Thursday, April 15, 2010

I am so loving my iPad

At first, I wasn’t quite sure how I’d use it other than checking the web and the usual iTunes-y kind of things.  I didn’t think I’d be able to edit any of my websites and the apps for those aren’t too great yet. Maybe someday they will.  But I can post on message boards, other blogs and such and that’s good.  Maybe when I can edit Joomla/HTML sites it will be perfect.

But I wasn’t expecting the iPad to be such a wonderful music tool.  I’ve always had a metronome on my iPhone and that’s been very handy.  I also have a pitch pipe that’s worked well.  Recently, I got an app called Cleartune to tune my violin but I haven’t played enough to really make that useful for me.  Maybe soon, I can spare the time to whip out the violin and get it in tune :)

Anyway, the iPad – wow!  I have apps that will let me play full-sized piano keys with very accurate sounds – and other instruments, apps that include hundreds of compositions, games that will teach music to others, videos demonstrating piano techniques, apps to compose music.  So much good stuff, so son.  What will come later?

I can just set the iPad on the piano and I have nearly a thousand pieces to play anytime I want.  The only drawback I see right now (and I’m sure someone will fix this sometime) is that I can’t add fingering, highlighting and so on to a piece.

One app, forScore, allows for general notes about a piece but nothing ON the piece.  It would be nice if there was an index of notes I’ve made to easily find them rather than looking at individual compositions but that’s a something for another post.

As I get more and more familiar with these apps, I’ll write individual posts about them.

Right now I have:

  • The metronome (of course!)
  • eScore
  • Etude
  • forScore
  • FunPiano
  • Pianist Pro
  • PianoMan
  • Pro Keys
  • Sheets
  • iPiano Lessons

Stay tuned for more on these – and maybe more! – apps.