Today I’ve been working on getting the Christmas bass parts for the Charnwood Symphonic Wind Orchestra and the Charnwood Concert Band fully set up in ForScore on my iPad. For those not used to musical nomenclature, that’s what a pad means in this context — a collection of music. In many cases it consists of a folder stuffed full of paper copies but I’ve discovered that it is much easier to carry around electronically. The result doesn’t weight any more than an empty iPad but is easy to search, sort and annotate without defacing the originals.

I had a lot of the pieces already scanned in but the first task was to make sure I had everything. There is a lot of crossover between the two collections so not everything had to be scanned in but I did need to create quite a few bookmarks, ForScore’s method for creating virtual copies with a different name (as well as marking out sensible subsections of longer pieces).

In some cases, I already had electronic copies but I’d identified issues with them and had corrections to make. The final stage of the process was firing up Frescobaldi and getting to work on updated editions of some of my Lilypond scores. In the process, I’ve also improved my understanding of how to adjust layouts. Since the iPad is relatively small I want the music to be as large as possible (for legibility) while not stretching across too many pages (page turns are points of risk, especially when there isn’t an obvious break to use) and, where possible, making breaks at sensible points.

Job done, which means I can now start to work up set lists representing each pending gig. Those aren’t fully defined yet but, as Christmas season approaches, it will make it as easy as possible to focus my preparation.