Steps to Taking the Plunge into the Digital World with Kristina Finch - PHH 069

Welcome to Practicing Harp Happiness, the Harp Mastery Podcast My name is Ann Sullivan and I'm a harpist, teacher, and founder of Harp Mastery. I'm all about creating more harp happiness in the world by helping harp players like you play the music they want the way they want. But as a harpist who nearly flunked out of one of the most prestigious music schools in the world, I although later not only graduated, but I went on to teach there. I know from personal experience that learning the harp is way harder than it looks. Here, each week on the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast, I show you how to solve the challenges of practicing and playing the harp. Whether it's about making your fingers behave or learning music faster, or getting your piece's performance ready, or just learning to enjoy your playing every day. Sounds great, doesn't it? Let's get started.

Welcome to the show. Today we are talking technology. The technology that has changed the lives of harpists everywhere. And that's the world of digital sheet music. You know, PDFs, tablets, computers, foot pedals. All the things that have made thick binders of sheet music a distant memory, thankfully for so many of us. Consider how an innovation works. Usually it doesn't change the world all at once. The Wright Brothers managed to get their airplane off the ground, but it took a lot of time in development before the general public could fly coast to coast. There was a span of nearly a hundred years between Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone and Motorola's first handheld cellular phone. It takes time to sort out what is really useful about a new technology and how it can benefit the person on the street. In our case today, the harpist at the Harp. Now, sheet music downloads have been around for a long time. I published my first downloadable music PDFs way back in 2004. Granted, the technology for delivering them and using them was primitive by today's standards, and you still had to print them out. But that's my point. Here we are nearly 20 years later and purchasing, downloading and playing from PDFs is simple and commonplace. Even harpists who aren't fans of computers are often quite comfortable with this aspect of technology. It's now gotten to the point where using digital sheet music is enough easier and more convenient that it's worth your time to figure it out. But if you haven't taken the digital plunge yet, today's podcast will help you feel more confident about doing so. Or if you made the leap a while ago and want to know some of the best practices and insider tips for getting the most out of your digital tools tools. You're going to love this episode too. Just a little while ago, Dr. Christina Finch, who is one of our amazing Harp Mastery Certified Coaches, presented a seminar to our My Harp Mastery members on this topic. Now Christina is not only a fabulous harpist and a very gifted coach, but she is a tech wizard. So I had asked her to teach our members how she uses her iPad and how to put the technology together. She did such a spectacular job that I pulled out just a part of the recording of her live seminar to share with you. Now if you haven't met Christina before, you are going to love her energy and enthusiasm in addition to all the great information she shares. By the way, I use digital music and I don't have an iPad. This technology is available to you if you are an Android or Windows user too. So don't think you have to buy a new computer or tablet to take advantage of this. I use my Windows Surface Pro for my music, not an iPad. Now Christina is talking mostly about the iPad in her presentation and I want to be sure that those of you who don't have Apple products know what tools you need. So I've put together a free PDF called the Digital Sheet Music Cheat Sheet for Harpists. It's a quick one page guide to devices, apps and foot pedals that will help you get started whether you're an Apple, Android or Windows user. Now to get the PDF, just go to the link in the show notes for this episode and don't worry, I'll remind you about it. Plus I'll share a couple of other bits of info at the end of the show too. One reminder, this was a live video call with our members so you'll hear her referring to things that they could see on the screen. I'm sorry this is just audio for you, but you know what, we'd love to have you in the My Heart Mastery community. So we'll talk to you some more about that another time too. But right now if you're here's Christina's presentation.

But like I said, I'm going to introduce myself. My name is Christina Finch. I live in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. I've been here for about two years. My husband and I both teach at the University of Southern Mississippi. He is a classical saxophonist. Prior to living here, we lived in Miami for about seven years. So pretty big change from Miami to Mississippi. But I'm a small town girl. I grew up in Williamsburg, Virginia. So I really like the small town. It's a nice college town. This is A nice place to live. And I was saying earlier, there's lots of work around here, which is great. Yep. Salvi Diana. This is my baby. It's nice to hear that Darlene has a Salvi Diana also. These are wonderful instruments. I love my Salvi, of course, lion and Heelys, Iowamas, Kamax. They're all great harps. I've got my salvi as my primary. My aoama is what lives in Miami. And then my kamak. I've got a little big blue, a custom little big blue that is my electro acoustic harp that goes into some of the gigging and play the chamber orchestra down in Miami still. So I bring that harp in. So lots of different harps to choose from. And then, so like I was saying, I live in Mississippi now. I still do some work in Miami. I've been coaching for the Heart Mastery program, the certified coaching program for. This is my third semester. Carrie is one of my students who's here, a wonderful person. I just, I feel so privileged to work with the students that come through the Heart Mastery certified coaching program. They are some of the most.

