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Monday, April 18, 2016

More about iPad and church music—the basement tapes

Because I'm such a Chatty Cathy, the overworked editor at World Library Publications was forced to truncate my previously published article by a few dozen paragraphs to get within an order of magnitude of my required word count. These paragraphs are included below for your edification and amusement...

Tips for using forScore with Finale 

For your original music and arrangements of
public domain music, you don’t need to have a special file to create good-looking forScore documents. What will help is to do two tasks one time, and you will have access to them forever – first, create a tablet-sized page for the Finale “page set-up” task, and then create a tablet-sized paper size for printing, so that when you create your PDF it will be the perfect size for an iPad. For a Mac computer using Finale 2014.5, the steps are described here. Remember, you don’t need “margins” on your iPad – maximize screen real estate by printing almost to the edges of the document. These steps will help you do this.

  1. Navigate to the file “pagesizes.txt”. In Finale 2014.5, you will locate it here:
  2. HOME —> LIBRARY –>  APPLICATION SUPPORT —> MAKEMUSIC —>  FINALE 2014.5 —> CONFIGURATION FILES —> pagesizes.txt
  3. Open the file in TextEdit or another text editor.
  4. Type in the following information under the bottom line of the listed paper                            iPad = 5.8, 7.75; .1, .1, .2, .1, .5
  5. The first two numbers are width and height of the page, in this case, the iPad screen, the next four are the page margins. The last number is for left-margin instrument scores…probably you don’t need to know that. The top and right margins are assumed to be negative, no minus sign is required. 
  6. Next, in Page Setup (under the “File” menu), choose “Paper Sizes” and then “Manage Custom Sizes.” Click the “+” sign to add a custom size, name it “iPad”, and enter the iPad screen dimensions, 5.8 X 7.75, and either “0” or a small number like “.05” in the margin boxes. Your margins are already fixed in the Finale page size. Click OK. Now you’re ready to print to an iPad screen size. 
  7. As you finish a Finale file,
    you will choose “Print PDFSave as PDF…, and navigate to the folder where you want to save the document, either on your hard drive or on the cloud drive.
From inside Acrobat, File -> Properties will let you
store the name and composer as properties of
the PDF itself. These will be recognized by ForScore
so that you can readily add them to the app.

Tips for scanning music into forScore. 

Use the lowest-resolution scanning setting you are comfortable with (I use 200dpi), and black and white image source, scanning directly to PDF. When in "Preview" mode during your scan, crop the preview of the final document to as close to the edges of the music as you can. Remember that you don't need to see the title of the song when you're playing, because the file itself will be the title of the song. You want your scanned music to be as much music and as little extraneous information as possible. If your scanning software doesn't allow you to do this, you can also crop the music from within ForScore, maximizing the screen real estate for the music itself, which is what you want to see.

When saving the PDF to your cloud source (e.g. Dropbox), save the actual name of the song and the composer to the “title” and “author” information lines of the PDF. This way, the information will be available to forScore on import.

Handy functions in ForScore

ForScore has a lot of ways to conveniently store and manipulate your music. One handy feature is the "notes" feature, which I use to create notes for myself that "overlay" the songs in a set list that I might use at a concert. This helps me to store ideas for introducing songs and see them when I'm about to play them. Annotations, both written annotations attached to the score and simple color highlighting are available.

Adding scores to ForScore is as simple as drag-and-drop from within iTunes using your desktop, or can be done on the fly by storing your pdfs on the cloud in Dropbox or other online storage, like Google Drive. Just direct the "Cloud Services" icon to your storage location, and you can add pdfs to your setlist from anywhere.

For my money, the best feature in ForScore, aside from being able to crop your purchased or scanned music of its unnecessary margins, is the ability to create smart jumps, so that when you get to a repeat bar on page 5 of a score you don't need to page back 3 pages to page 2. The app allows you to set a jump point with a dime-sized colored circle on the page to another place in the score. You can do this more than once within the score, too, in case you need a coda jump as well.

What's changed since the article appeared?

