Seven-string electric bass arrangements of works by
the Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach
Digital Sheet Music Performance Software
Musicians who perform using sheet music have various challenges to overcome.
There's the organization one's sheet music collection to allow easy and quick access to any given piece
and there's the problem of page turning for longer pieces. Among various other challenges.
My original solution to these problems was to print my music at two-thirds scale and paste them six-up onto large pieces of posterboard.
This allowed me to view an entire movement at once without having to turn pages. Though, a few of the longer movements still required that I turn the sheets but only once instead of many times.
I ended up with a few dozen large posterboards with all of the Bach works I've been studying.
I bought a large carrying case meant for art works to keep these all organized.
I used these posterboard scores for all of my Bach performances except for Solo Bass Night V where I used a new system for managing and displaying my sheet music.
In 2011, I began work on an original software application that is tentatively titled Score.
The idea (though admittedly not an original one) was to have all my sheet music stored digitally as images and have a software application that would allow me to navigate and display my music on an LCD screen.
An HD resolution (1920x1080 pixels) display is perfect for displaying two pages of sheet music at once.
I started off by simply photographing my six-up posterboard score pages and cropping them down to the required size.
I later came up with a workflow that allowed me to print my sheet music directly to image files which I then scaled and cropped to size.
The latest version of Score is displayed below along with a demonstration video and a photograph of my latest performing setup which consists of a 24" HD LCD display, an adjustable heavy duty monitor stand, and a netbook PC.
There is also a 3-button USB footswitch that allows me to navigate works and change pages.
A hierarchical treeview nagivator organizes all my Bach scores by Work, Movement and Page.
There are also buttons on the bottom of the window for interface configuration and navigation.
I have not yet made this software available to the public.
I wrote this initially for my own use but after having this system on display at a software conference, I found that there is a lot of interest in a system like this from other musicians.
