Originally Posted by Planobilly
I see people playing live with tablets and I have often wondered why they like to use a tablet.
I use one most of the time. As I've gotten older, the screen has had to become bigger.

I use it only for sheet music when gigging, not for backing, but I do use iRealPro backing for practice, though the lack of a melody and other soloists is significant.

I have all my music in MobileSheetsPro. Other band members use other Apps. It allows me to keep scores all together, has an index and a search. It allows me to group into 'collections'(*), e.g. for my jazz group, for the ukulele jam group, for learning focus, for my wife's singing songs. It allows me to set up set lists, but also allows me to find a song quickly if it's called unexpectedly. iRealPro is just chord sheets, no dots, but I have a larger number of songs on it and can often enter then new in a couple or so minutes for some song I don't have.

Being a tablet, it's lit up, so is easily visible in a dark-ish room. It's heavy enough to not need clips/pegs to keep it on the music stand if there's a breeze, but is not so visible in bright light, especially if I'm wearing sunglasses. I usually print paper for expected sunny events.

iRealPro's accompaniment is OK, not great. It sounds better than typical low-end MIDI, quite a long way short of RealTracks. It has a limited style repertoire, but it mostly does me for practice.

Around here at least, tablets are definitely more common than paper for the scores. I'm not sure who, if any, of my friends use them for backing. Buskers certainly sometimes do.

(*) Edit: A tip from a friend is to have a collection named something like needs attention, so one can quickly find sheets that need fixing or imnproving.

Last edited by Gordon Scott; 12/17/24 11:38 AM.
Jazz relative beginner, starting at a much older age than was helpful.
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