It is December 31 and I just wondered “what exactly has happened this year?”
So through the eyes of this blog, let’s have a look. We’ll start with January and the tail end of our South America trip, along with the workshopping and recording of my music in Brazil.
After spending too many hours hunting down good repertoire for my school orchestras, in February I explored the efforts of conducting. I also set up my newsletter with MailChimp.
It was a plentiful month of posts in March, many on great discoveries I recently made but also highlighted a new piece, Picture for Emily, for my niece.
Spent a fantastic few days in Wellington in September recording Rakaia with the NZSO. Also, Rhian Sheehan’s amazing score for The Cult, which I helped out with, won best score!
In November I did a three part post looking at music printing, engravers, copyists and how things are changing. I also hooked up Sibelius users with some great resources!
Musician? Got your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad? Well, what are you going to put on it? As a musician, sharing my time between rehearsals, conducting, composing and teaching, I have fine tuned a collection of amazing apps for my iPhone that I find are absolutely essential and I hope will help you save you a lot of money and give you some great tools. Just a note, I’ve used all of these on an iPhone but they are all available (if not now, will be very soon) on the iPad.
Field Recorder – This is an outstanding digital recorder for the iPhone. One review of it says “Audiofile Engineering’s FiRe application is by far the most advanced stereo audio recording application we’ve seen for the iPhone and iPod Touch, going far beyond the limitations of previous go-to apps…”. It is a professional quality recorder and the list of features is huge so check out the link. It has a beautiful interface, the quality of recording is amazing, you can edit in the app and can export as WAVE, AIFF, CAF, AAC, Apple Lossless, AAC, Podcast, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC. So handy for capturing a rehearsal or auditions, taking field recordings and pretty much endless possibilities.
Dr. Betotte TC – There are many metronomes but few powered up for the music professional. Dr. Betotte TC has all the normal features of a normal metronome such as playing any time signature, beat divisions, the ability to save your tempos and settings to a playlist, tap in a tempo – but it has got so much more. For a start all of the rhythmic divisions have their own volume sliders, one click halftime feel, options for swing tempo, you can import your own audio samples and the playlist can auto advance. Some nice other features (which are so easy to access) include an alarm timer that syncs with the metronome and customisable gradual up/down, step up/down and quiet count buttons. These step up/down buttons are so handy for students learning a passage, as it gradually gets faster over time (or however you set it up). What I do like about this metronome is its visual capabilities – it’s often really unhelpful just having a “beep, beep” metronome. For learning scores or for reference in rehearsals it is so handy to just have a ticking needle, or a huge “1, 2, 3, 4, …” being counted on screen. This is by far my metronome of choice.
Stay In Tune – There are a lot of tuners available, a lot of good ones and generally they all have the same features. It’s how they deliver the features which makes the difference. Stay In Tune is my favourite – it has a wonderful, clear interface, you can also easily produce tones, calibrate and select specific tunings for different instruments. It is also one of the most accurate and gorgeous I’ve found.
Backline Calc – It’s a musical calculator and perhaps the last app you would think about looking for, but once you have it you’ll realise how handy it is. There are six categories and some examples include: Length (sum times, compare tempos, song length, beats to tempo, time to samples), Pitch (MIDI note, frequency and wavelength conversion), Timecode (frames to timecode, convert timecode), Electric (power, voltages), Acoustics (distance to time, sound pressure level, panning) and Files (file size). These are only a few examples – a very handy little app.
Chordmaster by Planet Waves – The most advanced and intelligent guitar chord reference. You can make chords easily with sliders, you can strum them and the overall interface is beautiful. It’s also nice to see a popular and well known music accessory company delving into apps.
SoundHound – We all hear a song on TV and want to know what it is and there are several apps who help you out with this, the most popular being Shazam – but these don’t go much past the novelty factor of holding the device to a speaker and finding out the song. I like SoundHound as it provides a few more features such as effectively picking up you singing personally, or you can just type the title, album, artist or lyric. Also, in the results, it provides iTunes links, all the lyrics, YouTube videos and the ability to easily share.
Karajan® – Music & Ear Trainer – Karajan is by far the finest ear trainer. It is powerful and very customisable in each of the categories – intervals, chords, scales, pitch and tempo (bpm). It has detailed statistics so is great for students using in lessons or for your own interest. Personally, I use the tempo recognition all the time (great for conducting) and the pitch recognition is handy too. The pro version is entirely worth the money. (iPad screenshot below)
Oxford Dictionary of Music – Yes, your dream has come true. The entire Oxford Dictionary of Music is available on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. It has a wonderful interface, easy search and is regarded as the most up-to-date music dictionary out there. Also good to note that no internet connection is required to use the app. These guys only do dictionary apps so they know what they’re doing. This is a must.
