My latest big band rehearsal sessions has reminded me of a feature that I needed while doing a theater gig with iGigBook this summer. The composer, Joseph Vernon Banks, usually uses a segment of the last song as the music that we vamp out on and that segment is usually a couple of pages back. Apps like ForScore and UnRealbook allow you create "jump" points that you press to take you to a particular page in a score. ForScore has a neat little thing where it jumps to the page you need to go to and then flashes an amber circle where you need to bring your eye to. This jump feature works pretty good in these apps but if you're using a wireless page turner and turning pages hands free, you still need to tap your little jump mark to jump. This got me to thinking about how I would implement this particular feature, I mean, really thinking about what would cover situations where you had repeats spanning multiple pages, D.C., D.C. al Coda, D.S, D.S. al Coda. Wouldn't it be great if, as you were viewing the score page by page, indicate which page these items are located and then have the navigation do the jumping for you during the normal course of advancing the page? Take a big band chart like "Nica's Dream" as an example. The D.S. al Coda is on page 4 and so is the Coda. The Sign is on page 1 and so is the to Coda. Which means you begin playing on page 1, advance to page 2, then to page 3 and then to page 4 and then jump to page 1 and then jump back to page 4. In order to get this right, you have to essentially do what notation software like Finale and Sibelius do when playing back a score and that's exactly what I've done. The next version of iGigBook will do all the jumping for you during and allow you to interactively indicate where all of your D.C., D.S., Coda and Signs are.
Okay, now on to some musings...
There's an article here where the blogger and beta tester for UnRealBook is making the point yet again about how being able to annotate a score is a must have feature for him and the work that he does in music education. You can read his piece "Sheet Music Readers for the iPad - Thoughts in February 2011"
here
I think it's perfectly valid for this fellow to feel that annotation is a must have feature for the line of work he does and for interacting with and teach music to children. It's also valid for him to believe that an app like iGigBook is missing a vital component, i.e. annotation. When we shift our attention from the narrow confines of the world this author is working in and expand it to the realm of the working musician who may be playing piano at the hotel lobby bar and taking requests from the audience for tips or the person heading up the weekly jam session, we encounter a different set of needs from an application. This app isn't called iGigBook(i Gig Book) for nothing. The feature set you see in iGigBook reflects what the working musician typically encounters on the gig, set lists, set list management, and the biggest one of all, having immediate access to as much sheet music resources that you can. Just having your books on the device and being able to open them, check the index and then go to the page is better than not having the resource at all but having the ability to search through multiple books in seconds to find a tune is using the iPad to it's fullest potential.
iGigBook isn't an app for children, it's a tool for the working musician playing the bar gig, the restaurant gig, the hotel lobby gig, the community theater gig, the corporate party gig, the jam session and the open mic...it's the Go-To Gig Tool!
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