If I Only Had A Brain

Thanks to my wife Stephanie for giving me a solution to my Page 1, Page 2 issue.

All you need to do is scan the pages individually and enter them into the iPad one by one. Make sure they are labeled consecutively. For example, with If I Had A Bell, I labeled them If I Had A Bell Page One and If I Had A Bell Page Two. As long as they are consecutive, you can set it up so once you need to switch to Page 2 it’s a simple swipe of the finger.

Easy enough to do. Of course, memorizing the tune makes more sense.

Again, thanks to Steph for pointing that one out.

On Outdoor Gigs, the iPad Can’t Be Beat

I did my first outdoor gig with an iPad today and I couldn’t be happier. We played the gig at the National Harbor on the Maryland side. It was right near the Potomac River so the wind was pretty strong all day. So while my bandmates were scurrying to find clothespins to tack down their sheet music, I kept buzzing along with my iPad. The Set List feature let me easily organize the three sets we played today and things went really well. So grateful it was a beautiful day here in Maryland and the National Harbor Wine Festival was jampacked with people. Really fun time.

Now if I can get the rest of the folks in the band to follow suit with an iPad or tablet, our gigs will sharpen up even more.

The only downside for me is that we had 2-page a chart for “If I Was a Bell,” the famous tune from Guys and Dolls. Well, I still can’t figure out how to work out a 2-page chart in iGigBook. You should be able to simply swipe the iPad with your finger but when I do that it goes to the next tune in the iGigBook. I can physically move the page with the drop down tool, but at a session or on a gig where every second counts, all you really have time for is to swipe your finger to the next page. If anyone has figured that out, please clue me in.

Other than that, no complaints, really easy to work with and much better than carrying three Realbooks to a gig.

Use an iPad Stand and Look Slick

Just when I thought I was beginning to get a grip on sheet music on an iPad I went to a session last weekend and someone had an iPad stand. I still use the old fashioned music stands made for reams of paper. When I thought about it, my iPad looks pretty sparse on my Manhasset music stand. Anyway, this stand was a K&M iPad holder. The guy who had the stand was guitarist and songwriter Jerry Bresee, who says iPad users should note that there are different versions for the iPad, 1,2 and 3.

Here are some links to check out. One is for the K&M stand Jerry uses and the other is a general link to a bunch of different stands:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dmi&field-keywords=ipad+mic+stand+and+ipad+3

Stands start at about $25 and range to $80 or so. Don’t spend a lot of money on a stand, unless you’re really going for the cool factor. Me, I’m still happy I have the three Real Books on iGigBook, plus adding sheets as people call tunes for gigs and sessions. Overall, things working very well.

Getting the Set List Ready in iGigBook

OK, so as luck would have it I have a gig this Saturday night and thought I’d send the Set List out from iGigBook  to my bandmates. Everything worked well except I couldn’t find the venerable Bernie’s  Tune. It’s kind of strange because the tune is listed and indexed in Book 3, but for some reason I couldn’t bring it up when adding tunes to the Set List.

Overall, the function works well and I suspect in 99 percent of the cases the feature will work like a charm. This stuff works, but there are some weird glitches that I suppose you have to work around. The other thing that worked well is for the tunes that weren’t in the Real Book, my friend sent me the PDFs, which I then moved to my desktop, I then connected the iPad with my notebook and then clicked on iPad and clicked on Apps and scrolled down to  File Sharing. I added the files to the File Sharing menu and then synched pretty easily with the iPad. I’m basically good to go, have all my tunes organized for the gig saturday night.

BTW, thanks everyone for all the great comments and feedback about this blog. My main goal was to get people up and running on the iPad with iGigBook, but as I move forward with digital sheet music and digital music in general, I’ll continue these posts. I think one valuable blog could be a session on editing video files in Windows Movie Maker. It doesn’t need to cost a lot of money to take Flip videos and edit them down so you have some decent video clips you can show prospective restaurant or club owners. More on that soon.

The Ups and Downs of Digital Sheet Music on an iPad

I am officially through my “golly gee” stage of running iGigBook on the iPad.

First, why I love digital music on an iPad with iGigBook and why I think you would, too:

I really like having all three Real Books easily accessible on the iPad. I like that I don’t have to carry two or three books to a gig or a session. I like the 8 x 10-inch form factor of the iPad, it’s close enough to an 8.5 x 11-inch piece of paper that I don’t miss a paper sheet. The iPad is well lit and delivers a very crisp pageview. Whether reading a book or playing a piece of music or watching a YouTube video, the iPad is an awesome piece of technology. It’s easy and fun to use. My younger son is addicted to the iPad and I’ll have to be sure he doesn’t lift it off of me when he goes back to college in two weeks.  When it comes to working in iGigBook, whether it’s using the search tool to bring up a tune, flipping through the index or using the pageturning tool on the toolbar in the righthand corner, I find that I get to the next tune called by someone faster than my bandmates still working with paper copies of the Real Book.

