I’ve started working on a series of forScore video tutorials, and I would like to know:
What do you want to see in a forScore tutorial?
I want to target some different audiences:
- People who are just getting started with forScore
- Power users looking for more tips to add to their arsenal
- Musicians who don’t own iPads/tablets but are curious about how they’re used for music
If you’re just getting started with forScore: What topics would you like to know more about? What do you need help with most?
If you’re a power user: What are your favorite advanced tips? (If I use them, I’ll credit you in my tutorials!) What questions do you get the most from new users?
I’m planning to do a “Getting Started”/quick-start one, plus a bunch of mini-tutorials geared towards specific tasks/features and advanced tips.
Thanks for your input!
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I’d love some tips on best practices. I sing in a chorus and the only downside to using the iPad is that, sometimes, the music director gives notes quickly, even to the point of shouting “breath mark there” while we are singing, without stopping. Using a pencil on a paper score is still much faster than opening up the Annotations menu and grabbing the breath mark, or crescendo stamp tool. So, some tips on the best ways to keep up in a scenario like that would be great. Maybe always use the pencil tool, and then go back later to change those marks for stamps? Or some other quick annotation tips…
I hear you – I’ve observed pro orchestra rehearsals where it was even worse, with the maestro shouting things left and right as they were blowing through the piece full-speed – it seemed tough to keep up even with pencil/paper. We are on the bleeding edge, though, so it will be up to people like you and me to invent the best practices and share them with each other! I do want to focus a lot of the tutorials on methods for speeding up annotation, and I think we also need to lean hard on the forScore development team to come up with ingenious interfaces to make annotation lightning-fast.
This is a genuine concern, and I think there are definitely ways around this. I would love to see forScore devs look into Bluetooth 4.0 technology (such as the Blue Tiger from TenOneDesign – http://tenonedesign.com/bluetiger.php), where the stylus would result in a mark on the score vs. a finger for a page turn, or to implement an overall “quick annotation” mode, where single touches on the screen are interpreted as marks, and pages are turned with the foot pedal. Both are do-able, if you ask me, though I myself have done very little tinkering with iOS coding.
This isn’t actually a tutorial item, but perhaps a segment on how to convince your chorus to let you use an iPad. I actually had people complaining about mine in rehearsal when I first started. Some people are stuck in their ways. Most “the audience will notice it” issues can be fought with a black folder, and anti-glare screen, and dimming the brightness. Obviously, the must button and airplane mode are also good for avoiding badly timed alerts. 🙂
That’s an excellent idea and it’s a topic I’ve considered blogging about, as I read another blog post a while back about an orchestra player whose conductor was resistant to her using the iPad, although he couldn’t give a reason when asked. What kinds of complaints did people have, in addition to “the audience will notice it”?
Some random complaints from idiots^H^H^H^H^H^H members of the chorus…
1. There is a glare reflecting off it into my eyes.
2. It’s distracting to me to see you using it. (Really??????)
3. You will stand out in the chorus as not looking uniform with the rest. If we don’t all have it, then none of us should have it. (my response there is that while the women all wear black, they don’t wear the exact same outfit, and the guys don’t all wear the same design tux.)
4. What if your battery dies or it breaks? (My response is “I’ll sing the rest from memory. 🙂
5. I see you checking your email when you should be paying attention. (ok, that one is on me)
I am sure there are others, but these are the ones that come to mind.
<eyeroll> 😉 Wow, glad I never had to deal with that. Well, those are all addressable, so I’ll take a crack at it in a future post or tutorial.
About customizing the menu bar – I like it, especially since I have always thought that stamps should have their own button and not be buried in the “Draw” drawer. And I’d like more shortcut gestures and actions – maybe even assign gestures to specific stamps/markings.
Personally, I’d say something on doing repeats. Using the link feature is great for people who have a hand free and don’t use a foot pedal, whereas the page duplication feature is good for musicians whose hands are occupied.
You could also mention setlist sharing, since it’s new – it’s a great tool, and I have visions of it being used in ensemble settings…
Thanks, Matt – I’m adding repeats/rearrange and setlist sharing to my tutorial topic list. The active Bluetooth stylus thing is intriguing too. I wish the forScore devs would start a support forum so that the user community could put their heads together and suggest ideas like this. I should ask them sometime.
By far, the best suggestion for forScore that I could think of would be to let me customize the menu bar. I’d love to put a buttons there for the pencil tool, the breath stamp and the slur stamp. 1 touch access to the items that I use the most.
What about dealing with all the PDF files and organizing them/backing them up/accessing them when they are NOT on our iPads?
Oh boy, Paul, I’m not sure I have that problem entirely licked myself! But I can certainly share my own (however imperfect) system and what I’ve seen others do.