Kind, motivated, intelligent and intuitive people I've ever had the opportunity to work with. Just wonderful people. And having the opportunity to work with Ann, you all know, you, you go to these all the time. So you know what kind of person Ann is and what she brings to the table as far as teaching and being a good person and just, just really sharing in every way that she can. She is. I've said this so many times and I think every time I say she gets a little like, oh, Christina. But she is like the epitome of harp girl boss in my mind. She has created this incredible community that you're all a part of and is offering so much to our community. The harp community is a large one, much bigger than most people think. But we are a really vibrant and loving community and Ann is a really important part of that. So I'm really very grateful to be a part of the Heart Mastery world and the Heart Mastery certified coaching world. My schooling is in Hart Performance. I did my undergraduate and my doctoral degree at the Eastman School of Music with Kathleen Bride, studying with Kathleen Bride and my master's degree at Florida State.

Thank you, Anne. That's very kind of you. And so I've got a lot of experience playing with orchestras and freelancing and weddings and all kinds of stuff. All kinds of stuff. You know, being a professional musician is kind of like having your fingers in all the pies. So like I said, my two degrees at Eastman, my one degree at fsu. And then I have spent the last, since I graduated from my DMA in 2015, I've been freelancing, teaching, gigging, kind of doing a little bit of everything. And throughout all of that, this, my iPad has been my very best friend and my companion throughout all of these musical experiences. And it's, it's been a journey and one that has taken a while to kind of settle into a nice, we have kind of a nice relationship now, this iPad and I, but it has taken time. So I'm going to share with you a couple of tips and tricks for the process of switching from we're going to call analog analog to digital. So we'll talk about best practices for scanning music, all of the things that are involved with going digital. So I had, I got my first iPad when in 2013.

My mom bought it for me. I had just finished my coursework at Eastman and I was taking the San Francisco Ballet audition and my mom went with me and she gifted me this iPad. And at that point I was just done with my doctoral degree. I was about to leave Eastman and I had been scanning music from the Eastman Music Library for already a couple of months because I knew I was going to be leaving the place where all the music was and all of the markings were because in the Eastman Harp Studio, Ms. Bride just has stacks and stacks and stacks and stacks of immaculately marked music. And once you're gone, it's gone too. So I had already had, I had already built up quite a big selection of scanned music, but I also had to do a lot of work in order to make it so that I was able to take my iPad out to gigs and do the thing.

Personally, when I made the switch to iPad, it made sense for me because I was doing mostly background music playing when I was living in Rochester.

During my degree I did a lot of busking, so going out and playing in public for tips, which is both very non rewarding things. Someday, some days, and some days it's a really great thing. There was one day that I played for like three hours at a museum and only made like $4 or something like that. But I would carry around these gigantic binders of music. I mean this is not one of them, but this is something like what I would carry with me, a big three ring binder, 3 inch, 3, 2 inch, 3 inch, three ring binder of sheet music, of popular tunes, of classical music, of whatever I felt like I needed for that gig. And as we all know, this is not an easy instrument to move. Often if you're playing a gig, you're also carrying your bench and your music stand and your strings and your shoes and all the accoutrements that one needs in order to successfully play the instrument. And this much sheet music is not a light thing to carry around. And when you're trying to use a wire stand, having 15 pounds of music on a wire stand is not conducive to a good experience, let me tell you. So I made the decision to switch to digital.

