Paperless Music

[Joe Beamish]

Originally Posted by Goodallboy

I use a program on my iPad called Dropbox.

Between my playing partner and I, we have over 200 original songs. Some slip from memory from time to time and we need the crutch.

Good point -- these days we have cloud storage which allows for easy access to well-organized files in any number of formats and software.

I wonder, do you simply look up the song for a quick memory jog, or do you set the iPad up and read along while playing?

[pjbelsch]

im only 28, but I've been using an iPad with Onsong since the inception, coming up to 10 years now. I downloaded a scanner app a couple years ago and took my church's whole sheet music library and scanned them with my iPad camera and uploaded them to the cloud and can pull them into Onsong whenever I need them. It is a life saver because I kid you not some of the songs I scanned were the last copy in existence.

Now, I have never been great at memorizing lyrics. chords for the most part I am pretty good. But, it has been a life saver, if anything I use it just for reference because its usually "what's the first line of the second verse' or just checking chords.

Also, when I purchased Onsong it was only $4.99, benefit of being an early adopter. Now its up to $20 and they now have some subscription garbage. I don't agree with their business model but ill keep using the product since I got it so cheap. if there are better options out there use em, but unfortunately Onsong may be the best.

[619TF]

Originally Posted by Joe Beamish

My bad, I thought I saw this thread on the main page. Not sure what happened there.

Then again, zombie threads are commonly enough revived around here. And perhaps new technology has emerged worth discussing.

I really don't care what classical musicians do.

There's actually 3 threads on the same topic that are being responded to right now. That's why I pointed out that this one was really old.

I'm sure those classical people don't care what you do either. The point was that they're internationally recognized as some of the most highly trained in the music field. Yet nobody expects them to memorize every piece. Musicians are also humans and therefore shouldn't be criticized if they chose to look at sheets while performing. As stated, many of today's pros even do this now but use hidden devices for the assist. Even the ones that wrote the songs in the first place do it. If you don't need anything in front of yout then more power to you. To say that using them means the artist doesn't know the piece well enough is actually far from the truth.