Ditching Sheet Music for the iPad - on the Concert Stage
I just played my first symphony concert using an iPad instead of sheet music - and it worked!
While this practice is not crazy-unusual, I did need to drum up some courage and expand my comfort zone to do so. And it was also novel enough to draw some attention from curious colleagues - two iPads on the music stand?
Violinists Laurie Niles and Paul Henning at Saturday's Long Beach Symphony Orchestra concert - and our music stand with two iPads!
While many of my symphony colleagues use the iPad for practice parts, it is less common in rehearsals or concerts. I've seen it used in chamber music concerts and recitals, but more seldomly at a symphony concert. I've never actually seen a symphony concert where the entire orchestra was on the iPad.
This interesting situation came about when, on the morning of the first rehearsal for last Saturday's Long Beach Symphony Orchestra concert, my stand partner, the excellent and multi-talented violinist Paul Henning, sent me a friendly email. "Looking forward to playing with you at LBSO! I’m planning on using my iPad for the rehearsals and concert. Are you using an iPad yet, or will you be reading off the paper part?"
Hmmmm - intriguing!
I was subbing in the first fiddles - I had been invited one week before the first rehearsal, so my preparation time had been abbreviated. There was a lot to get into the fingers - Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet" (my muscle memory is for the second part), Bernstein's "West Side Story" (happily in my fingers fairly recently), a Chopin piano concerto, and a new piece by Sydney Guillaume, "Lavil Okap" (lovely!).
These days it is commonplace for symphonies to disseminate "practice parts" digitally, with the option to get paper copies for those who wish. Ideally, several weeks before the concert those practice parts are available online, at which point it is pretty simple to download into a program called forScore on the iPad.
The nice thing about using digital downloads is that you don't have to wait for anyone to send you music. So in this case, I downloaded everything into my iPad within hours of agreeing to the gig.
By the time I received Paul's email, I'd been working on the music all week - marking my fingerings and other reminders (accidentals, etc.) in red, to make it easier to see my markings when I came to rehearsal the first day. (This is another nice thing about the iPad - you can mark the music up in lots of different colors - black, red, blue. There is even a setting to mark in white, which you can use to blot out messy markings or fingerings you don't like.)
Typically, the physical sheet music is waiting on the stand for the first rehearsal - that music stays with that stand. Both stand partners can mark up the music - the outside player's markings go on the top and the insider's on the bottom. I was sitting on the inside for this one, so I had made all my iPad markings on the bottom, so that I would get used to seeing them there.
So wait, use the iPad for the rehearsals and for the concert? No actual shared sheet music on the stand? How would we do this? I admitted to Paul, I'd never done that before.
A little background: I set up my iPad for music during the pandemic, and once work resumed, I started making the switch from requesting the thick pile of paper-music practice parts to simply downloading it onto my iPad.
I bought the pedal page-turner (a Firefly) in 2021, and I learned to use it while practicing orchestra parts on the iPad. I have a relatively old iPad (a 2nd generation iPad Pro from 2017), so at a certain point I splurged on an old-style Apple pencil to help me mark the parts. (I tried a generic computer pen but it just didn't work!) I don't know exactly when I completely switched over, but at this point I download all of my orchestra practice parts on the iPad. It's a rare gig that doesn't disseminate them digitally, before the first rehearsal.
The idea of using the iPad for a concert was interesting, but I felt unsure. I'm pretty clumsy with the page-turn pedal. While practicing I tend to stand, and I've occasionally stepped on the page-turner pedal accidentally in moments of over-enthusiasm - or I've hit it on the wrong side and gone backwards a page, or stepped too hard and jumped four pages forward. That would not be good, during a concert!
I quizzed Paul a little bit: "Have you done this before with a stand partner? Do you just do the two iPads side-by-side on one stand?"
Paul said that he'd used the iPad in concert a number of times, and he offered a few ways we could work it. One way would be to share the iPad, and then still have the inside player (traditionally the page-turner) operate the page-turning pedal. The other way would be to have the two iPads side-by-side on the stand, with each of us operating our own page-turn pedal.
