Do You Use a Tablet, Rather than Books?

Jerryc41

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How many of you use a tablet of some kind for your music?

A member of our group started using an iPad rather than books a few months ago. Now I'm using a 10" Kindle. I love it. I use MobileSheetsPro, which is an amazing program that can do so much.

With 32GB of internal memory and a 32GB micro SD card, I'll never run out of storage. I have mounts/stands for both table and floor.

I'm new to this, and I'm still learning, so if any of you have tips or suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
 
I do - iPad and OnSong. Excellent program that I only just scratch the surface of.
 
iPad and Set List Maker. But only for the dozen or so songs I have transcribed with MuseScore.
The other songs are still in the book.
 
Using a cheap android tablet and dropbox now. Don't really have a list maker. Will look into it. currently just doing a quick search for the song I want is good enough
 
More & more people in my uke groups are going the tablet route. Most are using medium to larger sized tablets. I don't know what programs they are all using. 2 of my 3 groups send out music ahead of time online for upcoming jams, so it seems easy to upload right onto a tablet. I'm not a very tech savvy person, so I'd be reluctant to try the tablet method. Paper is easy, I can tuck it into my music stand case, and I can make quick changes & notes on it as we play. But my office is covered in stacks of paper music & binders. I need a better organization system for the paper, or I need to get hip and join the "cool kids" with the tablets.
 
iPad and Set List Maker. But only for the dozen or so songs I have transcribed with MuseScore.
The other songs are still in the book.

Did you use MuseScore on your iPad? I have tried other apps without much satisfaction.
 
How many of you use a tablet of some kind for your music?

A member of our group started using an iPad rather than books a few months ago. Now I'm using a 10" Kindle. I love it. I use MobileSheetsPro, which is an amazing program that can do so much.

With 32GB of internal memory and a 32GB micro SD card, I'll never run out of storage. I have mounts/stands for both table and floor.

I'm new to this, and I'm still learning, so if any of you have tips or suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

I have a 9.7 iPad. I have downloaded tabs and ebooks, but find the print rather small. I haven’t tried to print from my iPad, cannot plug into the printer or thru my laptop, but then I haven’t bought a lightning connection.
 
I use a mixture of everything. Have some books and also have onsong and Mobilesheets installed on my iPad / cheapo tablet.
Also occasionally use sheet music.

My go to and favourite is probably onsong on my iPad.
 
I use a Nook 7 and pdf's of the songs that are stored on a SD card.

I have several pdf's downloaded from this forum, the Welti songbooks etc. I also scan pages from songbooks I own and upload. Keeps me from lugging books around.

The tablet also helps when I am camping and have no WiFi or cell coverage but want to play a song.
 
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I'm not a very tech savvy person, so I'd be reluctant to try the tablet method. Paper is easy...

I like to think that I'm tech savvy, but I was hesitant to try the tablet. It's the software that makes it easy. As for paper, my group uses several books plus individual pages, so I used to wheel everything around in a suitcase. Now I can get by with just the tablet. At home, I could probably make a pile of ukulele music three feet high with all the extra copies I have. It's a waste of paper and ink.
 
Yes. The songbook for our jam book had more than 125 entries. The bound books themselves (we have about 15) are a huge burden to schlep around. So we put the entire book in PDF form in a Dropbox folder and encourage folks to download the songs. That way, we can update the book without having to print a whole batch of new paper, alphabetize, etc.

Some of our folks have iPads, others have Kindles or Android devices.

I recommend this highly, even if you're not tech-savvy. It's nice to carry your music everywhere.
 
Did you use MuseScore on your iPad? I have tried other apps without much satisfaction.
No, on a PC. Tablets are great for consuming content but not so much for creating content.
But I do like the ability to put the elements on the sheet that are important to me, and leave off others. I usually want to fit a song on to a single page. If I am close, I am willing to compromise some things to make it fit.
Other people have different priorities so the sheets they produce are not a good fit for me.
 
I just recently starting using an Amazon 10" Fire tablet that I bought on prime day. The Kindle e-reader I have for books had too small a screen to use effectively, for me. I travel a fair bit, with kids and grand-kids in New York and Arizona, so it's nice to have some music on the tablet. I bought an electronic copy of The Daily Ukulele that I have on there and using it's pretty good. Sometimes, the print is a little small, for my old and tired eyes, and if you make it bigger you lose the edges of the sheet. But, given the convenience, I will probably be using it more. I haven't loaded anything else yet, but will likely do so soon.
 
