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At the Ready, Sheet Music Minus the Sheets By ADAM BAER Published: May 20, 2004   Mike Garson, a pianist in David Bowie's band, with his MusicPad, which stores all his music and allows him to edit it on a touchscreen.   IKE GARSON can finally travel light. A pianist and composer who has played in David Bowie's band since 1972, he fretted for decades over his ever expanding collection of sheet music, stored in dozens of heavy manila folders overflowing with heavily annotated sheets, many of them torn. But on one recent weekday morning, while fighting Los Angeles traffic on his way to an early "Tonight'' show rehearsal, he actually had clean copies of nearly all of his hundreds of works in his car with him - in a thin, lightweight box about the size of a conductor's score. Mr. Garson was carrying his music in digital form, scanned into his MusicPad Pro Plus, a five-pound tablet computer made by a company called Freehand Systems. The $1,200 device, with a 12-inch liquid-crystal-display touchscreen, is the first of a class of computers that enable music ians to store music and edit it onscreen. Soon it will also allow them to communicate with one another over wireless networks. In much the way that portable digital audio players have changed the way people consume tunes, tablets like the MusicPad are changing the way musicians use sheet music, which is so compact that it can be digitally stockpiled far more cost-effectively than MP3 audio files. "It's something I always wanted, and was trying to work out with a computer,'' said Mr. Garson, 58, who has volunteered suggestions to Freehand Systems on how to improve the MusicPad. "But it became so unwieldy.'' Kurt Bester, 48, a pianist and composer who also tested the device, said it had freed him from fumbling with paper when he plays since he can turn the page by tapping the screen or pressing a foot pedal. The bright screen helps him read music in dark rooms, take notes and even archive music he writes before it has been printed. "This is my sheet-music iPod," he said. Beyond its usefulness for professional musicians, the MusicPad could help restore sheet music's luster as a tool for amateur entertainment as Freehand Systems seeks to expand the amount of sheet music available online. Through the company's newly purchased Web music store, sunhawk.com, MusicPad users can download and edit 35,000 newly digitized scores. An average-size music store today carries sheet music for about 2,000 individual works, according to Fred Anton, chief executive of Warner Brothers Publications, and customers generally must order others through the mail unless they live in a metropolitan area with a professional-level sheet-music store. Freehand Systems hopes to use Sunhawk to change that. It already offers about 20,000 works from the complete 40,000-work Warner Brothers Publications catalog at the Web site (the rest will make it online in a couple of months). And it is working on similar arrangements with other top publishers that could double the amount of music available through Sunhawk. (Of the two other leading online sheet-music stores, musicnotes.com provides nearly 20,000 individual works and Hal Leonard's sheetmusicdirect.com, over 10,000.) Sunhawk customers can preview songs, transpose them into different keys and hear them in MIDI format. The sheet-music files are encrypted to limit the transfer of a work to the number of MusicPads for which it was purchased; encryption also allows Sunhawk to rent instrumental parts of a composition for limited periods. Mr. Anton said that the MusicPad and Sunhawk could help resolve two problems that have crippled sales of sheet music online: the limited portability of paper and the fact that the official versions of many pieces are sold only by the publishers. Mr. Anton dismissed worries about the potential for trading illegal copies of music sold online. "The Xerox machine has always been the arch enemy of the printed music world, and copying is impossible to police," he said. Not unexpectedly, Freehand Systems faces competition in the race to take the slow-growing sheet-music industry digital. David Sitrick, a patent attorney and engineer in Chicago, has developed a system called the eStand, which involves proprietary software installed on pairs of Wi-Fi-enabled touchscreen tablet computers. Mr. Sitrick received patents for the concepts behind the eStand in 1998 and 2000, two years before Freehand Systems patented the "music annotation system for performance and composition of musical scores" that led to the MusicPad. In fact, Mr. Sitrick, 53, has sued Freehand Systems for patent infringement. He has also filed an "interference proceeding" against the musician Harry Connick Jr. over a patent he received two years ago for "a system and method for coordinating music display among players in an orchestra." Mr. Connick, whose system is said to provide for digital conversion of handwriting into musical notation and to distribute electronic scores over a network, declined to comment. Kim Lorz, the chief executive of Freehand Systems, said his company had not infringed on Mr. Sitrick's patents, although Freehand Systems does plan to release a double-screen model for conductors. This fall Mr. Sitrick expects to begin selling the eStand, which he says will have more memory and more computing power than the MusicPad - which has 64 megabytes of RAM and 96 megabytes of flash memory, enough for roughly 5,000 pages of sheet music - and will cost considerably more. He also plans to introduce a digital-sheet-music Web site, he said, and is considering selling his music-reading and editing software separately. Mr. Sitrick has shown the eStand, which mimics the look and feel of an open score, mainly to professional musicians, and he has already won over some prominent artists, including the violinist Itzhak Perlman. Two years ago Mr. Perlman tested a version of the eStand while conducting the Chicago Symphony at the Ravinia Festival. He liked it so much, he said, that he plans to purchase one. Page turning "is a pain," he said. "Just the fact that you could touch a screen and get to the next page is weird and wonderful." One of the few people who have assessed both products is Mike Albaugh, director of music at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan. Mr. Albaugh, who recently bought 25 MusicPads for school use, said he found them more durable than the eStand and that he liked the pledge from Freehand Systems to fix anything that goes wrong. He said the availability of music to load onto the machines was crucial. "Freehand has purchased the rights to a lot of works within the general archives of music, and with us, it's about the standard works," Mr. Albaugh said. He said the digital tablets would save paper and serve as a time-efficient teaching tool. What's more, he said, the backlighted screens, which can be used in landscape or portrait orientation, can help ensure that a pit ensemble's sound does not thin out because half the violinists need to turn a page. Whether the machines will be warmly received by Interlochen students remains to be seen. Liz Koch, 18, an oboist, said she found the MusicPad easy to use but that she didn't appreciate its high price. "It would also be inconvenient to carry," she said. Travis Dierolf, 17, who plays trombone, said the idea was good but that he would not trust the MusicPad in a performance. "While the marking functions seemed promising, I think that whenever you have you more technology you have more things that can go wrong," he said. As for David Bowie, Mr. Garson said that all his boss cared about is "making sure you play the right stuff when it matters," and that like most rock stars he never uses sheet music. "Still, I think I'm going to get him a MusicPad for his birthday with all his thousands of lyrics entered onto it," he said. "I think it would be a really nice thing for someone so prolific to have."