ViolaMania

“Join the party, as the Bay Area's top professional violists come together for an evening of alto clef, viola jokes, and great music to celebrate the rebirth of the Northern California Viola Society. Watch our "viola progressive" onstage, as we attempt to set a new Guinness world record for the largest viola ensemble ever. Violists, please bring your axe and join us.” From Classical at the Freight hosted by the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra

Smart Music 2011

The upgrade to Smart Music 2011 was released recently, and I’ve been enjoying it.  I’ve been on vacation, so I haven’t had a chance to try it in the studio yet, but the fall season starts soon.  First impressions are that this is a really good upgrade over 2010.  Navigation is much better, and it runs much more smoothly on my older tablet. 

Both tablets take on Chamber Music Camp

And the tc1100 wins for being able to print.

The iPad did a nice job of letting us watch some youtube performances of the pieces the kids were working on.  It was even able to show me the score from imslp.org, but that was all it could do.  When it came down to the kids needing parts, the tc1100 stepped up to the plate, plugged into the printer, and gave us music. 

I brought the iPad on day 1, but when it became clear that printing would be needed, the tc1100 came for the rest of the week.  I was able to keep scores for all the groups I was coaching and mark them up quite nicely in Journal.  Although, it’s not entirely a fair comparison as I don’t yet have a stylus for the iPad.  It’s hard to feel motivated to get one as the inking on the tc1100 is so nice. 

Meet Paddy-Pad, the new tablet in town

Not the cat, the thing hiding behind it.  The cat is Mr Fluff, and like all good cats, as soon as I had a good comparison shot set up, he came and sat in front of it.  Amazing how they do that.  Anyway, though the wonders of craigslist, I am now the proud hopping-on-the-bandwagon owner of an iPad.  There are already plenty of reviews of the iPad on the internet, so I’m not going to bother with that.  But what I will present are some nifty comparison shots of the new iPad and the tc1100 I’ve been using.  They’re not as far off as I had initially thought when I set this up.

The tc1100 rocks the media booth

I’ve recently completed my training to begin working in the media booth at church.  I’ve been wanting to get more involved and this really feels like a good place for me to be.  I just love sitting behind a computer and letting it run through things.  We run words during worship and sermon points with ProPresenter 4, which makes the experience, especially words during worship, feel very much like clicking through page turns for a pianist.  The main difference being that the slides do not run straight through like a piano score does.  It’s more like a score with a gazillion multi-endings and DS’s.  That’s where the tablet comes in.  I just create a new section in my church notebook in OneNote (which is one of Microsoft’s best kept secrets and most valuable tablet tools), print in the charts for the songs from PDFs, then start a new page to keep track of the roadmap.  There are any number of Verses, Choruses, Bridges, and Tags (which can run like let’s tag this other tune at the end of the one we’re on or maybe go back and do another Chorus or two, but this time with the background down so the words can be overlaid over the video) happening.  I just jot down a quick list of the order the band goes through things in and they hope they do it the same way when we hit service time.  Some of the nice things about using digital ink for this are the paper savings, the ease of erasing and re-writing sections, and the ability to have the (annotatable) charts for reference in another tab in the same program.  My new after market battery will easily survive the meeting, rehearsal, and evening service on Saturday, then the rehearsal, and 3 services on Sunday.  By the last service, when things are running more on auto-pilot, I can even open up Evernote where I keep my sermon notes and get my own notes in.  This tablet just keeps getting more and more useful.