One caveat: Once you get the three Real Books linked to the index, you really have to give yourself some time to work with the tools. Lately, I’m finding that just flipping through the index is the best way to bring up a tune. However, the search tool is fast. If you think you won’t have enough time to bring up a tune in iGigBook when you’re on a gig, I think you’ll see that iGigBook will get you there faster. If you’re super anal and work off a designated setlist, you can always make up a setlist, e-mail it to everyone, and everyone in the band can have the same information. But gigs never go according to plan. Very often, you’ll respond to how the audience responds. Some audiences may want to hear bebop and the blues. Another may like latin tunes or want to hear something familiar, like a jazz version of a pop tune, so while set lists are good to make up as a plan, don’t get spooked. I’ll take my chances with the search tool on an iPad versus thumbing through the book. It’s faster and won’t leave you on the bandstand looking foolish thumbing through the book. Also, on windy days on outdoor gigs, no more pages flying off the music stand, another embarrassing moment.

While I really love iGigBook on the iPad, something happened this morning that pointed out the limits of the technology. Someone in the band called the tune “I Believe in You” a Frank Loesser tune from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. It’s not an often-called tune, plus in Classic Real Book 2, Volume 5, it runs on two pages. WHOA!!! That’s a problem. Tunes with more than one page of music are an issue for the iPad. I have to find out, but I don’t think there’s a way to split the screen. Even so, with the 8 x 10 form factor a split screen for two pages would defeat the purpose. No, it seems that there may be some situations you’ll need to have bring paper sheet music. Also, another issue I’ve found is that iGigBook has the index for the Classic Real Books,which is Volume 5 of the Real Books. A lot of the players these days have Volume 6 of the Real Books, the so-called “legal” books. For example, the melody lines for Ornithology are actually closer to the tune played on most recordings in Book 1, Volume 6 than in Book 1, Volume 5. Book 1, Volume 6 has My Shining Hour, whereas Book 1, Volume 5 doesn’t. And Book 2, Volume 6 has “I Believe in You” on one page.

It’s a bit of a pain, but once you figure out which tunes your friends tend to call from Book 1, Volume 6, you can scan the sheet in, create a PDF and load it in to iGigBook. So while a bit of an inconvenience, iGigBook will meet your needs 95-99 percent of the time. There are workarounds for the couple of tunes people like to call from Volume 6 that just don’t appear in Volume 5.

Anyway, all this fuss about the Real Books. Just for the record, the best players have 50 to 100 (or more) tunes memorized and are so good that when someone calls a tune they know how to play it just looking at the music once. That’s not me, and probably not most people. The reality is that even if you have the majority of the tunes you call on a gig memorized, you’ll still want the Real Book around as a reference, or in the event someone requests a tune you didn’t rehearse.

Plus, to practice, the iPad is much easier to use than the paper copies and combined with iReal b, a great resource for the woodshed!!!

Don’t miss iReal b

OK, it’s the holidays and I’m juggling work and family and finally had the time to load up iReal b. This was actually very easy. The app loaded right up in a minute or two on my iPad. Once the app loads (it costs $7.99) you get 50 tunes with it.The tunes are mostly boilerplate Blues 101, Swing Tunes 101, Bossa 101, that kind of thing. The best part of iReal b are the forums, which you access online.  I selected the jazz forum, where I was able to quickly download Jazz 1300, a volume of 1300 chord charts complete with a piano, bass, drums rhythm section. I encourage everyone to check this out. The chord charts can be easily transposed into any key, but the best part is that it’s a great practice tool. I started with Recordame at 144 on the metronome and have worked up to 166. My friend and I played the Joe Henderson version and that band played it around 190 or so. :Point is, kind of like an Abersold CD, but better because you can set the tempo — the drum track is awesome, especially for me since I’m a bass player and find that the drum track really keeps me honest. The other good thing is you set it to loop through several times, so if you’re practicing solos, you can take 32 choruses on the blues (or whatever) if you want to!!!

The other thing to check out is that there are many other genres of music you can download on the forum. There’s only so much time in the day, but there are forums for Beatles tunes, brazilian/latin, bluegrass/country and pop, rock rock and blues, among others. All of this access for a $7.99 fee for the app. Between iGigBook and the iReal b, the expense of the iPad has been well worth it, plus there are many other work-related things I do with the iPad, since I’m a technology journalist by trade and I’m constantly writing about tablets and mobile apps.  That’s it for now. A bit more on my progress with iGigBook in the next entry.

Digital Sheet Music Blog — How to Transpose Chord Charts and E-Mail Set Lists in iGigBook

OK, I finally got around to the last couple of features that most people would want to use with iGigBook. First, let’s do the really easy one. You can access the chord transposition function by downloading the Jazz1200.pdf to your iPad. The easiest way to get the PDF is to do a Google search for Jazz1200 and you should have no trouble finding it.

Once you have Jazz1200, you add it to your iPad the same way you add PDFs of the Real Books to the iPad. Simply connect your iPad to your notebook or desktop computer, bring up iTunes, click on the iPad icon, then click on Apps and scroll down to file sharing. Then add the file and sync to the iPad. The Jazz Chord Charts, all 1,200 of them, should show up in the Book List, the item on the far left in the bottom of the iGigBook main page. One note, I always put files I’m adding to the iPad to my desktop. I just find it easier to find them then fumbling around in a directory that I may have forgotten about.

