Footime pedal is here!

My footime pedal showed up a day early, just in time for the rehearsal tomorrow morning.  First impressions, it’s solid.  The build is good, the buttons are sensitive, and the feet hold it steady.  Enjoy the unboxing….



Not much in the box, just the pedal and a short page of instructions. It’s plug and play, so there's not much necessary in the way of instructions.



Good feet on the bottom keep the device stable and prevent sliding.

Button toggles between sending page down/up or arrow down/up.  Pushed in, it also works with the iPad through the USB camera connection kit.

Testing on the desk, works as expected!

USB cable is long enough to have the stand at standing height, with plenty of leftover.
I can’t wait to give it a go in rehearsal tomorrow morning.

Temptation–Asus EP121 Slate

My TC1100 is old.  There’s no way around it.  While it may perform comparably to a netbook for most tasks, it’s showing its age in other areas.  The upgrades to 2GB of RAM and an SSD have helped, but nothing can change the processor or graphics card.  One of the most frustrating places it lags is when turning pages in Journal.  A half second lag on a page turn is a full measure of music in the second movement of Shostakovich 8th quartet. 

For work purposes, I have upgraded to an HP 2730p.  The extra screen space, battery life (5 hours on the internal and 3+ more on a fairly worn slice), and power are worth the trade offs in bulk and weight.  It’s also nice to have a keyboard attached so it can be used in laptop mode on my lap, as I have no desk at the studio.  But, that extra bulk (especially with the slice) makes is less stable on a music stand, and harder to pick up and put down for notetaking during lessons.

This makes the new Asus Slate EP121 that I got to play with at CES a very tempting upgrade.  I could have even more power than the HP 2730p with less weight than the TC1100.  Even more tempting is the fact that several local (about an hour drive to either Fremont or San Jose) have them in stock.  Or, at least they had them.  By the time I got to the San Jose store (I was already down there running other errands) they had sold all the boxed units.  They were willing to sell me the display, but due to the popularity and newness of it, no discount and the same return policy, with restocking fee, would apply.  They said they would be getting more soon, so after spending some good quality time with the display unit, I left without it, but I haven’t stopped thinking about it. 

Upon using the TC1100 at rehearsal a few days later, however, I noticed some things that I rely on in the TC1100 that Asus slate lacks.  One of my favorite physical buttons on the TC1100 is the jog dial.  I’m sure scrolling by touch on the capacitive screen of the Asus Slate is nice, but I’ve found flicks to be unreliable.  When it comes to turning a page in performance, nothing beats the reliability of a physical button.  It’s possible that now, with the Footime foot pedal, I may no longer need the jog dial, but it’s nice to have the built in option in case I don’t want to carry the foot pedal.

The other, non fixable, deal breaker is the non-removable battery combined with a less than 4 hour runtime.  Most performances don’t go past 2 hours, but rehearsals can go 3 or 4.  I like the option to swap to a fresh battery in a rehearsal break.  Many potential owners are talking about getting an external extended battery to extend the life, but that’s not something I want to be tethered to on a music stand.

I’m still waiting for a 14” slate with 8 hours of battery life, weighing less than 3lbs, and running windows 7.

Creating Digital Sheet Music

I’ve tried several programs for scanning music and turning it into PDF files.  My scanner is a flatbed, so it just spits out multiple JPG files.  I usually use some little freeware or trialware utility to convert those multiple JPGs into a single PDF file.  But for this upcoming concert, I realized I needed the stronger inking capabilities of Journal.  I know some Adobe products have good ink annotation tools for PDF files, but they’re not free and Journal is.  I will sometimes insert my PDF into Journal with the Journal note printer, but then I found a more direct route. 

This time, I decided to scan straight to the TC1100, and since I’m running a pretty fresh install of Windows 7, I had none of my little PDF creating utilities.  I just went with Windows Fax and Scan to do the scanning, and was pleasantly surprised to see how easily is allowed me to crop before the final scan and then kept things organized once it was done.

From there, I created a blank note in Journal, and inserted the JPG of each page into a separate page of the note.  It’s a bit tedious to drag each image to the full size of the page.  I do wish for a one click “maximize” option for images. 

If I did want a PDF version from there, I could use doPDF to print to a PDF file with or without the annotations I’ve made in Journal. 