I bought an electronic copy of The Daily Ukulele that I have on there and using it's pretty good.
I did not know it was available this way. I will have to look.
Sometimes, the print is a little small, for my old and tired eyes, and if you make it bigger you lose the edges of the sheet.
This is why I often transcribe a song in to MuseScore. *I* set the margin size. *I* set the font size.
 
All of my downloaded songbooks and song sheets go into a dedicated folder on my desk computer, that automatically copies to Dropbox. I can access Dropbox from my iPad and immediately find the song I want -- no shuffling through papers, and I only have one additional item to carry. Saves paper, time, and weight.
 
I'm very tech savvy and do graphic design so I was very prepared to go digital 5 plus years ago when I joined my ukulele group. After a short time of using paper, I started using my iPad 9.7" with OnSong and forScore, both of which I found on the cumbersome side. I make all my music sheets PDFs on my Mac with a great graphics design app, Canvas Draw, one page each, transferring them with Dropbox. (I'm a total Apple fanboy, Mac since 1986, iPhone, iPad, etc.)

After short time I found the 9.7" to be too small for my eyes (even with glasses), so I searched and could only find Android based larger tablets, the 12.9" iPad Pro was not out yet, and I knew it would be expensive. Finding MobileSheets Pro for Android convinced me to go for a 13" Android tablet for $150 from Amazon. I used that for about 2 years, but it was slow and had other shortcomings, then it died. By then the 12.9" iPad Pro came out for about $1000, which I didn't want to spend.

I bought another of the same Android on Amazon, but the shortcomings were getting more annoying, especially stylus functions that I needed to use all the time during rehearsals, so when MobileSheets Pro came out for Windows and my research said that a Windows stylus is much better than Android, I bought a 13.5" Windows tablet with stylus for $400. But neither the Android or Windows tablets could record while using another app, which I'd been doing during rehearsals with my iPhone and providing the audio tracks to the group on my web site.

The stylus was actually not that much better, but what really got to me was how difficult the Windows OS was, slow, very cumbersome, and doing updates all on its own at the most inconvenient times, like during rehearsal, with no way to control it. I was so frustrated that I stopped by an Apple Store and tested a 12.9" iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil, it ran circles around anything else, fast, smooth, logical. So I decided to stop being so shortsighted and bought a 64 GB referb from their web site with a Pencil for $800. I went with forScore because it has in app recording and got used to it's way of doing things.

I have about 300 songs, plus about 170 audio tracks attached to the song sheets with custom libraries and set lists making it extremely easy to pull them up.


9 tenor cutaway ukes, 5 acoustic bass ukes, 11 solid body bass ukes, 8 mini electric bass guitars (Total: 33)

• Donate to The Ukulele Kids Club, they provide ukuleles to children in hospital music therapy programs. www.theukc.org
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I do not have a ton of material having been playing for half a year. Majority of my material is paper, largely because I have purchased a few books for chord/melody and fingerpicking and checked a bundle of books from our library system. At home I utilize these on a music stand. I am also on my desktop PC for some of the lessons and play-along opportunity it offers. But sitting in front of my computer is done by necessity as it is not where I would choose to play my uke otherwise.

iPad is used for my group meetups whereby they post the music in dropbox. It is more cumbersome in some ways because there is a tipping point of being too small or having to scroll excessively. But I like that I do not have to print out 20 songs that I may not revisit. If they have extra printouts at the meetup I would grab a copy to use instead of my iPad.
 
I would love to use a tablet but I am not a techie person at ALL. Plus it seems like it would have to be laptop size, or I wouldn’t be able to have the font size large enough for me to see. Anyone else have that problem?
Up to this point I’ve been using a three-ring binder. I copy and paste song lyrics into a works document at a font I can read, and print them out. Most basic songs I can play by ear, so I put what key the song is in at the top of the page to remind me.
 
At home I use paper on occasion, but most of the time I'm on my Kindle. When I go out to play, I almost always sing and play songs that I am quite familiar with. I just need something to jog my memory and keep me on track. The Kindle does fine for that. I also try to drag as little gear as I can get by with, which means that I don't want to have a bunch of binders and books to deal with. If I stop somewhere along the way home and I have internet access, the Kindle comes in handy to connect to the wifi and check emails, messages, and of course, see what is happening on UU.
 
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