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Monitor dreams

A project log for Ultimate practice room

Convert the X stand included with most keyboards into a table stand with isolation from the floor.

lion-mclionheadlion mclionhead 05/04/2021 at 07:210 Comments

The arrival of cheap, portable 15" 1920x1080 monitors 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0885RN8FQ

got lions revisiting the idea of a digital 2 page music display (https://hackaday.io/project/80525/log/156814-music-stand, https://hackaday.io/project/80525/log/147525-music-stand-for-an-electric-piano). For so many years, the choice in music displays has either been extremely small 7" tablets, extremely expensive 12" tablets, or massive TV's requiring a floor stand.

Reading music on a 12" ipad has proven difficult, over the years. It has to be cropped to be legible & turning a single page at a time is very slow.

$150 now buys what is basically a 15" tablet with lower resolution. Music would only be able to use a 1080x1562 window because of the aspect ratio. The densest music lions have worked on in recent times still seems pretty legible at 1080x1562.
You can get slightly over 1080 horizontal pixels by turning on individual RGB channels, you can stretch it to use all 1920 vertical pixels, & you can crop it. The stretched, uncropped version might actually be easier to read than 1080x1562.

Even a single 15" monitor would be an improvement, but lions really want the childhood memory of seeing 2 full pages of music at a time, without actually storing thousands of square ft of paper. Most of the paper music could be scanned in, saving millions of dollars in square footage. Indeed, the cost of storing paper music is the mane justification for a $300 monitor system. The mane concern is how heavy 2 portable monitors would be.

1080x1562 version:

Stretched 1080x1920 version:

The remaneing needs would be a keyboard & touch pad for annotating.

$300 is still a lot of money for a lion.  Even a $200 stand was too much.  The stand is still an open ended problem so it's more like a $500 wishlist.  Using 2 pedals while standing is hard.

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