Top 10: Creative tasks with an iPad

8: Digital Sheet Music

If you play an instrument, or you have one gathering dust in a cupboard, then the iPad is a great reason to get it out and tune it up. With your iPad you have access to a library of musical scores and it can even play them to you, should you get stuck with a trick section.

Avid Scorch (£2.99) is the musical equivalent of Apple’s iBooks app. It comes with a small selection of scores, and there are currently 250,000 more available from its in-app store. They’re browsed by instrument, chart position, new releases, recommended picks and a search facility. The likes of Coldplay and Adele are here – usually priced at £3 per song – and there’s lots of classical music, too, and many out-of-copyright scores are free.

Avid Scorch sells, displays, plays and lets you modify musical scores

The underlying technology is based on Sibelius, the industry standard notation software. As such, scores aren’t simply bitmap images – they use real notation data, and the app can play them back on its internal synth. You can change the tempo and key, solo, mute and adjust the volume of different instruments and switch between a full score and the parts for each instrument.

The app uses .sib files generated by Sibelius or Sibelius First so it’s easy to import your own scores, too, delivered via email, Dropbox or when syncing with iTunes. A composer can share the full score with an ensemble and let each performer pick the relevant part for his or her instrument. Kitting out an entire orchestra with iPads seems a bit excessive, but for smaller ensembles working on new compositions where there are lots of last-minute changes, it’s a superb system.