For my background music playing life at that point. And then over the years, I slowly transitioned to using exclusively my iPad for everything. I use it for chamber music concerts, for orchestra concerts, for everything, literally everything. And I have found that it is a really powerful tool for learning, for organization, and for just general harp happiness. So let's do a little bit of talking about this. And so you've got those of you that have this, this little PDF that I put together. You'll see that there's not a lot on it. I left some spots for you to, to add some things of your own here and to take some notes. I always find it's nice to have somewhere to like, write down notes as we're going through. So we're going to talk about a lot of stuff today, and I'm going to be interested in hearing about some of your ideas as we go through this pros and cons list for things that are potential cons for you that maybe I haven't thought of, because there are a lot of things that maybe are in your world that don't necessarily apply to mine. So the biggest pro, as far as I'm concerned, is the ability to organize your ever growing pile of new music. I don't know about you all, but I am constantly on the prowl for new and exciting music. And it's really great to always be looking for new music. But when you're purchasing sheet music or even printing things off that you buy those things pile up quickly. Next thing you know, you've got a pile of music this big on your stand. Or you've got a giant, this, this big preschool cubby behind me that I've got over here. That's where all my music lives, all my sheet music lives. And one of the hardest things that I've always had with that is finding things. You know, it's, it's organized. It's about as organized as a pile of, of 5 million pieces of sheet music can be. But say if I was looking for a piece of music by Marcel Tournier that I learned when I was a freshman in college. It is certainly in my Tournier folder or in my Tournier stack over here, but it's going to take me time to search for it, to locate it inside of my stacks, to walk over to my harp, then to make sure that everything is good. With things being in order, all the pages are there. When you've moved as often as I have, pages get lost there. I was cleaning up a little bit around my computer here, and I just found a random piece of sheet music, but only the first page.

I'm sure you all have experienced this before. It's so easy for things to get disorganized when you're working with sheet music. So having one place to locate all of your music quickly and easily is so helpful. So beyond that, that is a major, major pro. Being able to organize and quickly access your music is huge. Another thing that's going to be really important is the increased accessibility when you're. When you're using a piece of digital technology, a digital hardware like an iPad or a Surface. And when I say accessibility, I mean, like, if maybe the music has really, really small ledger lines, or maybe the music is just a little unclear, a little blurry, you know, sometimes scans don't always come out well, or even copies. Or maybe it's a really old piece of music and it's just kind of hard to read. And it would be really nice if you could just zoom in on that note to make sure exactly what it is so that you know what note you're supposed to be playing. Guess what? On the iPad. Oh, just dropped my Apple pencil. That is possible. Not only can we zoom in on what we're trying to see here, but if, generally speaking, if one page of music is hard for your eyes to see, you can turn it sideways and it's basically twice as large. So it increases the accessibility for people with vision impairment. It's easier for people with physical limitations because of just the portability of it. You know, it just makes life a lot easier as far as accessibility goes. There are so many markings and tools that we can use that to help increase accessibility in general through that, through the use of digital, digital hardware. So with that, that, in that same vein, another pro for us is going to be the increased capacity for sheet music customization. This is everything. And I'm going to try and show you a little bit of this page. This is the last page of the Dances by Debussy. So this is a scan that I took of this piece recently. I'm preparing for two pretty large auditions right now. So I'm an orchestral audition. So I'm preparing my books. And traditionally, people print out their audition books. All the audition excerpts and all of the solos and all the things you have to learn. You print them out and you've got a nice big bound book of them. Not me. We're doing it on our iPad this year. So when I say you have increased capacity for customization, what I mean is you take your. This is everything, this apple pencil. It does everything it needs to do. It's great. You can zoom in. Say I'm having a really hard time remembering when I get to this piece, that this retinue here, to make sure that I remember that that retinue happens. And exactly where it happens, I can move that out of the way. I can circle it in purple. And let's say the next time I practice, I miss that retinue again. I'm gonna circle it in red this time. And I can circle it in as many colors as I want until I remember to do it. And then once I've got it in my hands and in my mind, I've got the ability to then go back and erase those markings. So I ask my students to write on their music all the time. Whether it's writing in fingerings or even writing in notes. I am a firm believer that there is no cheating in harp music. Whatever you gotta do to make it happen is what you gotta do to make it happen. If that means writing in notes for ledger lines or even writing in notes that are on the staff, hey, whatever. As long as you're able to play the music that you're trying to get played, that's all that matters. So here in this situation, we find what is happens in so much harp music. And I am. I'm sure you've all run into this before, which is the use of inharmonic notes. So you'll see here. This note right here. Yeah, this note right here, it is A marked B B natural on the harp. But we also need B flats for this little section. So we play that marked B natural as a C flat on the harp. So many. So much music requires us to be able to read enharmonically. And that's really hard for a lot of people. With this, with the iPad, I'm able to take this little B natural that has a circle around it. In our world, in most sheet music world, what do you do when you've got an inharmonic? You circle it you circle it in a million different colors until you remember that you get it. Here I can take my little white marker, make sure it's the right size, and I can erase this note, and then I can go in here to my stamps, find the downward note and change the note that's there. Or I can draw it in. Whatever's easier, whatever's more convenient. So say I need a C flat there instead of a B. I can just draw in my C flat and then it's there. Rather than having to read it inharmonically, you can literally write it into your music, which makes life a lot easier in the long run. I'm also someone that really likes to see pedal changes as big and bright as possible. Let's see if I can switch over to a solo here. Alcylan by Matoshi Kasako so you'll see here, if I bring it up to the screen, you can see all of the different colors that I'm using throughout this. I've got my pedal changes in green. I think if I'm looking at that correctly, I've got.

