Sheet music reader app: playing from a tablet or phone on the stand
Any phone opens a PDF. That does not make it a sheet music reader. You find out three minutes into the first song, when the page needs turning and both hands are busy, the screen dims itself and the note from Tuesday's rehearsal turns out to be on a different copy.
A sheet music reader is an app built for reading music while you play. It turns the page without you letting go of the instrument, lets you write on top without spoiling the original, keeps the screen on and keeps the music organised by song and by gig, not in a downloads folder.
Why an ordinary PDF viewer falls short
The viewer that came with your phone is built for reading documents sitting down. On a music stand it fails in four ways, and they are always the same four.
The screen goes off. The system locks the phone after thirty seconds untouched, and five minutes of song without touching the screen is completely normal.
Turning a page takes a hand. Swiping is fine on the sofa. With a guitar on a strap or a pair of sticks in your hands, it is not.
Annotations get lost. If you write on the PDF in another app, you save a new file. A month later there are three versions of the same part and nobody knows which one has the right fingering.
It has no idea what comes next. The viewer opens a file. The gig is twelve files, in an order, and hunting through a folder to jump from one to the next is exactly what you do not want to be doing between songs.
What a sheet music reader has to do
Turn pages hands-free
The standard answer is a Bluetooth page-turner pedal. Most of them present themselves to the phone or tablet as a keyboard and send a key (an arrow, page down, space) every time you press. That is why they do not need an app of their own: any reader that understands those keys will work with them.
What matters is what happens on the last page. A good reader, when you press again, jumps to the first page of the next song in the gig. A bad one sits still and makes you let go of the instrument.
Annotate without spoiling the original
Fingerings, breaths, "watch the repeat!", a circle round the bar that always gets away from you. On paper you do this in pencil. On a tablet you need the same set of tools: a pencil, a highlighter and an eraser, and a way to undo.
Two details separate a useful app from an awkward one:
- Annotations live on a separate layer. The original PDF is never touched, and you can show or hide the annotations whenever you want to see the clean page.
- The stylus draws and the finger does not. If you rest your hand on the screen while writing with the stylus, it should not leave a smudge. And your finger should still be able to scroll the page and zoom.
Work without signal
Rehearsal rooms and pub basements have the same mobile coverage: none. If the music lives in the cloud and downloads when you open it, the day the connection drops you have no gig. The reader has to be able to download everything beforehand, on wifi, and then work with no network at all.
Keep the music organised by song
A piece of sheet music does not stand on its own. It goes with its song, its lyrics, its recording and its place in the setlist. If the reader knows all that, at the gig you move from song to song in setlist order without searching for files.
Tablet or phone
For reading music, the tablet wins comfortably. A page of score on a 10 or 11 inch screen reads from music-stand distance almost as well as paper. On a phone a full page comes out too small to read while playing, so you end up zooming in and panning round the page, which is exactly what you cannot do with your hands full.
The phone is fine for going over a part on the train, checking a lyric, or a chord sheet set in large type. For reading a score that runs to several pages while you play, use a tablet.
If the tablet has a stylus (a Samsung with an S Pen, for example), annotating feels much closer to paper than doing it with a finger.
What Band Companion does as a sheet music reader
Band Companion is not only a sheet music reader. It is an app for the band, with the songs, the rehearsal recordings and the gigs. Reading sheet music is a central part of it, though, and this is what it does today on phone and tablet:
- You import PDFs from the files on your device or, on Android, by sharing them from another app. Word documents (.docx and .doc) are converted to PDF when you attach them, but only the text and its basic formatting survive, not the images. Photos of sheet music cannot be imported for now.
- Pages sit one below the other. You move through them by scrolling and zoom in with two fingers. The screen stays on while you read.
- You annotate on top with the pencil, highlighter, text boxes and eraser, in several colours and thicknesses, with undo and redo. The original PDF does not change, and a button shows or hides the annotations. You can add blank pages at the end of a piece for anything that does not fit.
- Pen mode means only the stylus draws: your finger scrolls and zooms, and a resting palm leaves no marks. With the S Pen, the side button turns the pen into an eraser for as long as you hold it down.
- Live mode works through the setlist or the gig song by song, with the sheet music full screen. A Bluetooth page-turner pedal (or a keyboard) moves to the next page and, at the end of a song, to the first page of the next one. It turns a whole page, not half of one.
- Offline: from the sync screen you can download all of the band's content, annotated sheet music included, to use in a basement with no signal.
- Print or share the sheet music with its annotations, or clean if you hide the layer first.
What it does not do, so nobody gets a surprise: there is no dark mode for sheet music (pages are always white), it does not recognise scanned scores and turn them into notation, and it does not transcribe audio into sheet music. In the web version you can view sheet music with its annotations and annotate with the pencil, text and eraser, but Live mode and the pedal belong to the phone and tablet apps.
Sheet music is part of the repertoire, so it also turns up in the setlist for each gig and in Practice mode, where you can play along with one of the band's recordings while you read. If you want to drill a particular passage first, that is covered in practising a song with an A/B loop.
Setting it up before the first rehearsal
Moving from paper to a tablet goes far better if you do not do it on the day of the gig.
- Scan or get hold of a PDF of every part and attach it to the song it belongs to, not to a loose folder.
- Copy across the annotations you already had on paper, even if it is only the important ones: repeats, codas, time signature changes.
- Pair the pedal with the tablet as if it were a keyboard and test it on a three-page song. There is a test in Band Companion's settings that shows you which key it receives.
- Do a whole rehearsal with the tablet before the first gig. That is where you discover the stand tilts too far back or the print on page three comes out too small.
- Download everything the night before, on wifi, and pack the charger.
Frequently asked questions
What is a sheet music reader?
An app for reading PDF sheet music while you play. It keeps the screen on, turns the page with a pedal or without you letting go of the instrument, lets you annotate on top without changing the original, and organises the music by song and by gig.
How do you turn pages hands-free?
With a Bluetooth page-turner pedal. It connects to the tablet as a keyboard, and each press sends a page-forward key. The reader has to understand those keys and, at the end of a song, jump to the next one in the gig.
Is it better to read sheet music on a tablet or a phone?
A tablet. A full page on a 10 or 11 inch screen reads from the stand almost as well as paper. On a phone it comes out too small to play from without zooming, and with your hands busy you cannot zoom.
Can you annotate sheet music without ruining the PDF?
Yes, if the reader keeps the annotations on a separate layer. In Band Companion the original PDF never changes, and the annotations are shown or hidden with a button.
Does it work without an internet connection?
Band Companion can download all of the band's content, sheet music and annotations included, so you can use it with no signal. Do it on wifi before you leave for the rehearsal or the gig.