Latest / The Steve Stine Podcast / An iPad Setup That Saves The Show

Transcript

An iPad Setup That Saves The Show · The Steve Stine Podcast

• 0:35
  Steve: Hey Steve Stein from Guitar Zoom Academy here.
• 0:37
  Steve: And today what I want to do is talk to you about the importance, if needed, to be able to use something like a tablet to be able to keep track of your sheet music, your lyrics, whatever it might be, and why.
• 0:51
  Steve: So let's take an old school approach first and just understand the traditional mentality.
• 0:58
  Steve: You shouldn't use an iPad, you shouldn't use anything on stage.
• 1:01
  Steve: Most people that are saying something like that are coming from a situation where they probably play with the same people over and over and over and over and over, and they play the same songs every weekend or three times a week or whatever it might be.
• 1:12
  Steve: You're playing the same material over and over and over.
• 1:14
  Steve: Well, obviously, in that situation, it gets a little easier because you're playing the same songs many, many times with the same people, and you get used to how the songs go, and you might not need an iPad or something like that.
• 1:27
  Steve: Now, even in that situation, why would you need something?
• 1:30
  Steve: Well, maybe you have a poor memory.
• 1:32
  Steve: Maybe you need something that jogs your memory on certain things, or you have a hard time with lyrics or whatever it might be.
• 1:37
  Steve: Again, that's your prerogative.
• 1:39
  Steve: My situation is a little bit different in a lot of people that I play with in that you're involved in a lot of projects all the time.
• 1:47
  Steve: You're always learning or playing, I should say, lots of different material.
• 1:51
  Steve: And some of this stuff you're never going to play again.
• 1:54
  Steve: And so you're not retaining everything to, you're not putting everything to memory.
• 1:58
  Steve: It would be impossible.
• 1:59
  Steve: You know, you're not putting 500 or 600 and 700, 700 songs into your memory.
• 2:04
  Steve: You're just playing.
• 2:05
  Steve: So you're reading, and then when you get done, you move on to the next thing.
• 2:09
  Steve: I play with, you know, orchestras or symphonies, or um, you know, I play in church and play with a bunch of different kinds of bands.
• 2:17
  Steve: Um, you know, anytime I get a situation where I can play with people, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take advantage of it.
• 2:22
  Steve: But it's not always songs that I know.
• 2:24
  Steve: Most often it's songs that I don't know.
• 2:26
  Steve: And so it's nice to use something like this to keep track of those songs.
• 2:31
  Steve: I can use them on stage, help me get through the tunes.
• 2:33
  Steve: Maybe I'll never play that tune ever again.
• 2:35
  Steve: And even if I do, it might be six months from now.
• 2:38
  Steve: You know, there's all kinds of different reasons.
• 2:41
  Steve: So an iPad becomes very, very cool to use, some sort of tablet.
• 2:46
  Steve: Um, you know, I used to use sheet music on stage with certain situations, but then you're trying to flip the pages and all that sort of thing.
• 2:53
  Steve: Or if you're outside and it's windy, then they're, you know, flying around in the wind.
• 2:57
  Steve: I got an iPad and I got a pedal that I use to switch via MIDI.
• 3:03
  Steve: So I don't have to, I can keep playing and just switch the pages on my iPad, which is great.
• 3:07
  Steve: So I'm gonna show you what I use and how I use it and um see if this helps you a little bit.
• 3:12
  Steve: So let me share my screen with you here.
• 3:16
  Steve: There we go.
• 3:18
  Steve: Now, if you look at my screen, what you're gonna see is on the bottom there, there's this icon, this blue icon that says F S.
• 3:25
  Steve: That's an app called Foursquare, F or Fourscore, excuse me.
• 3:29
  Steve: F-O-R-S-C-O-R-E.
• 3:32
  Steve: So if I open that, okay, this is what it looks like.