All of the. So this piece requires you to strum with your right hand, and all of the strums that are up are highlighted in red because it's really, really hard to remember which ones are supposed to be strummed up and which ones are supposed to be strummed down. It's actually a really hard piece. And then I've got the different sections bracketed in different colors. So repeated sections are bracketed off in the same color. And then different sections have different. Like this section right here is different from anything else in the entire piece. So it gets a nice big box around it. So it's a reminder for me while I'm playing this that things are a little different here. Keep track of what you're doing, slow it way down, and see if you can make it work. So let's move forward with another pro here because there are so many pros to talk about, and we are going to get to cons and eventually. But like I was saying before, just the portability of this is really makes a huge difference in your life. You can take this anywhere with you. Say you're going on vacation and you're going to be away from your harp for, I don't know, a week, two weeks, a month, whatever, however long it is. If you have an iPad, you have the ability to bring with you a wealth of repertoire that you can score, study that you can listen to recordings of, and watch the score while you're listening. There are so many ways to work on music away from the harp. And having everything in one place, like on a digital device, is hugely helpful for that. These devices are all backlit, which can be another way that it increases accessibility. It's so hard to find good lighting for a lot of. A lot of times. This instrument in this room, I'm really lucky. It's a small, enclosed space. This is supposed to be a dining room. So I have a lot of light. I have a lot of light just all around. I've got a lamp here, I've got a lamp there, and I get really great daylight in this room. But for a lot of people, it's hard to find space and the right kind of light in your room. And having something that's backlit is really, really helpful. So for me personally, when I'm using this in orchestra, it's really helpful for me because I don't have to use that big old stand light that goes on top of the stand and blocks my view of the conductor. So I'm able to just work. I can see my music. It doesn't matter how dark the stage gets or how dark the pit is. You have the ability to see my music now. Matter what. So personally, this evening, I'm going to be talking mostly about Apple products, because that's what I personally use. If you are a PC user and you prefer to use your Android or your, your Surface or whatever device it is, this is. There's nothing that is superior or inferior about those items. This is just what I have access to. All of my devices are Apple devices, which makes it really easy to share things. So that's the reason that I'm talking specifically about Apple stuff. Am I going to talk about how to load music onto the iPad? I am. So before we get there, though, I want to make sure that we get to the things that are maybe not great about switching to digital, because I'm curious about the things that have, have held you all back, other than, you know, I mean, there's a learning curve, of course, and there's, there's a price, there's, there's some, some cost prohibitiveness to this, this switch over. It's not an inexpensive change to make. This is the third iPad that I've owned. And let me tell you another thing that's not great about them is that they're very fragile. I've had this purse, this specific iPad, for maybe three years, and it's got a crack across here. It's got a crack across there. It's got a crack across there. My English bulldog stepped on it, like, the second day I had it. So highly recommend screen protectors and cases. If you do get one, be better than me. Don't. Don't do what I do and just, you know, let it break. So are you fully digital, Marci? Yes. I do not take paper music with me anywhere that I go. I just played with the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra a couple of weeks ago, subbing for a dear friend of mine who just had a baby. And when I was playing for the opera concert, I was going up to ask the conductor a question about where we were starting in Musetta's Waltz from La Boheme. And I brought my iPad up to him and he said, oh, you're one of these people. And I'm like, yeah, because otherwise I've got to have, like, a giant stack of music. And you know what's really tough to use for outdoor concerts? Sheet music. Because it goes blowing everywhere. My iPad is not going to blow off the stand. And you'll find this is something that's always funny to me because I've gone fully digital when I go back to using sheet music. So, like I said, right now I'm preparing for two really big auditions, and I hadn't yet moved all of my orchestral excerpts into my iPad. So I was kind of going back