A couple of weeks ago, I had the great good fortune of spending some time in the Evanston/Chicago area with two of my college frat brothers. It had been 8 years or so since we last gathered and was great fun. We are all retired or semi-retired and are coincidentally afflicted by some of the same age-onset challenges, including remembering where we left our keys, walking across the house to do something and forgetting what it was, or trying to remember the actor’s name who played Mick in the Rocky films… I used to fret about memory loss until I realized during my visit that we all experience the same phenomena, so I’ll just have to accept it and go with the flow!
Me and Widi 
Me and Maish
I only mention our common memory issues as a lead-in to the challenges I face with my major retirement avocation, which is guitar playing.
I’ve been playing country blues tunes for the past three and a half years and have accumulated a substantial body of work. Sadly, try as I might, I simply cannot memorize them all and find it most effective to have the chart in front of me while I play.
So, for most of my practices, guitar lessons, and public performances I am surrounded by paper charts, ranging from a single to four plus pages in length. When moving from tune to tune, I can be found shuffling through a massive sheaf of paper, which can be seen in the accompanying photograph.
By the way, my music charts come almost exclusively from training DVD’s offered by Happy Traum’s Homespun and Stef Grossman’s Guitar Workshop. The charts are in PDF form, downloadable from the DVD. Typically standard notation and, most importantly to me, tablature are given on printable charts.
The massive sheaf of charts I’ve accumulated becomes a problem if I want to travel with my guitar(s), or when I perform, which is mostly at the local coffee shop open mic night. As you can see from associated photograph, I am typically hidden behind a music stand and overflowing charts, which separate me from the audience and that is not an ideal performance mode for someone like me who likes to interact with the crowd. And, why perform finger-style if nobody can see your hands at work on the guitar?
My wife Nettie concurred with me that getting out from behind the music stand would be a good thing when I perform. She notices it when photographing a performance.
So, I did some research and discovered that there were iOS apps available for storing, presenting and scrolling through musical charts and one of the most popular among musicians was forScore which is downloadable for $15. forScore can be used with an iPhone and/or an iPad. (the app works on other platforms too, but for better or worse, I happily exist in the middle of Apple world!)
forScore is capable of storing piles of charts and those charts can be organized in a number of logical ways based on your choices. Bookmarks can be assigned to your favorite tunes for quick access and setlists cutting across your entire collection of charts can be conjured up for a performance.
While I own the larger sized iPhone it is still not large enough for me to feel comfortable reading a chart, so I opted to use an iPad which can be adapted to a mic stand with a holder, which in my case was made by Hercules.
It took me the better part of two days to get all my music on board the iPad and to organize it. It helped that there are multiple Youtube videos available by people who’ve developed expertise with this app. I’ve yet to annotate the electronic charts but intend to do so. I used annotations frequently when noting on which finger to begin a slide!
Finally, it would break the continuity of playing a tune to have to release the guitar with one of my hands and slide a finger across the iPad screen to transition to the next page of the chart. Consequently, a necessary adjunct to this paper-replacement project was a foot-activated pedal to advance the chart page. The iPad and the forScore app work well with the bluetoothed Firefly PageFlip, so I acquired one and it gets the job done. It does take some adjustment getting used to advancing and reversing the chart pages with my foot while I am playing.
I just completed this project yesterday so I do have an experiential learning curve to travel through in the short term before I feel entirely comfortable with this new system when used either at home or in front of an audience. Nevertheless, I have high hopes for the benefits of getting out from under all that paper. Below is a shot of me on my first night of practice with the completed set up… It went reasonably well…
Thanks for any comments you wish to leave below:
I am with you on using tablets for guitar. But recently, I started playing piano again, and for me, it is easier to read sheet music spread out. Maybe I am just not used to it the way I am with guitar. Right now both my wife and I use ipads with Onsong. I went to the larger ipad (12.9 pro) find it works better for me. I do have a couple of AirTurn pedals that I have used but generally, when playing, I just do a quick flick of the wrist to get to the next page. Habits I guess. I am thinking about going to a 4 pedal AirTurn to enable more functions. Have to put that on the Christmas wish list.
Same. Onsong with an airturn pedal.
I also create most of my own charts, as I prefer complete Vs’s and Chorus’s, and don’t like to have to “back up” to a page I’ve already used….and I don’t mind having charts that are more than 2 pages when necessary, so I can “advance” with the pedal as often as need be.
The thing is, the Onsong app does so much, I really need to spend a lot of time just watching the Onsong video tutorials.
Burgess Meredith played Mick