iPad vs. Sheet Music: Pros & Cons

In a recent gig, I tried using my iPad as a music reader in place of traditional sheet music.  I mainly did this as an experiment, but during that time I found there were many advantages to using the iPad vs. sheet music.  The app I used was forScore.

In Favor of the iPad:

• Wind gusts (or room fans) will not blow an iPad off a music stand
• No need for a stand light
• Power-outages will not affect the iPad (those with sheet music were left in the dark during a circuit breaker failure)
• You can carry your entire music library within the iPad
• An iPad won’t give you a paper cut (don’t judge, those things can HURT)
• No pencil, pen, white-out or highlighter needed – tons of annotation options built in to forScore (The white marker was great for erasing music, which was a preferred alternative to using a pencil and scribbling over the music we don’t play)  Plus, there is a huge array of stamps which include almost every musical symbol and accidental, not to mention the blue and black pens and much more.
• forScore includes a built-in touch screen piano to help with pitch accuracy and a metronome, which can be used to simply pulse the music rather than make the clicking/beeping noise.

In Favor of Sheet Music:

• If sheet music falls off the stand it will not break
• You can lay out about 3 sheets of music across the music stand, whereas the iPad requires page turns every page
• It is faster to annotate the sheet music with a pencil (but with many less options)
• Page turns on the iPad can be difficult when there is no place to rest in the bottom half of the page (all page turns are done by touching the right side of the screen while playing).  Since I play trombone, this can be difficult!  For an instrument such as trumpet, it would have not been as big of a deal, since the trumpet could have been played with one hand to allow for easier page turns.  Since I did not have the AirTurn Bluetooth foot pedal, I had to touch the screen with my finger, which proved quite difficult at times, even with the ½ page turn feature.  Areas in the music which called for continuous playing meant that it was quite difficult to find that brief moment needed.  Despite this, I did get to a point where I was able to get through the entire show w/out issue....but the pedal would have been nice.

Conclusion: I will definitely be using the iPad as a pit musician in the up coming school musical... as long as I can get a hold of the AirTurn foot pedal.