OK, click on The Jazz Chord Charts, bring up a tune, say Afro Blue, which in concert key is in Fm. Go to the tool icon on the right and you’ll see a dropdown box that says Select Key. Select the key your singer wants to sing the tune in and boom, you have a transposed chart. Easy, and this part is very intuitive.

On to Set List Manager, which is on the bottom right. Tap on Set List Manager and on the bottom left about three-quarters down on the screen you’ll see New Set List. Tap on that and then you’ll see a drop box Add New Set List come up. Go to book list and for the sake of simplicity, we’ll work out of the Classic Real Book. Tune one is Black Orpheus. Click on the Black Orpheus and then click on the + icon on the top right. You’ll see a dropdown list that in my case says Demo List. Tap Demo List and you’ll see a dropbox that says Black Orpheus Has Been Added to Demo List Okay. Select the rest of the tunes. When you are done, tap on Set List Manager on the bottom far right. Check to see that your set list is there and then to e-mail it to your bandmates tap on Gig Set Viewer. Tap on the third icon from the left on the top right and you’ll see your set named. In my case, I’ll tap on Demo List. Once the set list comes up tap on the middle icon on the top right and a dropdown box will ask you if you want to Include Songs As PDF Attachment? Tap yes and an e-mail will pop up. Fill out the e-mail,tap send and shazam, you’ve sent a set list out to your bandmates.

This is cool, but some of my favorite gigs are when I come to the gig with no preconceived notions and people just call tunes as the night goes along. But for the anal retentive, this is a great tool, and it does help to have a general sense of what tunes the band will cover in any given night. It is especially good for gigs with singers, where you really do typically have to arrange a more formal set list. That’s it on iGigBook for now. I think it’s a really useful tool and will help organize my musical life a bit more. I used it at a session last Sunday and had no trouble finding tunes and really liked that all I had to do was throw it in my gig bag. No more carrying around two or three Real Books, most of which are fraying and/or I have pieces of paper that people have given me over the years. This won’t replace paper entirely, but it’s a good start and the guys were impressed.

Digital Sheet Music Blog — All’s Well with iGigBook

OK, as you might of guessed some of my problems with iGigBook had to do with operator error. Turns out that iGigBook has very precise slugs it likes the PDF files to be named (look for the iGigBook Book Index List in the help topics). If you don’t name the files correctly, the PDF won’t link to the index. I suggest getting started with Real Books, 1, 2 and 3. The file names for those books are crealbk1, crealbk2 and crealbk3. What I did was slug them crealbk1.pdf. So what registered was crealbk1.pdf.pdf. So all I had to do was rename the PDFs and resync them to the iPad. So let’s be clear: Name the Real Book 1 file crealbk1. It wasn’t readily apparent, but I got the result I was looking for. Now, I can go to the book list, click on the Real Book I want and scroll through the tunes. Click on a tune and there it is. I also seemed to have enabled the search function as well so when I’m in one of the books I can do a song search and the song will pop up. As I said from the beginning, this stuff isn’t intuitive, but if you stick with it, eventually it works. I bagged iRealB for now because it’s more of a play-along experience and I have plenty of Abersold CDs if I want that experience for practicing. Will check out making set lists and transposing chord charts later in the week.

Digital Sheet Music Blog — ForScore and Some Issues

OK, I got my PDFs on to the iPad and in to ForScore in under a minute. Everything was cool. The charts showed up fine and the pages are easy to turn. But geez, the search tool didn’t work and accessing the navigation bars is a fight. This app cost only $4.99, so I’m not upset, but unless I can easily search a tune right away this doesn’t hold much appeal to me. I’m going to try iRealB next and see if I can make it a trifecta of failure. Could really use some help from the user community on making this stuff work. Seems like I’m going to have to dig some more and figure some stuff out. ForScore seems to have lots of nice features, especially for composers, but unless it is easy to access tunes and do searches, not sure it is that helpful. The navigation panes are way too hard to use.

Digital Sheet Music Blog — Where iGigBook Fell Short

OK, back from my session, my two dogs are relaxing watching the Ravens-Skins game with my son, so here’s what I can tell you about iGigBook, at least during my first 24 hours working with it. I got the three main Real Books loaded up and did a session with it this morning. Worked like a charm, and I think I may have inspired some of the guys. The one drawback is at least at this point, I haven’t been able to link the PDF to the index. This would be a great feature, but there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to do this. If anyone has any thoughts on how to do this, please chime in, but for now, I think I’m going to try fourscore this afternoon and see how that goes. One last point, iGigBook cost $14.99 on the Apple AppStore. Also, in the first blog I neglected to mention that the iPadShield cost $39.99 at Best Buy. I’m not giving up on iGigBook. My main goal was to eliminate having to carry two or three books to a session and iGigBook did that right off the bat. I’ll check out other features later, like making a set list and using their chord transposition service. More on this stuff later.