Hands-free sheet music [Resources-Hands On

Abstract

As an old-school writer, I prefer my reading matter printed and bound. But as an avid piano player, I am sick to death of music books. The music stand on our Baldwin grand piano holds a few pages laid side by side just fine. But most piano music is sold in songbooks: double-sided pages bound to inflexible spines. These books close up on you midsong when they are new; they fall to pieces when they get old. And playing complex music without interruptions is virtually impossible unless you have an assistant to turn pages for you. · Tinkerers since the early 1900s have patented myriad mechanical page turners to address this problem, but to this day they are generally considered a pain to load, noisy, and unreliable. · After years of growling at my misbehaving music, I finally resolved to create my own solution. I set the bar high. The system should work with all of my music books, allow annotations, and turn pages while my hands remain securely on the keys. It must be big enough to show two pages of notation sharply at full size, yet compact enough to fit on my piano‚s music stand. I wanted something self-contained that would work with a digital keyboard when I play with a band. And I didn‚t want to spend more than a few hundred bucks. · Clearly, the key was ditching print in favor of pixels. I lugged my boxes of books down to a copy center, and for US $30 they ran them through a guillotine to slice off the bindings. I then used a Fujitsu ScanSnap document scanner (modified to accept large pages) to convert the books into PDFs. Calibre, an open-source e-book library organizer, let me tag and sort scores by genre, difficulty, composer, and so on.