and forth between my iPad and sheet music, and iPad and sheet music. And sometimes when I'm reading sheet music, I go to turn a page, and instead of grabbing a page and turning it like this, I just kind of poke it or I kind of swipe it, and then my whole music goes off the stand. So, you know, there's a little bit of back and forth. So, Beverly, you say you're concerned about pedaling using the firefly page turner. I have my firefly right here. I, for a long, long time, did not think that I would ever use a petal. Turn a page. Turning petal. Because we already have petals. I don't need any more petals. I've got seven already. I don't need any more. Also, where can you put it that it is practical. You can't put it in the middle. You can't put it behind. I think Jamie Haefner, the teacher at University of North Texas, she puts hers underneath of her bench so that she can bring her foot back to do it. That's a little scary for me. They've got forward and back pedals. I think you can probably program it so they're both go forward. I Like to have it in front of me. So I put mine, I tuck mine underneath of my music stand so that the backward pedal is underneath of the, of the leg of the stand so that only the forward pedal is accessible to me. And you do have to practice with your page turn pedal if you're hoping to perform with it. You have to make sure that you've practiced in your page turns because it's another thing to coordinate, unfortunately. But it makes your life so much easier. When I was living in Miami, I played at the Biltmore Hotel three hours every Saturday for afternoon tea. And you know, I never used a page turn pedal there because you can always, just when you're playing background, you can drop out a hand and just page turn. But when you're playing a big solo or I gave a recital here in Hattiesburg this summer and I played the transcription of Smetna's Mul Dao and it's like 17, 20 pages long. I can't remember how many pages long it is, but I used my iPad and I used my page turning pedal for every single one of those page turns. And there was one that was a little challenging. If the last measure of your page has a C sharp or a left pedal change, it's hard to get your foot over there and do the thing. But if you can find a way to start practicing this into your life life, it's going to make your life a lot easier in the long run. So let's see here. So, Grace, do I always take, do I always take backups? Do my backups take the notations? So no, I don't. I back up my iPad. It does like the, the icloud, icloud backup every like couple of weeks or something like that automatically. But I don't, I don't do anything like that. I have never. Knock on something, knock on wood. In the almost 10 years that I have been using my iPad, I have never had one crash on me. I've never lost any data. I've never had a problem. Never. Only in one instance at one wedding did I have my iPad shut off on me because it got too hot. Hot. And in that situation, I figured it out. We made it work. Gotta make it work sometimes. So I don't bring backups. I do have a backup iPad because I have not. I keep my old iPads. I don't sell them. So I have a first generation iPad Pro that I use for teaching at school, but I don't bring it with me. I don't do any of that because these devices these days are quite reliable, and as long as you do your due diligence of making sure that your backup is set up automatically and that you are keeping your iPad charged, you shouldn't have any problems. These are solid state devices. They don't have the kind of systems in them like big computers where they can crash and you can lose all your data. That's not something that really happens for these iPads. As far as my experience goes, if you've had a different experience, please share. But, yeah, I don't bring a second iPad. So, Trisha, you says. You said you've always been concerned with backing up your music, too. You're scared that you'll lose it all. So I. Paper copies, if we're talking about, like, copies, like literal Xeroxes, I have discarded all of them. I have gotten rid of all of my paper copies of music that I got when I was in school. You know, whenever Ms. Bride would have us learn a new piece, she would make copies of the music so that we had access to the markings. So I got rid of all of that, and I don't keep backups of that. But with that said, I do have a Dropbox folder that if I scan something that's like a big, major piece of repertoire that has important, important fingerings in it. I do backup things on my Dropbox account, but that is primarily for sharing purposes rather than backup purposes, because, like I said, I've never had a problem. I've never lost anything. Knock on all the wood. Yeah, exactly. Knock on wood. So, you know, I think that it's easy to worry that something like that is going to happen, but the reality of it is that, like I said, these devices are designed to work, and they do.