Circle Theory – Based around the Circle Of Fifths, this is a handy reference tool. I use it mainly with students using the more straight forward functions like seeing the relationships between notes, key relationships, key signatures, intervals and triads. But I’ve also used it myself for transposing between keys, checking notes of transposed instruments and as a reference for modes. A great little app.
Virtuoso Piano – Well we have to touch on some instrument apps. I’m sure the first app any musician gets is a piano but many are very basic. My favourite is Virtuoso Piano Pro as you can have multiple keyboards, easily flick between octaves, calibration and record/play features. Another really great app.
Guitar: Play and Share – Without question this is the finest acoustic guitar app. I’ve been playing around with it a lot lately and it is wonderful. Very clever, very easy to use and the sound quality is fantastic. Loads of features and ways to customise, different guitars – who needs a real one?
I won’t mention any more instruments as there are so many good ones (and far more that are rubbish). But if you’re interested in these, the video below is a great watch. It is from the Rend Collective Experiment featuring David Crowder and they produce the whole song from iPhone instruments. Awesome.
ProRemote – This is the only app I don’t own due to the whopping price tag (NZ$124.99, US$99.99), but it gets my attention and admiration. It is a remote control for ProTools, Ableton Live, Apple Logic or Soundtrack Pro. They say it “is like having four Mackie Control Universal Pro’s but better because it is wireless and much less expensive. You get almost $5000 of hardware for the price of ProRemote.” Very impressive. (iPad screenshot below)
Well it is an amazing series of products that I hope you will all enjoy checking out and using. I have found them all to be essential with my day to day work, saving so much time and hassle. Please let me know any other feedback, any great apps I have missed or your comments.
I remember seeing digital music stands for the first time a few years ago in a series of concerts in the UK where some DJs collaborated with composers and live musicians. I can’t find the link to it now, but basically composers were writing music alongside the DJs and the musicians were playing it in realtime from their digital stands. I remember thinking how great it was, and even now, that weighs up as some pretty adventurous activity!
Yesterday I posted a tweet mentioning my enjoyment at seeing Harry Connick, Jr. and his band using digital music stands on American Idol. This ignited a great response of knowledgeable and intrigued comments. They are not yet being used professionally in this part of the world, and I can’t say I’ve seen one in person, so I thought I’d explore them a little – here are my findings.
There seem to be three companies whose products are being used widely. The first is Music Pad, who it seems are the most popular and are the only (as far as I can see) company who have the whole product (a dedicated 12.1″ tablet), not just the software. The Music Pad Pro is their main product – looks fantastic and packed with features.
If you are thinking, “Yeah okay, fair enough, great for a brass player reading a chart, but how about a conductor reading an orchestral score?” Well, you need the Music Pad Maestro.
Ah yes, the possibilities of usage are wonderful to dream about. Let’s come back down to reality – for a Music Pad Pro plus carry bag, foot pedal and a few various cables, you could expect to pay around US$800.
A far more cost-effective option is just to purchase the software and you can run it on your own device. What looks to be the supreme product is the Music Reader, which sits at around US$99 for the full professional version. It is Mac and PC compatible and perfect for flat widescreen monitors, tablet and other touch screen PCs and, as of recently, the Music Reader is available on the Apple iPad – where it is a free download.
Another option is the eStand, although very sadly it only runs on PCs. Still not cheap – for the full professional multi-page package, you can expect to pay US$499.
So I am guessing you have many questions about how certain things work – let’s try and answer some.
Turning pages – three options: touch the screen, use the foot pedal or use a MIDI trigger.
File format – sibelius, finale, PDF and image file formats.
Annotations – you can still annotate on the score as you would with a pencil on traditional paper.
Portability – well, beats potentially carrying around hundreds of pages of music.
Stand lighting – you won’t be needing that anymore.
Syncing – you can sync devices on stage so everyone is on the right track.
Viewing – several options of single to multiple page views and you can “look ahead” with a half page turn.
Page order – you’ll never get them out of order again.
Printing – you can print from the programme … but why would you want to?
Extras? – Yes, there is of course a metronome and tuner.
If you’re thinking “is a tuner and metronome the only extra features you can give this?”, well that’s just what I was thinking. But, the Same Page Music Performance Station has both the sheet music as well as metronome and tuner features … AND a personal monitor mixer. Yes, you can take charge and adjust your own monitor levels.
See a great video of the Same Page system below:
I look forward to seeing the developments with these products. As a copyist, it’s exciting to see the ability to make the score or parts and have it in front of the players in seconds. Even in more relaxed environments such as teaching, its potential is exciting. Maybe this is my excuse to buy an iPad?
Let me know your thoughts, experiences if you’ve had them or links to any videos with these in action.