The big thing, literally, is the release of the iPad pro, with a screen size roughly the equivalent of a sheet of letter-sized paper, minus the margins. Music on the Pro is so beautiful that Apple includes ForScore on the demo tablets in the Apple Store so musicians can stand in front of them and drool (that's what the buckets under the counter are for.) A Facebook friend in the city remarked that using a Pro in landscape view would allow for viewing two pages at a time, reducing the requirement to turn pages by a substantial margin with a minimum reduction in page size for those accustomed to the size of the current iPad. I still haven't made the jump, since my iPad Air still serves well, and it's a chunk of change to invest in one of those late-model behemoths (though the price came down a bit at the last Apple event.)

For more information on ForScore, see their website, or go to the forScore page at the iTunes App Store.

and PLEASE! Only make legal copies. 

If I’m making a PDF in order to avoid buying a piece of music, I’m making an illegal copy. Ask yourself this question – when this copy is being used, is there a physical copy on a shelf on the premises for every electronic copy? Every scanned file I have must have a physical copy not in use.

iPad® and iTunes® are registered trademark of Apple, Inc.
PowerPoint® is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.
YouTube™ and Android™ are registered trademarks of Google, Inc.

Bluetooth® is a registered trademark of Bluetooth SIG.

Friday, April 15, 2016

iSing, iPlay, iPray — using tablets in a parish music program

This material, written in late 2012, was originally published in the Fall 2013 issue of AIM Liturgy Resources, copyright © 2013 World Library Publications, wlpmusic.com. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. 
In a subsequent posting, I will include specific instructions on how to create the most useful PDF format from Finale for uploading (or directly loading) into ForScore. 
Specific questions? Add them to the "comments" area, and I'll try to answer those as well. If I can't, I bet another reader will.


ForScore app allows you to make fully
editable playlists: "Funeral" contains
80 songs I can reorder on the fly.
How we’re using tablets in our parish music program

What you’ll need: a tablet device (like an iPad); a desktop computer; a Dropbox or similar online storage account with sharing privileges (www.dropbox.com); a scanner; appropriate licensing or legal copies; “forScore” app (www.forscoreapp.com)

It didn’t take long from the day the iPad was released (April Fools day, 2010, for those keeping track of these things) before a lot of us realized the possibilities for adapting the use of these devices in music performance. Technological entrepreneurs began writing apps to showcase the versatility of Apple’s tablet, videos of performances by geek bands using only iPads for instruments began popping up on YouTube, and sound technicians wandered the stages of concert and theatrical venues, iPads in hand, adjusting sound with suddenly ultra-portable remote mixers.

It was about five minutes after I discovered that there was an app for importing, sorting, and storing musical scores that I dove into the tablet market myself. In the guise of a small and yet completely legitimate tax deduction, I bought a first generation iPad in July of 2010, and used it the following Sunday to play the charts for that day’s services. I’ve done so ever since, nearly every week, as well as used the iPad for workshops notes and presentations (Powerpoints, including movies), and as a replacement for notebooks of music when I occasionally do a concert in a parish. As those of you who have an iPad or a similar Android or other tablet know, this barely scratches the surface of what we use them for, but it’s the domain of this article, so here we go.

You can maintain multiple playlists, while
storing most of your catalog in a master
song list in your device and/or in cloud
storage like Dropbox.
Since my experience is with the iPad, I’m going to say “iPad” when I mean a tablet device, mostly because I’m not sure where they diverge from one another in their abilities and available apps.  ForScore is an app exclusively for iPad. MobileSheets is an analogous app for Android, but I have no firsthand knowledge of it. (Search for “mobilesheets” at play.google.com)

Right now we have about a dozen iPad users in the choir, to a greater or lesser extent. For some of us, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, but there are some drawbacks. Here’s a bit of values clarification, stacking up the positive against the negative:

POSITIVE
Portable – goes everywhere, becomes a customary companion because of other uses.
Versatile – “forgotten” or misplaced music recovered on the fly
Eco-friendly – in the long run, especially as it replaces paper from the source (publisher) rather than at the end user (the church or user through scanning), less paper being consumed
Great app – the forScore app allows for multiple setlists, resizing on the fly, rearranging pages, setting up smart repeats (from page 5 back to page 2, for instance), and annotation with a stylus or a finger in different colors, as well as highlighting and typed notes (say, different hymn numbers in different worship books, or workshop/concert commentaries).
AirTurn – for instrumentalists especially, this Bluetooth-enabled pedal enables handless pageturns. Sweet!


