Last week, I attended a 5 day Guitar and Ensemble Institute sponsored by the National Association of Pastoral Musicians (www.npm.org).  The week is designed to be a time of learning , retreat, and renewal, with a specific focus on lessons and techniques on various instruments including Guitar, Piano, Voice, and Percussion.  I am generally the technical support person for the week so, of course, I had to take my new Kindle DX and put it through its paces.

Before leaving, I had received by e-mail various documents from the Program Coordinator and some of the presenters.  I was able to format them for reproduction and distribution and convert them to PDF format and load onto my Kindle.

Accordingly, I already had many of the ‘handouts’ as well as having the schedule for the week readily accessible.  In addition, I had downloaded a trip planner and had that available for our trip from Arlington, Virginia to Erlanger, Kentucky.  And I had copies of our auto insurance cards on the Kindle as well; fortunately, that wasn’t needed!

I also had some music that I was able to put into PDF format.  I already knew it would display just fine, but I wanted to find out if it was practical to use in a ‘real world’ situation.  What I found is that, for me at least, it’s not great if you are learning a piece, because you usually need to go back and forth to work on specific passages.  But once you have learned the piece and just need the music there to remind you of what’s coming up it works okay.

I also tried a piece  in guitar tablature.  That was also very readable though the landscape mode did not work as well just because of the layout of the piece.  I did get asked if there was a remote system for page turns using a foot pedal or something;  guitarists tend to have both hands on their instruments and page turns can be problematic.

In addition to actual music, I also downloaded a number of free chord charts for guitar as well as some fingering charts for flute.  They were very readable and it was nice to have them readily available.  I even found some ukulele chord charts on line, which I went ahead and included although I wasn’t bringing my ukulele with me.

While there, my daily Washington Post downloaded automatically so I could keep up with what was going on in the world.  I generally had several interested observers when I was reading it.  I found out that I’d been the catalyst for one of the folks to have purchased a Kindle for his wife after he saw my K1 last year – I  think I’ve convinced him he needs to get her an Oberon cover this year!  And one of the presenters was very interested in the DX for his 92 year old mother who finds it hard to read regular books.  Of course I told him also about the font enhancements available, if needed.

In short, I put it to good use for the week.  I found it worked better than paper for working through the handouts for the various sessions.  Next year I’ll absolutely encourage the presenters to send me e-copies ahead of time:  maybe I won’t have to carry around any paper at all!