Since I'd already made quite a lot of markings, and it seemed a bit weird to be putting my markings into someone else's iPad, we opted for the side-by-side iPads, even though that would also mean two pedals for page turns.
So I charged my iPad, packed up my Firefly page turner and headed to the first rehearsal. Once I arrived, the folder with the sheet music was sitting on the stand, then we loaded the stand with my iPad on, then Paul's - and then the stand started to sink downward from all that weight! So our first lesson was: take the sheet music folder off the stand. Two iPads is the maximum weight that the music stand can hold.
Paul had a different kind of page-turner, a Donner. A few people asked if the bluetooth page turners ever get mixed up, like my page turner could accidentally turn Paul's page. The answer is no: the page turner pairs with your particular device, similar to a speaker. And good news: I found it a lot easier to operate the page-turner while sitting.
Paul also had a different method for marking his music than I did; instead of having an Apple pencil, he simply used his fingers. When he needed to mark something, he stretched it (as you do on your phone, to make something look bigger) then he made the marking with his index finger. After that he pinched it back to the normal size. I'll say, his markings were a lot neater than mine, which tended to be a little wobbly with the Apple pencil.
Also, he'd already marked his part with the intention of using it for the concert, whereas I'd marked mine as with the intention of transferring certain markings to another part. So he had "cleaned up" the music - made it so nice! He had whited-out sloppy and distracting things in the music such as scrawled bowings, slash marks, multiple erasures - and he had replaced these with neatly-written markings. He had a system for the colors. Instead of everything in red as I had (because of my intent of transferring them) - he had fingerings and bowings in black, with some underlines and emphases in other colors. And during the rehearsal, if our conductor (Eckart Preu) was asking for something to be less or softer, he marked this request in blue, if it was to be louder, it was in red.
Meanwhile, I was just trying to keep up and turn the pages at the right time! Also, when there was a bowing change (as happens fairly frequently in rehearsals), I really had to fish around for where this was on my part. When everyone's paper music is open to the same two pages, you can generally see that the people are writing something new in, say, the upper left-hand corner of the music. This navigation did not translate to the iPad, where you just see one page at a time. I think I would get used to this, but sitting last desk, I struggled to get all the changes in my part.
The next day, as I practiced at home before rehearsal, I realized that I could be looking at this iPad thing in a whole different way. Seeing the iPad music as a "practice part," my feelings ran along these lines: I'll write my markings and fingerings in red, and if I'm lucky I can copy the most crucial of those in the shared sheet music. However, I don't want to annoy my stand partner, so I'm not necessarily going to mark everything. No weird fingerings, nothing too fussy, and don't over-do it with too many markings. And nothing embarrassing, like the fact that I keep missing that one D flat even though it is clearly in the key signature.
But freed of the "practice part" mentality, this part could be my own creation - it could be exactly what I need to see in order for me to play the best concert I could play. Definitely I can mark in the D flat, and a lot else.
Suddenly every obsessive-compulsive instinct that I've ever had began to come out. I could white out all the ugly and distracting markings. I could neaten up the fingerings and bowings that were already correct but didn't look good. I didn't need to put the fingerings on the top or bottom based on sitting inside or outside - I could put them anywhere! That means I could put them wherever I could see them best. I didn't need to worry about navigating two sets of fingerings and knowing which was mine, either. I could also use the color to a different end, like Paul was doing. A little bit of blue would help me see a "subito piano" or other such thing more easily. Wow, this was cool!
However - I didn't really have time for all of that, in this case. Just as I started getting carried away, I realized I was running out of practice time. I'd better just practice the notes. I wasn't going to be able to make my part all that it could be. My fingerings would have to stay in red. But if I did this in the future - if I had the parts more than a week in advance and I knew I'd be using the iPad - then I would really make the part nice for myself. This was a comforting idea.
