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How do YOU scroll PDF music on your laptop

#21
russ_bass said:
Hey there. I know it's a generic title but I wanted to know what YOU do, not what in theory can be done. I have quite a few songs now in PDF format. So I use a PDF reader (ie: Foxit Reader) on my PC.

The challenge is that if I'm playing along to a Youtube video and trying to read the music in the PDF reader, I need a 3rd hand to quickly hit the up/down key to scroll the PDF music up and down.

I know there are foot pedals for software that you have music in, but I'm needing something for simply scrolling up/down, etc. in a PDF that's a foot pedal (as I don't have the elusive 3rd hand).

I had seen a video where a guy altered a bluetooth calculator to act as a footpedal but apart from that, has anyone used a pedal of some kind for what I'm looking for?

Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...
I have seen a two footswitch pedal connected to an iPad to do exactly this but I can’t remember where. What I tend to prefer is two rewrite the chart in short hand so every song is no more than one page. Just easier for me to work with on the spot than trying to read a real chart. Here’s a pretty good video on the subject of short hand. To me short hand works great for most of the music I play. Especially for pop or rock oriented stuff. It would be a bit silly to write out for example jazz walking basslines in shorthand. For that situation in particular I think most people prefer to just write down the name of the chords and basically improvise the walking lines based on the chord structure of the song.
 
#22
russ_bass said:
Hey there. I know it's a generic title but I wanted to know what YOU do, not what in theory can be done. I have quite a few songs now in PDF format. So I use a PDF reader (ie: Foxit Reader) on my PC.

The challenge is that if I'm playing along to a Youtube video and trying to read the music in the PDF reader, I need a 3rd hand to quickly hit the up/down key to scroll the PDF music up and down.

I know there are foot pedals for software that you have music in, but I'm needing something for simply scrolling up/down, etc. in a PDF that's a foot pedal (as I don't have the elusive 3rd hand).

I had seen a video where a guy altered a bluetooth calculator to act as a footpedal but apart from that, has anyone used a pedal of some kind for what I'm looking for?

Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

I use a StealthSwitch 3 with however many momentary contact switch pedals (up to five) that I need. I mainly use this with 3 pedals set to alt-tab, right-arrow, and left-arrow. I use this while transcribing so that I can switch between Spotify and Sibelius with my feet, as well as quickly moving between windows and pages while teaching online.
 

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