Dennis,

Any laptop with a scrolling wheel mouse has the ability to slowly scroll down the page and nearly any speed you select. And, as for playing the keyboard with both hands, most of us use all the other items at our disposal on the keyboard such as the pitch bend, registration buttons, variations, fills, intros, endings, breaks, all of which require that you take a hand off the keyboard to operate. Yes, you can set up a foot pedal to do all those things, something with 10 switches that are so close together that you need wingtips to hit the right switch, and you have to constantly be looking at where your foot is positioned and not your audience.

Those of that use a laptop on a daily basis DO NOT have a problem with switching between lyrics displays, midi files, MP3s or any other feature on the fly while playing the keyboard. And, for the first two years I used a laptop in my performances I had a 5-year-old, used laptop that performed flawlessly nearly every day of the week. And, it was a relatively slow machine, small hard drive, and not much memory, but for the $300 it cost at the Computer Show at the Maryland State Fairgrounds, I think it was a bargain. My Dell cost me a whopping $499 including freight and it has all the bells and whistles. My widescreen Compaq that has a bit lower profile and more features than my desktop was $699, but then I got a $100 rebate, which brought the bottom line down to $599.

The secret to making the laptop work for you is the Taskbar at the bottom of the screen, which allows you to quickly move from one folder to another, thereby allowing you to keep the Lyrics/SheetMusic folder open along with a MIDI player and MP3 Player, yet still not adversely effect the computer's speed.

As for the touch screen V/S the mouse, if I had to reach across the keyboard to touch the screen in order to make things work it would really be noticed by my audiences. And, it would likely produce significant dead time between songs, which is something I try very hard to eliminate. With the combination of the laptop, registrations and MFD you can be ready to play the next song as soon as the first is finished.

This system works well for me and a significant number of forum members. It's by no means a panacea, but it is far more effecient than using books filled to capacity with sheet music, then having to leaf through those pages to find the right one. With the laptop, the lyrics/sheet music are in a single folder, all listed alphabetically, and it takes less than 2 seconds to select and open the pages for the next song.

Finally, using the same laptop, I just typed this message while listening to a third-party style file using a program downloaded free from Michael Bedesem. I don't think you can do that with the MPP.

Cheers,

Gary

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Travlin' Easy