The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
Reply to Thread Bookmark Thread
Page 2 of 2 FirstFirst 12
Posts 26 to 34 of 34
  1. #26

    User Info Menu

    Anybody notice this is a resuscitation of a 5 year old thread? Presumably the OP came up with a solution by now...

    FWIW I still have an iPad and UnRealBook years later. Best sheet music manager I have found.

  2.  

    The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
     
  3. #27

    User Info Menu

    I have a very old iPad—?1st generation—that when the charger works, does fine with iRealbook but struggles with anything else. I take it to gigs cause I wouldn’t mind if it were lost or stolen.

    At home I use a recent iPad Pro, which has also replace my MacBook Air and Windows laptop.

    Last year during the COVID lockdown my buddies and I would have little jam sessions at a friend’s house—typically played folk and rock standards. Ultimate Guitar Tabs is well worth the money for that purpose.

    I wish I could memorize hundreds of songs and listen to changes and play by ear, but it works out better for me to have the tunes in front of me—easy to get lost in gigging situation with a song you’re not familiar with.

    It’s become so common that it’s actually rare to have groups playing without them, even most concerts I go to, or used to go to...

    As far as pros, Lucinda Williams brings a huge notebook with her with all her songs. Came across a video of Lou Reed and David Bowie doing Waiting for the Man...Lou had a music stand in front of him.

    Which is worse...having paper or electronic music in front of you, or forgetting the words or chords to a song you made famous, in front of thousands of people?

  4. #28

    User Info Menu

    Have an iPad Pro 11" bought last year 2020, meant to be a portable environment for practicing music, at the amateur level.

    Fantastic piece of technology specially the display and the pen. Also great for watching videos. Speaker sound quality is good specially when iPad is used in landscape format.

    I use my iPad to annotate music documents of various origins:

    *) books: read them using the kindle app (no way to annotate with the pen. Too bad !), imported or bought pdf copies I annotate with GoodNotes 5 app and the pen. IMHO, the best way to study from a book)

    *) Imported pdf scores of various origins: created using Dorico on my Win10 notebook PC, imported ones I found or bought. On my PC, I can always create a pdf copy from anything shown on the display: screenshot pssoibly edited to remove useless info, thern loaded into a pdf or text document.

    *) Weekly practice timesheets using a pdf landscape template I created with LibreOffice on the PC. The iPad pen is used to write data inside spreadsheet entries

    - 8 columns, 1st column is activity name, then 7 columns, one per week day.

    - N Rows: top one is date, then each row is an activity (sightread, scale or arp practice, tune practice, whatever). last row is total time spent each day

    - Each spreadsheet entry contains time spent that day on that activity, plus adhoc notes (thoughts, comments, whatever) of what came to mind during the practice.


    For all of above, the iPad is fantastic and a great device one can carry and use anywhere. But the iPadOS is a PITA for those folks who are used to real computers, keyboard & mouse menus, OS & their file systems. Each app on the iPad keeps its data in a separate memory space not accessible by other apps. Put another way, no way to use "file links" to reference a file from another file. Apple decided that for security reasons, but that's a very big constraint which prevents an iPad to be really used as a computer. I also dislike the way to control the use of an app: touching an icon is OK to launch it, but stopping it requires more touch gymnastics. Would be much easier to just double or triple tap the app icon to cancel an app or display a menu and select from it.

    So an iPad can't be used as a real computer: My pro life as an experienced software engineer taught me to carefully organize the large amount of data files (300 GB at least, most being music related) in a very structured hierarchical way, making it very easy to quickly locate and access anything. This relies heavily on storing a single copy of any kind of data (pdf documents like book, score, spreadsheet, or images like photo, video, etc .). Hierarchy starts from a few roots: admin, music, system, photos, each having a predefined hierarchy (took me quite a bit of thinking to design which !). Anytime that piece of data is used anywhere it is referenced as a file link (shortcut in Win10 speak) to where it is stored in the hierarchy. There are no duplicated copies

    No way to do that on the iPad. So I just use it as a viewing / annotating device according to a predefined way (static or dynamic). No data is really created with it (apart from the pencil annotations !)
    Last edited by mhch; 05-02-2021 at 06:12 AM.

  5. #29

    User Info Menu

    Nothing is perfect, of course, but I had an iPad that wasn't being used a lot, so I loaded in Forscore and iRealPro and expanded my Senior citizen act to 100 tunes in a matter of a few hours, as well as importing my own arrangements and my own backing tracks. Pretty convenient: no music stand needed, clips onto mic stand, and with judicious planning, you can start a track and quickly bring up the lyrics in ForScore. also great for band work with other iPad owners, can send an lead sheet or arrangement to another player on the spot. I carried a fiberboard music case for years as a leader and MD, iPad is far easier.

  6. #30

    User Info Menu

    Quote Originally Posted by ronjazz
    Nothing is perfect, of course, but I had an iPad that wasn't being used a lot, so I loaded in Forscore and iRealPro and expanded my Senior citizen act to 100 tunes in a matter of a few hours, as well as importing my own arrangements and my own backing tracks. Pretty convenient: no music stand needed, clips onto mic stand, and with judicious planning, you can start a track and quickly bring up the lyrics in ForScore. also great for band work with other iPad owners, can send an lead sheet or arrangement to another player on the spot. I carried a fiberboard music case for years as a leader and MD, iPad is far easier.
    Looks great, I'll give it a try since it seems to simplify things I do manually so far. Thanks for the info.

    It probably uses links behind the scene : the feature is available for developers within the iPad programming tool kit., while it is not for iPad énd users themselves)

  7. #31

    User Info Menu

    Boox android tablet with eink. Several years with iReal Pro and musicsheets. Will buy next with eink too.

  8. #32

    User Info Menu

    I haven't played out in almost 20 years, so I never paid much attention to this thread.
    But recently I was recording vocals for a song of my own and had to print out a lyric sheet because I hadn't gotten used to all the lyrics yet (and in what order the verses should go.)
    The mic picked up the crinkling of the paper.
    That's when I thought I need something electronic----no paper to crinkle or be blown over by a fan---and, let's face it, larger font if needed...

    I have an iPad but I've never used it as much as I had expected. But I think it will be good for this. (Have iRealBook in there already, though I normally use that on my iPhone, which I always have handy, whereas the iPad is usually somewhere else and with a dead battery.)

  9. #33

    User Info Menu

    I bought a Kindle Fire (cheapo) tablet a couple years back to use only for music. I ended up using a little note taking app on it for making a few chord cheat sheets for tunes that my elderly brain couldn't retain. Probably won't play out any more as my duo partner got dentures and says his voice doesn't sound right anymore plus he's been in the hospital for 10 days (so far) trying to beat Covid. I think the curtain has fallen on that part of our careers. I've been working on solo acoustic stuff lately and may bring in a bunch of pdf tabs of dadgad tunes because I'm still lost in that tuning and need to refer to the TAB (which I hate). Mostly, I ended up using my phone for the cheat sheets.

  10. #34

    User Info Menu

    I've bought a (used) iPad Pro about 2 years ago and would not go back - with any gig except with the bigband I play with : there the charts are too often too unwieldy and having them converted/fed into my "FourScore" app one page after the other would be not very practical - for me personally. With a 2-page score I can easily flip forward/backward using a bluetooth foot-pedal but when I'd have to deal with a 5-page sheet it could lead to desaster...

    The Swing Band I gig with has a book of maybe 100 tunes and I have them all stored in the app- making play-lists and lining the tunes up is a matter of a few minutes. The size and the handling of the iPad Pro is perfect for me and I can only recommend it !