4 or 5 pages lined up at once, and then only "turn" a page once or twice per piece.