• 3:35
  Steve: So if I go to the far left hand where you see that kind of whole note there, okay, or half note, excuse me, you'll see all of these different songs in here.
• 3:44
  Steve: And these are all songs that I have played with various um, you know, bands or or musical situations.
• 3:51
  Steve: And if I go to the the right of that, I can create set lists.
• 3:56
  Steve: And this is my favorite part about this, is I can create customized set lists.
• 3:59
  Steve: So for instance, um, Journey Fellowship.
• 4:02
  Steve: This is a church that I play at, and these are a bunch of the songs that we play.
• 4:05
  Steve: We don't play the same songs over and over and over.
• 4:07
  Steve: So sometimes we change keys or you know, we change arrangements or whatever it might be.
• 4:13
  Steve: I can keep track of all of that in here and remind me when that song comes back up.
• 4:17
  Steve: Oh, that's how we played it last time, or that's the key we played it in, or we skipped that part, or we did this part twice as long, or whatever.
• 4:24
  Steve: It's all written in here, so I can remember that.
• 4:26
  Steve: Tonight I'm playing at Moorhead High School in Minnesota.
• 4:30
  Steve: It's their grand opening of their new theater, and we're playing two hours of musicals.
• 4:36
  Steve: Now, I'm not a big musicals person, nothing wrong with them, but most of these songs I'd never heard in my entire life.
• 4:42
  Steve: Some of them I had.
• 4:43
  Steve: And so we had a half a rehearsal yesterday, we'll get in a little bit today, and the show is tonight, and that's that's it.
• 4:48
  Steve: We won't, we probably won't get through all these songs.
• 4:51
  Steve: And even if we do, we get through them once.
• 4:53
  Steve: You don't practice them over and over and over like a band, you just go.
• 4:58
  Steve: And so during pit rehearsal yesterday, and then we'll have a little bit again tonight, what I did was I wrote down things.
• 5:05
  Steve: So, for instance, if we were going to play, let's say, uh, this frozen thing, which is like a mashup of all these different songs.
• 5:13
  Steve: Um, so I write down notes, I write down, you know, certain things that I have to remember, certain parts of songs, certain places we don't play, um, you know, certain key elements to remind myself how they go, because we we probably won't get another rehearsal on this.
• 5:29
  Steve: This is it.
• 5:30
  Steve: So I can write it down and I can follow it.
• 5:33
  Steve: And so I put all of my various songs in here when I'm going to play something, okay, can mark in, like I write down in.
• 5:40
  Steve: That means, hey, I don't play at the beginning, I come in right here.
• 5:43
  Steve: And then a little less when I get there, and full when I get there, and full, I keep going full, and then I hold this and go out.
• 5:53
  Steve: So sometimes it's, you know, I can follow the chords and things like that, but sometimes it's nice to have some dynamic placement too, so I know what I'm doing and how I should be playing.
• 6:02
  Steve: It tells me how to set my tone or my volume knob or whatever it is that I'm doing.
• 6:06
  Steve: So this is really great.
• 6:07
  Steve: Now, something else that's super cool about this is I can go into the far right hand side, and for instance, let's say I was gonna do uh pinball wizard.
• 6:18
  Steve: Okay, so pinball wizard, we're doing that one tonight.
• 6:21
  Steve: Great.
• 6:22
  Steve: I love this song.
• 6:23
  Steve: So this is the beginning, this is the song.
• 6:25
  Steve: The arrangement's different than the typical pinball wizard, though, by who.
• 6:29
  Steve: Uh, the whose version is a little bit different than the musical version.
• 6:33
  Steve: So I had to kind of keep track of what is different between the two.
• 6:39
  Steve: But let's say, for instance, I uh I have to play the beginning, and it's easier for me to look at this.
• 6:45
  Steve: It's looking for easier for me to look at the tab for the beginning of this song.
• 6:49
  Steve: So I can add it in.
• 6:51
  Steve: Now you can see this is from Ultimate Guitar.
