digital tabs and sheet music: an arbitrage opportunity
- May 15th, 2015
- Posted in diy . touring equipment
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A while ago, I saw Tony Fabris of Vixy & Tony using a ridiculously large Windows tablet to display his lyrics and sheet music. He’d also whipped together some software to organise it and such. It was awesome.
The trick was he’d got the tablet relatively cheap, because it was huge, but also the first release of Windows 8 on tablet, and there was something weird about it I think? I forget. It already didn’t exist anymore, but he had one.
Anyway, I’ve been watching for a similar opportunity ever since, because I kind of realised there was an arbitrage opportunity floating around right about… well, let’s go to the napkin:

See, past a point, as tablets get larger, they become less useful as tablets. Above 11″ or so, they rapidly become both unacceptably awkward and heavy, particularly at widescreen ratios. Oh, sure, you can get a keyboard, use it as a really awkward laptop, and a lot of companies are making laptop “convertibles” now as people try to figure out that format. But even done well, that’s basically a laptop that can make do as a shitty tablet, all at laptop prices.
Now, on the other hand, if you want something to sit in front of you on a music rack and display your chords or whatever, you want that extra, impractical-for-carrying-around size. And you don’t mind a little more weight, because it’s a lot lighter than a bunch of three-ring binders.
And LCD screens in those sizes and ratios are everywhere now from OEMs, because laptops. So everybody keeps trying to make tablets at those larger sizes because IT CAN’T MISS AM I RIGHT? Except every time it’s the same plan, it’s the same plan, and everybody ends up on fire and dumping these things.
So the trick is to find something in that little red bar, at the end of the too-heavy, too-big-for-normal-people 13-14″ downslope-of-heaviness while still in the awesome-for-sheetmusic range of musician happiness, all at the right oh-shit-this-was-a-bad-idea-get-rid-of-these-things price range.
There’ve been a few qualifying tablets floating around pretty much constantly since I saw Tony’s, all from one or another GeneroMaker, but they’ve all been too junky for one reason or another. Bad screens, bad battery life, double-digit DOA rates, whatever.
Until possibly now. Meet the latest iteration of this mistake, at $150 on Amazon right now.

3rd Generation iPod for scale because I left my sonic upstairs
The photo here isn’t great, but I don’t want to move the tablet because it’s doing the first-time charge. But trust me: it’s huge. It’s slightly over three times the size of Anna’s Kindle. It’s got a good screen, it’s heavier than some laptops but it’s thin, it’s got 5-7 (claimed) hours of battery life, decent viewing angles, and it’s running Jelly Bean so can talk to the usual app stores. It’s got USB and expansion and all that. The onboard sound is terrible and it’s not super fast, but that’s not what I need it for.
And almost all the positive reviews are from musicians using it for exactly this.
There will probably be more of these, but this is the first one I’ve seen since that old Windows tablet of Tony’s that meets all the requirements for such appropriately little dough. I’ve had it for all of a few hours, so this isn’t a review, but it is your notice: the arbitrage opportunity you may have been waiting for is now here.
2 comments on Ello.
That’s pretty tempting. I currently use an iPad to hold my collection of scanned fiddle tune books (currently at ~4800 tunes in ~25 books, completely impractical to lug around to a jam in paper form). At the time I decided to go with the iPad rather than an android or windows tablet with a larger screen, which I would have preferred, it was because the iOS app ForScore was such an excellent piece of software. There were plenty of PDF readers for android and windows, but none with as many sheet-music-specific features as ForScore — easy classification of scores by composer, key, style, etc; built-in tuner and metronome; bluetooth page turning; set list management; stuff like that. There wasn’t anything comparable in the android ecosystem, at least that I could find. Is there an awesome sheet music app for android now?
(The other reason I went with iOS was AnyTune, which is way better than the more-recommended Amazing Slow Downer, but not available on as many platforms. But I have an iPhone now, so those two functions don’t have to be on the same device.)
Josh: Clearly there’s something, since people talk about it and talk about using a bluetooth pedal to advance pages and stuff. Exactly what, I haven’t researched yet, as I was willing to roll my own – and still may well, I’ve been doing more coding lately.
But truth be told, if I had a full-size iPad instead of my mini, I’d most likely just use that, because of ForScore combined with full-size being just big enough. But I don’t; I have a mini, and no plans to upgrade until I need to. So: GIANT CHEAP-ASS TABLET IT IS!
Sorry, I’m going to keep collecting paper until they cancel the apocalypse. Filk will be even more important when there’s no ‘lectric.
My plan in such situations as these is to keep both – the digital for portability will be awfully nice if it works out tho’. But I wouldn’t want to trust a cheapie tablet as my holder of original data either, no.
One of the members of the band for our English Country Dance group has a cover for her large tablet that looks like a big medieval folio. That might help with the disguising.
Gary: Cool. I guess my next question is how well does it work outside?