I have absolutely fallen in love with the iPad as a practicing tool and all around music making facilitator. After 5 years on the market, app developers are finally catching up with the amazing potential of this unique computer, and for musicians, there’s no better app out there than ForScore. Here are my 20 best music hacks for the iPad, using this powerful app: 

 

1. Digitize all of your sheet music easily using their Dark Room feature, and say goodbye to heavy paper books.

 

2. Arrange all your sheet music in a setlist, and never flip through big binders of sheet music again looking for tunes.  

 

3. Make all of your sheet music instantly searchable by tempo, key, composer, or any other keyword using meta tags.

 

4. Set a metronome speed for each song, and the tempo will be instantly recalled next time you bring it up.

 

5. Access hundreds of thousands of free classical songs through their online link with www.mutopia.com. 

 

6. Annotate instantly using your finger or a stylus, then erase it or hide it with a few taps. 

 

7. Using the Cue feature, you can synchronize the sheet music and even page turns with multiple iPads nearby. 

 

8. Instantly set your metronome with tap tempo.

 

9. You can set each song to send a midi message through a midi interface (killer feature for keyboardists) 

 

10. Record yourself using the built-in audio recorder, and tag it to a specific page. 

 

11. Slow down your recorded audio and loop it.

 

12. Share your scores in a variety of formats, included annotated PDFs. 

 

13. If you have a fixed number of measures on each page, you can set ForScore to turn the pages automatically for you. 

 

14. Using an iPad Mini? Tilt the iPad to landscape mode, and you can do half-page turns with a tap of the screen. 

 

15. Set links between sections (for instance, click a single link to jump back three pages to a repeat sign).

 

16. Project your score on an Apple TV. 

 

17. Store all your files on Dropbox or iCloud, and access them on any device. 

 

18. Use a bluetooth pedal to turn pages hands-free.

 

19. There’s a companion app for the iPhone, so you’re never without your sheet music.

 

20.  Look oh-so-cool when you slide your elegant iPad out at the gig, while your friends lug out heavy reams of sheet music, complaining about how much their backs are killing them,

 

Full disclosure: I am not being paid or compensated for this review. ForScore is really that good, and it’s worth every penny of the $10 you’ll spend on it to get it on your iPad.