Tablets are everywhere in music rehearsal rooms these days, but for all their convenience, they represent quite a few compromises when compared to good old printed sheets. So Japanese company Terrada Music Score Co. has gone all-out to produce the ultimate electronic alternative to sheet music.
The Gvido Tokyo is about the size of a Manila folder, and features two 13-inch E ink screens with Wacom touch pen capability.
That means you can display two A4-size pages of music manuscript at a time, and make notes on them just like you would with a paper copy, storing the lot in the device or syncing to the cloud via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.
You can change pages mid-performance by touching the sides of the device, or use a Bluetooth foot pedal to leave both your hands free. Either way, there's no crinkly page noise to annoy your studio engineer, and a much smaller chance you'll mess up and dump a bunch of paper on the floor as your conductor glares at you, or get caught outdoors by a gust of wind and lose your sheets all over the place. Not that I'm speaking from personal experience or anything.
The Gvido Tokyo reads scores in PDF format, and lets you build a performance set list to keep things easy to access on stage. The inbuilt battery and low-power E ink display mean it should be good for several days use between charges.
There's a catch, though. Release pricing has just been announced at an eye-watering US$1,600. That'll take a fair few gigs for the average sheet music-reading pro musician to pay off.
The Gvido is a purpose-built musician's tool that's basically locked in to a single purpose –but it looks like a monster of a product for the well-heeled muso. Promo video below:
Source: Gvido Tokyo