In subsequent rehearsals I had a few more revelations: First, it's easier and way less disruptive to use the page-turner than it is to stop, place my bow with my violin in my left hand and use the right hand to reach across my stand partner and physically turn the page dozens of times during the course of the music. Especially as the inside player (the official page-turner), I began to feel much more settled because I didn't have to use my hands and arms to turn the pages, and I didn't have to reach across my stand partner.
Also, we each had our own physical space, more so than when sharing the music. Sharing the music, the person on the right has to angle their scroll so they can see, but so that the other person's bow won't bump into them. It's pretty subconscious, but it's still an issue. It's different with everyone, depending on people's eyesight and whether they wish to sit closer or farther from the music.
And speaking of eyesight, right away Paul showed me a nice trick where you can crop the music within forScore, which makes it all appear a little bigger on the iPad. Also, you can brighten your screen if you need a little boost visually.
In between each rehearsal I did have to remember one very important thing: charge the iPad! Let's just say, you never have to remember to charge your sheet music. But for each rehearsal and for the concert, the iPad started at 100 percent battery and ended around 40 percent. If I'd forgotten to charge it one day, the iPad would not have made it through the required two-and-a-half hours.
How did it go for the concert? It went well, though there was one time when my iPad tried to "go to sleep"! Typically, a phone or iPad is set to "go to sleep" after just two minutes of disuse, to save battery power. The screen fades a bit in warning, then it shuts off. I learned that this doesn't work so well for music-reading - it's like having narcoleptic sheet music. So I had changed my settings so that it goes to sleep after 10 minutes, which is usually fine. It resets as soon as you turn a page or touch the screen in any way. However, in this case, our conductor gave a bit of a loquacious introduction before the Chopin concerto, and my screen had been on through all of that before we started playing. So halfway through the first page it started to go grey - I had a moment of mild panic! But I just reached out and touched the screen with my index finger, and it brightened back to normal.
The other small drawback for me is a little more esoteric. Reading from separate music, I didn't quite feel that mind-meld connection that can happen from being "on the same page" - it seems to me that there is some kind of camaraderie in looking at and playing from the same music. Although - I can't say this always happens. Sometimes you are in sync and sometimes not. Sometimes it's just "we both did the wrong bowing - they changed it and it's wrong in our part..." and it's just nice that you have two people in on making it all work well - you aren't in it alone. But I'll say, Paul still helped me a lot in this new adventure!
I want to mention one more thing about having music digitized and in the iPad - it's a little personal. In January when we evacuated our home due to the Eaton Canyon fire, I could not take my library of music, but I took my iPad. In that moment, I wished that I had digitized my entire library. We were lucky; others weren't. But I will be working to digitize my music beyond the orchestra parts, starting with my teaching materials and my own parts for concertos and Bach.
So overall, I think the iPad works very, very well in the concert setting. In my case, it freed me up physically and it allowed for more clear and personalized markings in my part. With more practice, I think I would start feeling very comfortable using the iPad on stage, and I would enjoy the advantages of being able to customize the part for my own playing. I will not be surprised to see more musicians and more musical ensembles adopting the iPad for use in the concert setting.
You might also like:
- V.com weekend vote: Have you ever performed using a tablet for sheet music?
- Discussion: Going Digital: Which iPad sheet music apps / page turners are everyone using these days?
- The Virtual Musician: A Guide to Using Apps, Tablets and Technology for Performance and Teaching
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September 29, 2025 at 08:50 PM · No. 1 advice I have for people who want to perform with Ipads -- learn about ForScore's half page turn feature. Not only can you half-turn so you preview the next page, you can set the break point for the turn with your finger on the screen so you can turn exactly at the right point on the page.
You need to make sure the Ipad doesn't go into lockscreen while it's running ForScore, you can set that in settings. You also need to make sure the Ipad doesn't do any notifications. Just make sure notifications are off for every application.
Different opinions about bluetooth pedals but professionals I know are increasingly going to Donner and similar design pedals because the pedals have the right amount of height and size to minimize the possibility of accidental double-taps which can be a problem with the Butterfly design. Again, be sure you have the right setting, you do NOT want the pedal to keep turning if you keep pressing.