I have been using iPad for about 10 years, and I will never go back at this point. So, yeah, like Dennis, you said your computer's harp teacher crashed. Her computer crashed and she lost her arrangements. That has happened to me also with my physical computer. You know, it's these computers that we have. You really have to make sure you backup everything on a computer because a hard drive can fail. But just like, have you ever lost everything on your iPhone? It's. It's really the same thing. It's just bigger. So how do I label and tag things in four score? Can I give examples of categories and words you put in these functions? Absolutely, I can do that. So in fourscore, if you have your iPad, you can look at it, or I'll do my best to show it to you here so in four Score, we've got so many options. And let me tell you, I probably only use.

20 to 20 to 50% of the options on four score. There's so much here that I don't use because it's not necessary. My husband has the pro version of four Score. I don't. I only have the one. I paid for it once. I don't pay per year. But he has the. The pro version. And it really. It doesn't give you that much more, especially unless you're trying to do some really advanced markings on your. On your page, which I don't do. You know, I don't think it's worth the extra money, but paying 19.99 for four score is really worth it. So, like you were asking, labeling things, keeping things in organized places here in four Score. So there are a couple different ways that we can do this. And the first place is in the actual labeling of the piece of music. So if you tap up at the top where the name of the pieces, you have a bunch of different options here. You've got the title, the composer, the genre, the tags, blah, blah, blah. Lots of things. You can put as much as you want in this. As far as the name of the piece and composer. Those are really the only two important things. If you've got. If you maybe want to put lever harp or pedal harp underneath of tags so that these are just ways to search for these things faster. So when I was playing at the Biltmore, I liked to do sets of songs from Les Mis. So I would go up to here to my little magnifying glass, and I would type in Les Mis, because I put them all in a little folder here. So I've got my Les Mis folder with all of my Les Mis songs. So I know that I can just go in there and tap them one at a time. So that's one way that you can organize things, is through that kind of labeling system. And then over here on the left side of the page, underneath the. There's three lines in a row, those are our set lists. This is the best way to organize things, in my opinion. Of course, the labels are great. It's a great searching tool. But if, say I'm working on four pieces of music right now, and I know those are the pieces I'm working on, and I want to make sure they're easy to access. I can put those four in a. I say I'll start a new set list. I'll push that little plus button, and I'll add A new set list here, and we'll call it Harp Mastery. So I just label it Harp Mastery. I say create. And then I've got a blank set list here that I can put anything that I want into. So I. I can go here, press the plus button, and search through everything I've got on my iPad to try and find the things I want to add. Or I can go into search the pieces that I specifically want. So say I would like to add Alcylon to this set list. I go back in to that title page, that first title page, and down underneath, you've got all these listed things under here. And if you scroll all the way to the bottom, I've got a lot of set list. You'll find the one that you just made. That one says Harp Mastery. Click it. Click it. So there's a little check mark next to it. And then if I go back to my set lists again, there it is right in my set list, waiting for me anytime I want it. So that's one way that you can organize, especially if you're looking for. If you're. If you're working on three or four pieces and you want to have them easily accessible to you, a set list is a really great way to do that. But another way that you can make all of your pieces accessible to you is if you say, you open up any list. If you just go to this list and you say all scores, and you find the one that you want, you can click and drag to create tabs in four scores. So, yeah, there's Marcy's music. So we're going to click on Marcy's music and we're going to pull it over here and we're going to say create new tab. So now I have three pieces by Francois Couperin there and Marcy's music right there. And I can switch back and forth between them super quickly and super easily. So it really makes a big difference. Okay. Beverly, does four score work on the iPad Pro? So four score works on all iPad devices, All Apple iPad devices. Whether it's an old little iPad mini or a new iPad Pro, any iPad that you have will work. I'm pretty sure they have a version for PC for the Microsoft Surface as well and the Android store. Not 100% on that. Beverly says if you already have the music downloaded, the computer, can you transfer it to four Score? Yes. This is another thing I was hoping to be able to show you. So there are a couple different ways to add music to your iPad for 4.4score. Whether you have a PDF already loaded. So I was planning on opening up my email and showing you how to load one. So if it sends just as a normal PDF, you will, at the top of your screen, see something that says send to four score. You just click on that and it sends it right to four score. And then we scroll all the way over to see four score. I click on four score and there it is. Now I've got it in my four score. I can. It's already got the name there under genres. I'll probably put method book so that I can easily find all my method books in the long run. So it's. There it is. Easy as that. So if you've got a PDF already created, it's really easy to add it to your iPad. Now, if you don't have that PDF already created and you're needing to create one yourself, there are a couple different ways to go about this. Of course, if you've got a scanner with a big old bed on it, that's ideal. You're gonna get the best quality image from an actual physical bed scanner. But bed scanners that are large enough to hold music, most sheet music is larger than eight and a half by 11. So you have to have a. A scanning bed that's big enough to hold that. I think the brother scanners are the ones we've always used in my house, and they're generally pretty good. That's going to be the highest quality image that you're going to get. I very rarely do that because I'm very lazy. So I use my cell phone to scan almost exclusively. There are many, many apps that you can use. I have an app that I downloaded probably, probably almost 15 years ago and spent like $70 on, and it doesn't even exist to download anymore. But that's the one I use. There are lots of apps that can download that you can download and use. Or if you go into. If you have an iPhone, of course, if you have an Android, it's not going to be so simple. You have to download your apps. But if you have an iPhone. I just learned this yesterday, so I'm going to show you. I'm going to share the secret iPhone tips with you. Now, if you go to your notes app.

