If you’ve seen me play in the past, oh, six months or so, you may have noticed me reading music off this newfan­gled contrap­tion called an “iPad”. Recently I added to this an AirTurn pedal, a little wireless switch that lets me turn virtual “pages” with my feet, which is good for those instances when I can’t spare a finger. Lots of people seem to like to ask me about this situ­a­tion post-concert, and it’s actually a really boring subject, so I thought it would make a great blog post. 

I didn’t get an iPad for the purpose of reading music. I got an iPad because I thought it was a neat toy, and my pops had an extra one. The music-reading evolved natu­rally as part of the compos­ing process—I’d write a little some­thing on my computer, and instead of hauling it over to the piano (which is all of 15 feet away) I started emailing PDF files to myself and reading them off the iPad. Hereto­fore, printing out multiple drafts was just part of writing a piece (I’ve found that composers tend to go through LOTS of paper) and I was glad to be rid of that step. Reading off the screen is not bad, either; while it’s maybe not as big as I would like, and can only display one page at a time (instead of two side-by-side, as with a printed booklet), it’s big enough for most normal-sized piano music. And who knows, perhaps some day there will be an iPad XL super edition. 

Initially I read scores in iBooks, which is the built-in eBook and PDF reading app that comes with the iPad. This became unten­able pretty soon. There’s no way to make anno­ta­tions in iBooks, and worse, there’s no orga­ni­za­tion system. You can’t rename anything or edit metadata, all your scores just end up there in a big pile. Enter ForScore (haha get it?), an app which several musician friends recom­mended to me. It’s specif­i­cally built for orga­niz­ing and reading scores, and has a ton of useful features—annotations, a metronome, page scaling/cropping, a built-in browser (oh hello imslp.org), book­marks, auto-repeats, and lots of deli­cious metadata. 

Unfor­tu­nately I don’t love ForScore. For all its eager­ness to help, the inter­face is really quite crude and awkward. It’s one of those deals where you constantly need to be in the right “mode” to do this and that, and select the right “tool”. It feels very old-fash­ioned in this way; I wonder if the program’s design­ers are Finale users. Say you want to mark a finger­ing: you’ve got to tap-and-hold to get into “edit mode”, make sure you’ve got the “stamp tool” selected, select a number stamp from the little palette, zoom in to where you want to place it (other­wise it’s hope­lessly inac­cu­rate), and press “done” to get out of edit mode. A bit more involved than, say, pencil and paper. 

Even worse: once you’ve gone to the trouble of anno­tat­ing a bunch of scores, you can only export them in the propri­etary .4sc format, other­wise you lose your markings. That sucks. The PDF file format supports anno­ta­tions and metadata just fine; ForScore’s reliance on its own format is a pretty trans­par­ent lock-in attempt. 

Here is what ForScore looks like: 

Turning pages on the iPad is easy enough with the tap of a finger, but some­times, of course, one can’t spare even that, which is why I bought an AirTurn pedal last month. It’s a very simple foot switch connected to a Blue­tooth trans­ceiver. The batter­ies in the trans­ceiver last for days, and you recharge the thing by plugging it into a computer with a mini-USB cable. The iPad basi­cally recog­nizes it as an external keyboard, albeit with only one key: Page down. Of course, this means that when you’re paired with the AirTurn, the iPad doesn’t show its onscreen keyboard, which is the MOST ANNOYING THING EVER. If you want to, say, send a quick email, you’ve got to discon­nect from the pedal in order to type on the damn thing. This, too, sucks. 

The hardware is pretty nice, and quite unob­tru­sive; I put the pedal to the left, next to una corda. It takes maybe a week to get completely used to this, but once you have, you’ll find yourself reflex­ively tapping the floor when it’s not there. I opted for the clear plastic pedal, which makes it nearly invis­i­ble to the audience; this is a good thing. It’s also nearly silent in oper­a­tion; I glued a layer of cork sheeting on mine just to dampen that extra “clack” you get with leather-soled shoes. You can connect a second pedal to go back­wards, but who wants to do that? 

Perform­ing, however, is where the iPad + ForScore + Airturn combi­na­tion shines. You can make a setlist in ForScore and it will auto­mat­i­cally move on to the next score. It’s also got a nice feature called “debounce”, which prevents you from acci­den­tally hitting the pedal twice and turning two pages. It’s really smooth, and of course, in perfor­mance is when it’s most impor­tant for the expe­ri­ence to be seamless and reliable. Just remember to charge your batteries.