New Tablet for Piano

Over the past few years, I've been picking up only digital versions of sheet music for piano rather than paper versions or big piano books.  I'm doing this for various reasons but the primary reason is convenience.  It is nice having a good selection of sheet music on a single tablet.  It is also much easier to turn pages...  rather than trying to get my finger behind the page to be turned and then physically turning the page quickly without ripping the page (it has happened before more than once) all I need to do is a simple swipe across the screen.  

Until the past few days, I've been using my 11 inch Kindle for this purpose.  Well...  I use this Kindle for many purposes but this was yet another purpose for my Kindle.  

An 11" screen sounds like a typical full page size but, unfortunately, screens are measured across diagonally from corner to corner so this "11 inch" screen was really only 5-3/4" x 9-3/4"...  so, it is just slightly larger than a half sheet of A4 paper (or a loose leaf page).  This is far too small for my old eyes!  The fact is, most sheet music is around 9"x12" and I have been having difficulty reading this size too in recent years.  On my 11" Kindle, I was seeing only half a page at a time in order to get to an acceptable magnification.  This wasn't working.

When at the piano, I had to resort to viewing the tablet horizontally so I was viewing a 9-3/4" width but only the top half or bottom half of a page (or even in thirds for some sheet music).  This doubled or sometimes tripled the need for page turns...  first I would have to quickly swipe down the page while playing...  then, when I reached the bottom of the page, I would need to swipe right to get to the next page....  then swipe down...  then swipe right.  And, I would need to make sure all the pages were first set up so I would swipe right to the top of the page and not the bottom or middle of a page.  It was a pain in the butt and even then it wasn't large enough to easily see.  It was sort of like moving around a magnifying glass while trying to play the piano.  I really needed a larger tablet.

You'd think this would be a simple problem to solve by just picking up an inexpensive tablet that is larger than 11 inches.  Well, unfortunately, inexpensive and large do not go together when it comes to this type of thing.  

I could get a larger tablet but these were few and far between and the prices were north of around $500 (the better ones north of $1000).  Still, every now and then, I would do some online searches to see what I could find.  In the meantime, I kept using my 11" Kindle for this piano purpose.

So, a week ago I was searching again and saw a 14.3" tablet that was one of those "paper" tablets.  It resembles a sheet of paper with its slightly textured and anti-glare surface.  Glare was another huge problem I was struggling with when using my Kindle! 

These types of large paper tables are used primarily by artists.  The stylus to tablet surface feels more natural like pen or pencil to paper.  

This particular model can be viewed in color or in a "paper" mode which is a black and white mode.  Better yet, this screen's aspect ratio was more in line with a typical sheet of paper rather than a 16:9 movie ratio.  Wider meant I would get more real estate for a page of music!  And, it was on sale so I ordered it.

I've been using it for my digital sheet music over the past few days and it is a significant improvement.  It should come as no surprise that I actually play better and more fluidly when I am not struggling with effectively reading the music!