NEGATIVE
Front-end labor intensive.  The first time any song is put into the database, it has to be scanned and uploaded, or purchased and downloaded. Once it’s there, of course, it can be moved around and indexed in various ways.
Page-turn psychodrama. 95% of the time, no issues. But for the nervous cantor or music director, there will be the time that the page turn doesn’t go the way you planned (user error) and it will always be on the song you didn’t quite have as committed to memory as you wished you had. Since receiving an AirTurn device as a gift, the page-turning issue has receded. Controlling page turns via Bluetooth has been more reliable for me.

Cost. At this time, it is not cost-efficient to buy an iPad specifically for church use. But most users would find church use a small percentage of the actual amount of time we use the tablet for. It is difficult to overstate the utility of a tablet computer, which is capable of being a Skype phone, movie player, e-reader, word processor, presentation source (and even creator), social networking tool, email system, gaming device,…The list goes on. If a tablet already fits your lifestyle needs, it will be most helpful at the piano bench or in choir. 

iPad® is a registered trademark of Apple, Inc.
PowerPoint® is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.
YouTube™ and Android™ are registered trademarks of Google, Inc.
Bluetooth® is a registered trademark of Bluetooth SIG.

Thursday, April 7, 2016

SongStories 47: You (Stony Landscapes, 1994, GIA)

Psalm 65 just comes around once every three years on Sunday, on the day when the parable of the sower comes up as the gospel. I wanted to write a psalm setting that drew attention to the sower in the parable, hence, the simple title "You," and the repetition of the word throughout the paraphrase of the psalm. The antiphon given in the lectionary, "The seed that falls on good ground will yield a fruitful harvest," in my view hides the central truth of the parable, which is that the Sower is so abundant with the sowing. While the lectionary refrain seems to emphasize a moralistic interpretation of the parable, that somehow we're responsible for the kind of "ground" we are, the parable itself, allegorical interpretations aside, emphasizes the sower, who throws that seed everywhere! That the gospel writer goes on to give an allegorical interpretation to the parable is undeniable, but its quite likely that the interpretation is not the point that Jesus tried to make in the telling.



As I wrote in a blog post from July 2014, the last time this psalm and gospel were used, "the reign of God is God's work, and it is being sown everywhere. Also, and perhaps more importantly, failure, miracle, and normalcy' are all part of the way the kingdom operates. In the beautiful conclusion of Bernard Brandon Scott,
In failure and everydayness lies the miracle of God's activity. The accidents of failure are not exploited for their possible moral overtones, but are coordinated with the harvest. The hearer who navigates within this triangle can experience God's ruling activity under the most unfamiliar guises, even among prostitutes and tax collectors–in the everyday... Both the ordinary and the unclean belong to the miracle of the kingdom. The kingdom does not need the moral perfection of the Torah nor the apocalyptic solution of overwhelming harvest. (Hear Then the Parable, Bernard Brandon Scott, © 1989 Fortress Press)
"
Aside from its use again on Terry's 2003 album Family Resemblance, this was the only time we've used pedal steel guitar on one of our recordings.

The rhythm section included the awesome Beth Lederman on piano, Tim Downs on drums, and Jon Murray on bass, aided by Todd Chuba on percussion and Gary Daigle on guitars. This link will take you to the page on the GIA website where you'll find more information on the music and CD.


You (Psalm 65)  by Rory Cooney

You
You visit the earth
You make it fruitful
You make it bloom
You
Your rivers overflow
Spilling to earth in the rain
You call forth the grain.

To you belong the sowing and the harvest,
To you alone the rainfall and the sun
We will praise your name
You have staked your claim
On the fierce and stony landscape of the human heart.

You
You send us the rain
Water the furrows
Soften the land
You
You bless every seedling
You crown the year every spring
With the bounty of your hand. (ref.)

Wherever you walk
The earth begins to blossom
Even desert pastures
Are kissed by the dew
Flocks in the meadows
Wheat in the valleys
All sing their joy to you
To you.

To you belong the sowing and the harvest,
To you alone the rainfall and the sun
We will praise your name
You have staked your claim
On the fierce and stony landscape of the human heart
On the fierce and stony landscape of the heart.

("Psalm 65: You" by Rory Cooney © 1994 GIA Publications)