The Gig Easy iPad app eliminates the need for sheet music

Musicians, are you sick of lugging notebooks thick with sheet music to gigs, music that you must clamp to stands with clothes pins to keep it from fluttering away as you play? Here is your answer: get yourself an iPad and download the Gig Easy app ($3.99). You can now load thousands of pages of sheet music in .pdf format which you can then search and organize into set lists.

To hold your iPad in place as you play, be sure to pick up a Gig Easy iPad holder. (http://www.thegigeasy.com) Designed for musicians by musicians, the Gig Easy screws right onto existing music stands, so you don’t have to bring your own.

Gig Easy app
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/thegigeasy/id529154164?mt=8

Many Seniors Enjoy the iPad2

Apple’s tablet is easy to use and the screen text can be enlarged with the spread of two fingers. “My 76-year-old Mom got an iPad, initially to use as a reader,” writes college buddy Laurie Howlett. “But she and her husband fought over who got to use it so they bought another!” Professional organizer Tracy McCubbin also says that many of her older clients “have loaded up the Kindle app on it for easy reading.” They also use the iPad for email.

iPad2
http://www.apple.com/ipad

All of the elegant, intuitive Apple products seem to be popular with tech savvy older folks. McCubbin’s 83-year-old client had her load an iPod Nano with meditations that she listens to at night to go to sleep. Writer Kathy Talley-Jones notes, “My father likes to listen to books on his iPod Touch and gets every new iPod Shuffle, Nano, etc. when it is released!”

Dummies.com offers these lessons for new old owners of iPads:

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/consumer-electronics/iPad-For-Seniors.html

Free iPad app offers U.S. airport info for pilots and passengers

The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) has a great website for pilots (and passengers, too) that describes conditions at airports around the country and, more importantly, where to get good eats around every landing facility (http://www.aopa.org). Their free iPad app offers the same information, showing runway configurations and giving details about fuel availability, aircraft parking fees, and the operating hours of the tower.

http://www.foreflight.com/aopa

WingX Pro turns an iPad into a moving map for pilots.

Software art coordinator Jeremy Bishop uses his iPad as a backup GPS and weather station while flying his plane. “I’ve got several aviation apps loaded that allow me to reference my location on FAA maps, check airport and weather conditions en route and look up important info as needed. Then when I reach my destination, I can find the nearest good lunch spot!” Here are the iPad apps that keep him on course.

WingX Pro
http://www.hiltonsoftware.com
Jeremy uses this mobile aviation GPS app, which costs 99 cents to download iPad and $99 per year for access to current VFR sectionals, IFR low/high enroute charts and even fuel prices. Synthetic Vision, 3-D route-envisioning software, is available for an additional charge.

Use Evernote for iPad to take mulitmedia notes.

Brian Warling, Manager of Learning Technologies at the University of California at San Francisco, recently found a surprising new use for the iPad. “For the first time, I took mine to a conference a couple weeks ago, along with my MacBook Air,” he said. “I never opened the Air. I used the iPad exclusively to take notes.” Brian used the free Evernote app to capture the conference.

This feature-rich free app, designed to capture data and save it to the cloud, has a little learning curve, but it’s worth it. It captures text, clips from the web, and photos. “I used Evernote to snap shots of the presenter slides to go along with my notes,” says Brian. “This was the first conference I’ve attended in a long time where I came away with notes that were actually useful.”

http://www.evernote.com/about/download/ipad.php

 

Write your screeplay on your iPad with the Scripts Pro app

Actress/screenwriter Therese Lentz uses the iPad to prepare for auditions. “I don’t print sides anymore,” she says. “I just open the download in iBooks and I’m good to go.” Therese also uses her iPad to write. “I use Pages ($9.99, http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pages/id361309726?mt=8) for lesson planning and I have an app for scripts.

Scripts Pro
http://www.scriptsapp.com

Need to work on your screenplay on the go? Just download this $5.99 app and get started wherever you are. “It interfaces well with Final Draft (http://www.finaldraft.com),” screenwriting software for Mac, Therese says.

Fake your way through standard tunes with iReal b for iPad or Android.

For musicians of any skill level, professional guitarist Brian Monroney recommends iReal b, a “fake book” app for the iPad ($7.99) and Android-based ($9.99) devices. “You can find the chord changes for thousands of standard jazz and pop tunes online and load them into this app. It allows you to transpose them on the fly, so if the singer calls ‘Body and Soul’ in the key of B, there’s not going to be a train wreck,” Brian says. iReal b will also generate piano, guitar, or bass and drums accompaniments for downloaded chord charts.

http://www.irealb.com

Attach a tablet computer to a music stand with The GigEasy

When guitarist Brian Monroney and his partners Brent Smith and Darren Kramer first heard about the iPad, they immediately started work on their new invention. “We saw the potential for the iPad to revolutionize the way musicians used sheet music onstage and wanted to be a part of it,” he says. Their mounting devices, which are manufactured in Colorado, can attach iPads and HP TouchPads to VESA arms or brackets, microphone stands, Manhasset music stands, or camera tripods. Brian says, “The GigEasy attaches to a microphone stand and holds the iPad at the perfect position. Since there is nearly always a microphone stand provided at the gig, I don’t have to carry one. The setup fits in a small bag.”

 

http://www.thegigeasy.com

 

Musicians can turn pages with a foot tap. Plus, free sheet music!

If you use an iPad to hold your music while you play, you will want to buy yourself one of these Bluetooth-enabled footpads to turn the pages on your device. No more nodding to your bumbling assistant! Also, the AirTurn site offers a rich directory of free online sheet music resources: http://airturn.com/free-sheet-music-vendors/free-sheet-music-resources. These are older, out-of-copyright pieces. Still, they run the gamut from the most advanced opera scores to simple pieces for learning to play the piano, for example.

http://airturn.com

Two apps make writing on the iPad easy

iA Writer for iPad
http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/writer-for-ipad/
For less than a dollar, download this text capture app designed especially for iPad. It easily syncs files over Dropbox so you can access your work when you get back to your desktop computer. Writer saves your files in .txt format which can be imported into your regular word processing programs.

Dropbox
https://www.dropbox.com/ipad
Who doesn’t love Dropbox, the easy way to store files in the cloud. Dropbox comes as a free iPad app. It works with iA Writer to make typing on the iPad a practical way to take notes. You can store your iPad photos there, too.