Grateful Dead Music Forum

Sorry I just noticed where the footswitch was mentioned....May be I need a magnifying glass too...

myoung6923 wrote:my eyes suck and the iPad works great. It mounts right on to the mic stand. One nice thing, is that you can set up a whole setlist and just swipe to the next song. They even have bluetooth footswitches to turn pages if you don't want to swipe.

And the nice thing about using the iPad for is - is all of the other uses for it. You aren't going to sink $900 into something that only does one thing.

so do you just download the music sheets or do you create them yourself. Then do you set up a folder and arrange your set lists in that folder....Sorry for the dumb question but I only want to do this once and get it right...I am not the most computer literate kind of guy....

thanks for your help in advance

George

I own one of these. What I do is copy and paste the lyrics to a Word doc. Set the font size to 16pt. Then print to PDF which saves it to a file. Once it's in a PDF format you import it into the MusicPad manager. In the manager you can crop the page to fit the screen, hit save and you're done. Once all your sheets are in the MusicPad you create your setlist. It's a touch screen so you can pull up your sheets by touching the screen with the stylist that's provided. A guitar pick works just fine too I use a regular cheap dual pedal to flip forward or backwards between the sheets. You can also just tap the screen and it will flip the page.

They are being sold for $499.99 at Guitar Center http://www.guitarcenter.com/Freehand-Mu ... 1126007.gc

hotasaPistol wrote:Thanks for all the good info....I went to the Music Pad website and read some of the reviews.......not very flattering unless you are just using it for sheet music....it seems that if you want a lyrics sheet it has to be converted and is a pain in the ass....Not what it was designed for.......any way I am going to look into the I PAd and wonder where you can get that footswitch for scrolling.....and the music pad was closer to 900 than 500....sounds like a one trick pony and the IPAD would me much more versatile

thanks

George

Here is the page turner - I don't use it, I find that swiping to the next song works just fine.

http://www.thegigeasy.com/products/prod ... rturn.html

Phil and Bob have a few cords coming out of there prompters. Were do you get wired page turners?

11/15/11

Stereo Y cable

...

The other chord is power

myoung6923 wrote:my eyes suck and the iPad works great. It mounts right on to the mic stand. One nice thing, is that you can set up a whole setlist and just swipe to the next song. They even have bluetooth footswitches to turn pages if you don't want to swipe.

And the nice thing about using the iPad for is - is all of the other uses for it. You aren't going to sink $900 into something that only does one thing.

You definitely have a sweet set-up going on. I remember you showed it to me... somewhere... Plymouth, maybe?

an Ipad is smaller and more expensive

good thread, have been wondering what people have been clipping to mic stands

I tried an iPad resting on a music stand the other night, and I found it to be too small for my sh*tty eyes. Admittedly, I was sharing it with the bass player (who owned it), so perhaps was not at the optimal viewing distance, and also the charts were jazz tunes with lots of tricky (to me) chords that changed frequently, but I think I need a tablet with a screen closer to the size of a real sheet of paper.

IMO, those are best for folks who mostly know the tunes but may need an assist here and there. Not for novels of info requiring 10pt font.

I have found that I have to put each song onto one page and condense the info to only what I need to know.

I make everything in word first, reduce all margins to .25" and then expand the font size as big as I can get it so that it still fits on one page. Then I make certain things bold - such as the first line of a verse. Then, especially for songs with a lot of verses, I highlight the first line of each vese with a different color.mthis makes it much easier to quickly see where you left off. After that's all done, I save it out as a PDF file.

Then for a whole nights worth of files, I use acrobat pro and merge the PDF files into one document. So, I start with the first 2 pages as the setlist, then add each song in order. I go a little step further and add links to the first 2 pages - the setlist - so that I can just touch the song that I want and it will take me right there. If we stick to the setlist, then I can just swipe from one page to the next for the whole night. But, almost inevitably, we vary from the list at some point - so the links make it easy for me to get back to where we were without swiping like a madman while everybody is waiting for me.

I sync the files through iBooks and then move them into a setlist folder within iBooks. I also have every song PDF in a separate lyrics folder in iBooks - that way, I can punch up any song in a second - and then get back to the setlist as needed.

The page turner would be handy ccasionally, but I haven't sprung for it. I find that I'm able to just swipe to the next page easy enough.

Also, I do need reading glasses, but I am able to make each page with fonts big enough that I can read with no problem.

Another advantage - no more pages blowing off a stand - and no more situations with low light where you can't see the page at all.