I flip­pantly commented on Twitter earlier that StaffPad, a new music notation app for Microsoft Surface, had a likely audience of one—Alan Pierson, the lone musician Surface-owner I know. It’s easy to poke fun at dorky old Microsoft, but I’m genuinely just sore that I can’t try out the app. To expend as much devel­op­ment effort as StaffPad clearly has only to address the 2% share of tablets that run Windows seems like a risky business strategy, to put it mildly; I sincerely hope they’re success­ful, though, because promis­ing new software in this category doesn’t come along often. The target audience is small to begin with, and the number of talented musician-program­mers even smaller, I’d imagine. 

Perhaps, though, StaffPad isn’t even meant for me. It doesn’t appear to have real engrav­ing capa­bil­i­ties (it lacks, fir example, cross-staff beaming—a rela­tively basic feature) and there­fore wouldn’t obviate my need for Sibelius. Yet it also can’t export a Sibelius file—only MusicXML, which is far too rudi­men­tary to be useful, in my experience. 

But I have wanted a way to “do music” on my phone and iPad for awhile, and nothing I’ve seen has quite fit the bill. 

The hypo­thet­i­cal software I’ve been imag­in­ing is far less elaborate—a compan­ion to big notation programs rather than a replace­ment for them. The inter­face would be a blank sheet of music paper, and you’d just draw on it. Notes, shapes, pictures, text, whatever. Add a simple filing system, to keep all your related sketches together, along with voice memos and photos. The result would be the digital equiv­a­lent of a music Mole­sk­ine, or like a musi­cally-oriented Vesper. Maybe it could have some kind of hand­writ­ing recog­ni­tion to clean up the input a bit. 

Fully expect­ing like a dozen venture capi­tal­ists to get at me right after I hit publish on this. It’ll be the next Facebook, I tell ya!