I find Journal to be a great reader for practice and performance as the inking tools are great.  I just set the view to “Reading View” which puts on page at a time to the full size of the window.  That makes it easy to flip pages with the jog dial, and hopefully the footpedal when it comes. 

The TC1100 does rehearsal

It’s finally time to put my money where my mouth is.  I’m performing Shostakovich’s 8th string quartet with the St Peter’s Chamber Orchestra.  It’s a really exciting piece to play, but there are about 8 pages of straight playing with no opportunity to stop long enough to turn a page.  As it’s a quartet, we will have no stand partners to turn for us.  We were discussing solutions in the first rehearsal; the first violinist will do 3 pages, 3 pages, and simply memorize the last one.  It occurred to me that this might be the perfect opportunity to test my tc1100 in live performance.  I’ve read off my scanned copies plenty with my students in the lessons, but I’ve never used it for a performance with an audience. 

I gave it a go in rehearsal recently as a test, and I think this is going to turn out to be a very good solution.  While the timing may be too tight to switch the bow to my left hand, grab the page, flip it over, switch the bow back, and start playing again, I do have enough time to just reach out, bow in hand, and flick the jog dial.  It conveniently sticks out enough on the right side that I just have to swipe down along the side of the device and that’s enough to hit it and get it to flip the page. 

There are however, one or two turns where I don’t even have that kind of time though, so I’ve ordered a Footime pedal to do the turns with my foot.  I’m really looking forward to getting the pedal and seeing how it works.  They list a few compatible programs, including Word, so I’m hoping it will work with Journal as well.  I have a feeling it just sends arrow up/down or page up/down signals, which should be fine. 

The other members of the group are quite interested in the set up and have no reservations about me trying it, even though two of them are so out of the tech loop they barely use email.  Despite that seeming lack of tech knowledge, they were both like “oh yeah, there’s that opera company that does that now.”  Computers as communication devices may not be so prevalent in the classical music world, but people are starting to see the benefit of electronic sheet music, and especially the convenience of page turning with a foot pedal.  Now my procrastinating self just hopes the pedal turns up before the concert.

Finale 2011, music creation on a tablet

Inspired by this post over at techinmusiced, I decided it was time to see if entering music in Finale is any easier with a pen.  He’s reviewing Symphony Pro, music notation software for the iPad.  There are many music readers for the iPad, but this is the first really robust app I’ve seen for creating notation on the iPad.  I thought, “hey that’s neat, maybe I could use my iPad to write some stuff.”  Then I realized that Windows tablets already run a great notion program called Finale. 

I had always figured pen input would be nice for entering music, since I had to handwrite so much of it in school. With Finale and a pen, all you have to do is pick your note value and then tap on the staff where you want it.  Faster that having to color in the notehead, right?  Well, not much faster actually, the screen shot of Minuet 3 came out of my memory and went into Finale in about 15 minutes on my HP 2730p with an active Wacom digitizer.  The active digitizer is essential to the experience as you can see what note the pen is hovering over before you tap the screen to lay the note down.  I did try Finale NotePad on my Archos 9, thinking it would make a nice little music journal, but it was a pretty frustrating experience.  The resistive screen is just not accurate enough for note placement at any reasonable zoom level, and without the hover detection of an active pen, you have no idea where the note is going until it’s down.  Then it’s equally hard to grab again to drag to where you do want it. 

As for jotting down a quick idea, I think Windows Journal’s staff paper template might be better, because you can just scribble away and translate it to notation later.  This version of Minuet 3 took all of 5 minutes and is just as readable as any Musical book I’ve played out of (I’m looking at you, Brigadoon).  Journal can output a TIF, and the scanning software that comes with Finale can import music from a TIF, but I haven’t successfully pulled that off yet.  Perhaps that will be my next project. 

It would seem that the best way to get music into Finale is still just to plug in the keyboard and play it in.  I’m pretty sure Finale has an onscreen keyboard (of the musical variety) floating around in the tools somewhere, but I just don’t use Finale enough to know where it is or to want to bother looking for it.  The thing is, I just don’t write much music anymore.  I used to arrange some stuff for students, but as I’m doing more private teaching and less ensemble work, I don’t really need to arrange things anymore.  So while I did finally decide it was time to get back up to date with Finale 2011, I haven’t really had a chance to use it much.