All iPhones have this notes app in it. And then you click to create a new note. You can't really see my phone here. If you click to create a new note, you'll see at the top of your keyboard, there's a camera. Click on the camera. It's really hard to see. And you can say, scan document, and you can scan any document with your phone for free in that way. So I've got a piece of music here, and I just scanned it on my phone, and now I've got the first page of Marcel Turnier's BER sous roos on my phone that I can then say, done. I can click on it, save, and then done again. And now I can share it to my iPad. Easy as that. And when I share something, like I said, I'm using all Apple devices, so it makes it really easy here. You just, you share to your iPad, and then it gives you the option to say, where do you want to load this up? You click four Score and then you're all set.

I hope you loved that as much as I did. I love hearing Christina talk, whether she's talking about harp music and all things harp or whether she's just talking about the technology. I think she brings such energy to everything she does, and I just, just love it. And I hope you found something in there that was really helpful for you. Once again, she was talking about Apple products and the four Score app. And rest assured, if you are not an Apple user, as I am not an Apple user, there is plenty of technology available to you, too, and equally powerful technology. And that's one of the reasons I created this digital sheet music cheat sheet for you, so that you can see exactly what options are open to you. And it's got the Apple products on there, too. So whether you're an Apple user, an Android user, Windows user, this cheat sheet will really organize things for you just a little bit more to show you what programs are there, what apps are there, what accessories are there. And it really breaks it down into just three simple steps. You need the device, like your tablet, which could be an iPad or could be something else. You need the app, which could be four Score or the app that I use, mobile sheets. And then you just need the PDFs, you just need your music. That's it. So life is simple, and it's really great, and it's really fun. So join us with the technology.

You know, in the world of technology, right, it's fun. Much better than carrying around sheet music. One little note here. You might have picked up on this in the recording, but you might not. Even though Christina is a tech wizard, you might not have heard that she actually couldn't get her screen to share properly on the video call. And I just want to point this out that, you know, there's a big lesson here. Right. Technology does not always cooperate with us. But. But as you can tell from her presentation, it doesn't have to defeat us. Right? Okay. So don't forget to go to the show notes, download your free digital sheet music cheat sheet. And next week here on the podcast, we're going to be talking about something completely different. We're going to talk about why you might be missing your goals and how to change that around. Right now, this is the time we're all thinking back to school. We've got great plans, things we want to accomplish before the end of the year, and I want to make sure that this is the year. This is the time of year that you achieve those goals. So if you're the sort that keeps having, you know, you set these great goals and you miss them, well, let's turn that around. Let's figure that out. And I'll give you the tips and tricks to do that on our next podcast. So be sure to not miss next week's episode, and I look forward to seeing you then. In the meantime, remember that every day is a day. You can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. All right, see you next time. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I release a new episode every Monday morning so you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your harp happiness every day. See you next time.