• 6:53
  Steve: It's something that I've added in.
• 6:55
  Steve: Well, how did I add this in?
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I can go to Ultimate Guitar and open that app as soon as it is done loading.
• 7:06
  Steve: Okay, let's say I wanted to, you know, I wanted to add something.
• 7:09
  Steve: Like I'm gonna add um uh Wonderwall.
• 7:12
  Steve: Okay, so I can open Wonderwall, and maybe this is what I'm looking for.
• 7:15
  Steve: Maybe, you know, it doesn't matter, but something else.
• 7:18
  Steve: So I find this and I'm like, okay, well, this will work.
• 7:20
  Steve: This is what I need.
• 7:21
  Steve: So I can go to either download PDF or I can go to share, and then I can go to open with, and you'll see I can add it to four scores.
• 7:31
  Steve: So I can click on that, and boom, it'll say, okay, one or more files are in the same library.
• 7:37
  Steve: That's because I hit um the thing before.
• 7:40
  Steve: But so I can overwrite it or whatever, and now it's in there.
• 7:43
  Steve: Okay, so now I've got this song involved.
• 7:47
  Steve: There it is, right there, and I can add it to a set list and it's in there.
• 7:51
  Steve: So that's one thing I can do.
• 7:52
  Steve: Another thing that I can do that's super cool is let's say I go here and I really want just this part.
• 7:57
  Steve: Okay, so I make it a little bigger, and this is all I want is this thing.
• 8:01
  Steve: So I could take a photo of this, not add the whole PDF, but just take this photo, and then I could add that into Fourscore as well.
• 8:11
  Steve: So that's what makes that super cool is let me switch back here, is that real quick, I can get the the sheet music either from whoever's giving it to me, or I can go online and find what I need and I can add it in, and then I can start making adjustments to it, then I can save it into a set list.
• 8:29
  Steve: So if I have to do that again, I know what it is.
• 8:31
  Steve: Even if I don't have to do it again, like tonight, my set list is set.
• 8:35
  Steve: I all the notes that I've taken from yesterday, and then whatever I'm gonna take before we play tonight, they're in there.
• 8:42
  Steve: So, and then after tonight, I probably will never play those songs again, but I'm gonna keep them because you just never know, right?
• 8:48
  Steve: So I've I understand how our arrangement went tonight.
• 8:51
  Steve: So if we play it again a year from now or five years from now, I can go back to that and look at it and go, hey, this is how we played it.
• 8:57
  Steve: Perfect example.
• 8:58
  Steve: We did every rose has its thorn last night, but we were playing the poison, the regular poison version, but the Rock of Ages version is actually quite different.
• 9:10
  Steve: So we started playing every rose, and the singers were like, This, there's something weird going on.
• 9:16
  Steve: We're like, I don't understand why.
• 9:18
  Steve: And then we went and found the original Rock of Ages version, and the original version of Poison putting aside their tune down a half step is in the key of G.
• 9:29
  Steve: Okay.
• 9:31
  Steve: The Rock of Ages version starts in the key of D, moves to the key of G, and then at the end goes to the key of A.
• 9:38
  Steve: And I had completely forgotten that, but because I had the sheet music, and another gentleman there had the sheet music as well, we were able to look it up and go, oh, that's how we did it.
• 9:47
  Steve: So the kids had all learned that version.
• 9:50
  Steve: The sheet music we got was a different version.
• 9:54
  Steve: So that's again where it was really nice to have that and go, oh, okay, that's right.
• 9:58
  Steve: That's how we did that.
• 9:59
  Steve: Now we're good.
• 10:00
  Steve: Everybody can play and we're good to go.
• 10:02
  Steve: So, anyway, something to think about.
• 10:04
  Steve: Fourscore is the name of that app.
• 10:06
  Steve: And using it in conjunction with something like Ultimate Guitar is a great and easy way of being able to do that.