Ian Sidden

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Digital Sheet Music: My First Steps

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When I went to Europe this summer, I brought a fair amount of sheet music. While there, I was always worried that I didn’t bring the right book or that I didn’t bring enough books or – especially on the way back – that I’d brought too many books. In fact, I did bring back too many books since I accidentally snuck away my hosts’ Lohengrin score (sorry!).

As I look at my ever expanding library of sheet music, I realize that I do not want an enormous paper library. I’ve moved too many times, and I know what it is to pack everything up and lug it around. And even if I do own something, if it isn’t there with me when I need it, then it’s mostly useless.

In short, I would like to use digital sheet music.

So what to do?

Current Imperfections with Digital Sheet Music

Unfortunately, there’s no perfect answer. Currently, sheet music producers have made few inroads to digital sheet music production. Published digital sheet music is often reductions of pop songs, some musical theater and modern church music. There’s a smattering of classical music, but it’s hardly comprehensive. Some Chopin here, some Mozart there. The classical vocal music available is the most popular stuff but no full scores or song collections that I’ve found. 1

More troublesome, there’s no standard file for digital sheet music transmission. One application can open its own files but no other application can. It’s similar to the e-reader market in which each commercial file type is proprietary.

The most compatible file type is PDF, but PDF can’t change the way it flows from page to page. The reader program also can’t interpret the notes as notes since it’s often just a photo.

Another challenge is that sheet music is meant to be written on. Like an actor’s script, the sheet music serves as a palette to write performance cues and tips for the future. It’s often messy, but each performer has their own various needs. For a singer, it’s not uncommon to write large swaths of IPA. Flexible annotation is an absolute must.

My Technique: forScore on iPad

So here’s what I’ve done:

My preferred digital sheet music applicationI’ve installed forScore on my iPad. The company behind it does have a small digital sheet music store, but currently it’s too small for my purposes. Instead what I love about the application are the powerful PDF annotation abilities. It’s basically a tool for PDF annotation, but it has some other bells and whistles that make it ideal for digital sheet music reading in a way that GoodReader – another awesome PDF annotation tool – isn’t.

PDF files can be created yourself by scanning or by using Sibelius or Finale (please do not distribute them to others unless your have the rights), or they can be downloaded from public domain sites like IMSLP or university public collections.

I acknowledge that PDF is not perfect. The iPad has a large enough screen that I can make it work. However, I currently have excellent vision, and I can imagine a day in the future when I will want more flexible options for display. If you’re considering using an iPad for reading sheet music PDFs, then I suggest that you go to an Apple store and download sheet music from IMSLP onto one to see if it’s adequate for you.

Some Awesome forScore Things

These are a few of my favorite things in forScore.

One important capability is the ability to jump from one page to another without having to swipe pages over and over.

An example of a screen in forScore showing both the digital sheet music and a keyboard and a blue dot for a jump

Another is the variety and flexibility of annotation tools with the ability to create your own (the blue highlighter shown is my invention).

Digital sheet music in forScore with an array of writing tools to highlight and markup the score

And finally, there’s the built in metronome and keyboard.

Digital sheet music in forScore with the built in metronome over it

Most reassuringly, all of it can be backed up over the internet with very little fuss. That includes my annotations. When I once thought I’d lost an aria book, I lamented not the book itself but the annotations. I have no angst over this with ForScore.2

So? How’d it go?

For this gig I’m doing in Tucson, I used digital sheet music 95% of the time. They were emailed to me as PDFs, and I did some organization in the app. At first during rehearsals, I was nervous that it’d be clumsy and waste people’s time, but I got the hang of it. I bought a stylus, and I rarely thought that paper would be better. In fact, every time I highlighted too much in yellow, I was thankful that I wasn’t using paper because I could easily erase the mistake.

iPad Issues

There are a few problems with forScore, but the bigger issues are with the iPad itself. Upfront: the iPad is svelte, and the screen is gorgeous. iOS is fluid and all that. Battery life was never an issue.3

But Apple is determined to dictate how we should use their machines. It’s occasionally maddening. They really want to dissuade users from using handwriting, and handwriting on an iPad – even with a good stylus – looks worse than childish. Ever seen a Chick-fil-A ad where the cows write “eat mor chiken“? That’s what it looks like. But it’s not as nice.

Who wants a stylus? I do.4

For performers, handwriting is essential. Most aren’t going to stand there and type notes to ourselves in the margins. Since the iPad is regularly pitched as a creative tool, this seems like a logical capability to have.

And iPad’s document system is extraordinarily inflexible. Please just give us a central file manager.

A brave new world?

I’m hoping that over time, publishers will find a way to fulfill the need for greater electronic access to sheet music, and technology companies will create devices that offer the flexibility performers need. Organizations like NATS will also have to adapt since they can be strict about sheet music requirements at their auditions.

My wishes:

  • That I can buy a variety high quality digital sheet music including full opera scores (I am not for stealing sheet music).
  • That it can be easily annotated.
  • That it has reflow capabilities based on screen size and user preference. Transposition capabilities for song rep would also be divine.
  • That it’s in a file type that can be opened by different programs.
  • And I hope that the programs are cross platform compatible. I’m using this iPad now, but the inking capabilities in Windows 8 look pretty sweet (not to mention its useable filesystem). Plus I’m more willing to buy into a proprietary environment if I know that I can access the content on whatever I use (similar to Kindle).

That may be too much to wish for, but I’ll still wish it.1

I’d love to hear your wishes or techniques for using digital sheet music if you have them.

