The Steel Guitar Forum

After seeing how inexpensive tablet PC’s have become, (like the Eee T91mt) I’ve been debating getting rid of my paper lead sheets and mounting a small tablet PC on my music stand. Any thoughts on advantages or drawbacks of going paperless like this?

One plus, if a wi-fi connection is available I can listen to an intro or something on youtube from my steel seat during practice. I’d also be able to look up chords on the fly at a jam.

One downside might be scrolling through the music while playing.

I seem to remember some software that allows you to hook a foot pedal up and use it to "turn pages." Don't know the name though. I've been thinking of a similar thing using my smart phone perched on the keyhead, but I think it would drain the battery too fast to have the screen on for an entire gig.

My wife got a Kindle (1st version) as a gift a few years back, but she didn't care for it so she let me have it. I immediately set to work turning all my charts into pdfs so I could import them into the Kindle. Unfortunately the original model Kindles had formatting issues related to Amazon trying to promote their proprietary text conversion software/service and I could never get my one page charts to show up correctly as pdfs. I read somewhere they've since changed or fixed their formatting issues in the newer Kindles.

I put tab and lead sheets into a PowerPoint presentation and "time" the slide/page transactions to correspond to when I need the page to turn. Simple!

When I go to a jazz session where I might need a lot of charts, I take my laptop, which has seven or eight fakebooks worth of charts in pdf format.

For most things where I need only chord changes, my iPod touch with iRealbook is sufficient. It has over 800 charts, indexed, and instantly transposable to any key. iRealbook is mostly the jazz repertoire, but there are forums for other genres as well. It also has the ability to create your own charts. Tiny as it is, on the iPhone or iPod touch, it is still very readable. It's an indispensable tool for me.

I've used my iPhone a few times to quickly pull up a chord chart.. Set it on the center of the pad on my SD-10. It worked pretty good..

Now when iPad becomes available I'll be using one of those to hold all my sheet music etc..

Google + digital music stand
will show you some of the many previous efforts in this direction. Many were marketed as hardware+software at over $1000 per stand (wonder why those failed?) altho I think there are also some software solutions to run on your PC.

The model I mentioned above can go for under $500. Plus it can do e-mail and all the other tasks a little computer could do.

I wish I knew someone who had one. If it could handle a recording application like Garage Band I'm sold.

Might look cool mounted right to the steel too.

I picked up a Handsfree MusicPad Pro off of Ebay for $275 and rigged an adapter to hang it on my mic stand along with my old Digitech Harmonizer. the whole thing looks a little clunky, but it works surprisingly well.

The MusicPad took some work to shoehorn my charts into it, but once the work was done it's easy to maintain and setlists are easily created and driven via touchscreen.

<-----Pay no attention to this picture, I don't use the music stand anymore!

I can see where this is going. Soon all clubs and other venues will have wifi servers with charts for every song that's ever been written and musicians on stage (either upstage or downstage) will connect with their digital devices and everyone will be on the same page. Performers with original material will send their charts to the server from their smartphones while waiting to go on. This sure beats texting the bass player in the middle of a song to ask him what that funny change is.

I was just thinking the other day that the iPad might be great to use for sheet music. It would also be phenomenal if they develop a GarageBand app for it as well. There are a couple decent mobile multi-track recorder apps available now, but it'd be nice to have a more full-featured one.

As I see it, I'd hold out for an iPad over the ASUS tablet. The iPad is very close in price, has a bigger screen, is half as thin, is lighter, and has an OS and UI optimized for portability, as well as an already enormous library of apps designed for mobile usage.

True, but the iPad can only run one app at a time from what I understand, and there's a problem with flash video at the moment. That would be a deal breaker for me. That doesn't mean the Asus is the greatest thing in the world either... but it has a normal OS.

I'm just excited that touchscreen gadgets big enough to read on stage are breaking the sub $500 price rage.

It's got me thinking about the possibilities for music.

Nathan Sarver wrote:..iPad might be great to use for sheet music. ....
I'd hold out for an iPad over the ASUS tablet. The iPad is very close in price, has a bigger screen, is half as thin, is lighter, and has an OS and UI optimized for portability, as well as an already enormous library of apps designed for mobile usage.

Something tells me I should avoid expostulation with an Apple fanboy, but I should point out that the cheapest iPad at $499 is more than twice the price of my Asus eeePC. Still, as you say, the price is close (within a few hundred dollars.)
As for bigger screen, the iPad screen is 9.7". My eeePC is 8.9" and most eeePCs are 10.1". In my opinion all of those are too small for using on stage as a music stand, unless you have really good eyes.
I don't know whether there are really that many more apps available for iPad than there are for Winodws and Linux.
iPad and eeePC are really very different things, and probably shouldn't even be compared.

I apologize if I came across as an Apple fanboy. I'm not. They have some products I like, but so does Campbell's Soup. As for my comparisons to the ASUS tablet, my information only came from what I saw on Amazon. They seemed to range from about $450-$700, which is similar to the iPad's prices. I'm sure it's a fine machine and can do things the iPad can't.

Right now, the iPad seems like little more than a large iPhone, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but isn't as earth-shattering as many had imagined. Right now, with as much as I know, both products are essentially netbooks without a keyboard. I just feel like the iPad has more potential as a multimedia device.

You may be right about the size being too small in a gig situation. I measured a couple fake books, and they were 14"-15" from corner to corner. It might be pretty difficult to reduce the size by 5" and still make out notes and chords easily. Fun to speculate about the possibilities though.

I bet those more expensive eeePC models have a faster processor than my model 901 with 900 MHz Celeron. Windows on the 901 runs pretty slow, probably too slow to scroll or "turn pages" on a digital music stand. Linux works a lot faster. I guess all you would need is a controller for your foot, so you can down the page, and back up again for repeats, D.C. and D.S. And really good eyesight.

Cal Sharp wrote:I can see where this is going. Soon all clubs and other venues will have wifi servers with charts for every song that's ever been written and musicians on stage (either upstage or downstage) will connect with their digital devices and everyone will be on the same page. Performers with original material will send their charts to the server from their smartphones while waiting to go on. This sure beats texting the bass player in the middle of a song to ask him what that funny change is.

You're thinking small, Cal. With digital instruments you can just hook the instrument into the chart server and the song will come out. No musicians required, but the house has to pay $1000 per set to ASCAP and BMI, who write the songs algorithmically.

I have a Kindle but hadn't thought about using it for music. I can't imagine it'd be pleasant though; the ink is a dim gray. On the other hand, it might be the iPad's killer app...

One nice thing about the piano, you just turn the page whenever it's convenient and keep playing with the other hand. And it looks cool