NOTES:

  1. The company closest to getting there that I’ve found is musicnotes.com. They have cross platform apps for reading, those apps accept other files formats, and their sheet music viewer for their library supports different versions of annotation. Their library just isn’t quite what I need (again: song collections and full opera scores), and the annotation flexibility isn’t even close to what forScore does. But I’m keeping an eye on their progress, and them being totally digital, I expect that they’ll be aggressive in this space.
  2. Of course, using an iPad in an active theatrical rehearsal environment has its own angst. The thing is expensive, after all, with a glass front. It works best in music rehearsals, but I made it work while staging. Just be careful to not have a big passionate moment and throw the thing on the ground. And if I lost it  I would lament more than the annotations.
  3. I did bring my cord to rehearsals, however. Just in case.
  4. I do realize that what Mr. Jobs was saying was that these machines should be usable even without a stylus. But handwriting still exists, and it will continue to exist, and that will require some extra tool. Handwriting with a finger tip is no fun, and the disdain apparent in that video doesn’t give me faith that they’ll ever reconsider their position on digital handwriting for iOS devices.

5 Services for Data Portability

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Let the "Cloud" Help!

My girlfriend worked at the computer labs at New Mexico State. She said students were constantly losing their USB sticks in the labs. Imagine their horror at having lost a term paper or perhaps some important business document.

There’s a better way. Much much better.

Whether you’re a student writing a paper or a singer who needs access to your resume or headshot while traveling, it’s dangerous to transport using a USB stick or laptop. There are safer ways to access your stuff on the go.

Here are five free or cheap services to help you. Most of these are also accessible on smartphones and tablets, and those that aren’t are accessible on a friend’s or organization’s computer. You can store any type of file in these, and those files will be available and safe.

Dropbox

Dropbox is an amazing program that lets you sync files across multiple machines and access those files from a web browser on any machine.

It works like this: install Dropbox, drag files into the Dropbox folder, and that’s it. From then on, those files will be synced across multiple machines (where Dropbox is installed of course). This includes several smartphones like iPhone. Yes, these files are accessible from the internet if you are on a friend’s computer.

Downside: You must have programs installed on whatever machine you want to work. So if you have a Word file, then you will need Word on the machine you want to work on.

Cost: Free for 2 GB, 50 GB for $9.99/month, 100 GB for $19.99/month

Google Docs

Google is trying to completely change the way we use computers and the Internet. They want us to use applications inside of a web browser (like Internet Explorer, Firefox or Chrome).

With Google Docs, you can write a document online, and it will stay there without you having to worry about moving it from machine to machine. Imagine the heartache you won’t feel if your home computer dies and all of your documents are stored in Google Docs. Sure, you’ll need to get access to another machine, but you can start where you left off.

Google Docs will also let you store any type of file there. I’ve used it to store entire albums of music.

Downside: It’s not as fully featured as MS Office is. Also if you upload an Office file (.doc or .docx for example) there will be formatting problems. This is constantly getting better though.

Cost: Free, Google Storage (for files that aren’t Google Docs) is free up to 1 GB, more than that will cost

Evernote

Evernote is an excellent way to capture information and access it anywhere.

Basically, it’s a note taking program. But you can save nearly anything to it including PDFs and pictures, and it will be accessible from the Internet, most smart-phones, and most computers.

I use it to save research like song and aria translations so that I can access them on my computer or my iPod Touch. I can save web-pages and images, and it scans those for words and let’s me find them by searching for them.

It can do more though: I once read of someone who’d forgotten to bring a document to his doctor. It was stored in Evernote though, so at the doctor’s office he emailed the document to his doctor from his phone.

Downside: Keep your formatting simple because formatting text is miserable in Evernote. If you need a word processor, then use a word processor and save that file to Evernote. Otherwise, you’ll just want to pull your hair out.

Cost: Free with 60 MB/month of uploads or $5/month for privileges and 1 GB/month of uploads

Skydrive

Microsoft has a way of making great products and then not advertising them. Skydrive is one of those products.

It’s a free 25 GB storage space online. That’s it. You can store any file there, and if it’s a Word, Excel, Powerpoint or OneNote file, you can edit it there as well.

All you need is a Windows Live account, which you probably have if you’ve ever used Hotmail.

Downside: Editing Office documents online works, but the editors are not fully featured yet. You’ll still want to have Office installed somewhere if you want to do any heavy editing.

Cost: Free.

Windows Live Mesh

Another great MS product, Windows Live Mesh is best for people who have two or more computers and want to bring one along.

Basically, Mesh lets you sync your primary folders across multiple machines. This means that everything in your My Documents, My Pictures, My Videos, and My Music folders appear identically between two or more machines. It’s amazing.

Some of this (5 GB) can be saved to your Skydrive account to be accessed if you don’t have your computer with you.

Downside: The 5 GB that syncs to Skydrive is – currently – unable to be edited online. It’s like there’s a separate place for this synced content. To work with it you must download it, edit it, and upload it again. It feels inelegant.

There’s also no way to access these files on a smartphone like an iPhone or Android phone.

Cost: Free.

Summary

Again -and I can’t emphasize this enough- there is no reason to lose important data by losing a piece of hardware.

It is becoming increasingly rare that there won’t be an internet connected computer wherever you go. Any of these services can make your life way easier when you have to travel or just move from one of those computers to another. Yes, there are some kinks in each service and learning curves, but the alternative is much worse.

Save yourself the heartache.

Cloud photo by Michael Jastremski