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I remember seeing people once in a while use magnets outdoors a long time ago but never put two and two together.

Well this morning I saw this, and immediately wanted to "share"...the people marketing them are called "Stand Tray"

"I hope they make a million dollars" (my scratched up piece of plexiglass is due for replacement anyways)

Page turns while playing?

. . . are easier when the music is not flying down the block . . . :-) :-)

I have little chipped off pieces of earth magnet that I could cluster together and pull apart when I get to an outdoor gig, I suppose...??

Turning pages is always a pain when music is scotched down outdoors, and (again) I'm not going to risk a multi hundreds of dollars ($1000...??) fragile tablet getting blown over with any music stand (meaning that this can happen to every single music stand made, including those made for tablets) that can be blown over if there's enough of a wind gust.

Since - overwhelmingly - most sheet music read today consists of illegal copies, it also seems to me that things like three and four pagers can be taped together face up and spread out across a stand with my clips holding the pages down. On my KM101 super compact so-called "wire" stand, the little arms that are built in to hold the music down also double as width extenders for the stand... So this stand can support the tops of four pages without dragging along some big piece of wind-catcher plywood or masonite.

The thing about outdoor music is this:
Those events are NOT EVER about the music. If someone isn't playing for a half a minute or so while getting their music re-scotched, it just doesn't matter, even if it's just something like a brass quintet. I've played outdoor brass quintet jobs whereby we played some long medley of armed forces hymns, and we all just stopped at the same time and got our pages straightened out and then continued... So what?

Since my collapsible music stand is a KM101, folds up to nothing and pretty much consists of nothing, yes magnets would work, but there's not much metal there for them to stick to... I suppose it would be enough magnetic attraction even with the 101 (basically built of 1/4 inch by 1/16 inch steel strips), but I'm probably just going to continue to use my wood/lucite music clips, and hope to not play too many jobs outdoors that require reading sheet music.

LOL.. The one community band in Memphis that plays a whole bunch of outdoor events in the summers also significantly shrinks in numbers in the summers, I've noticed. I think about twenty people in that band just don't choose to screw around with reading music outdoors, dealing with all the hassles (mentioned in this post - which is way too long), and in 90°+ heat...so I think about (again) twenty of the members of that band only play in the fall concert, the Christmas concert, and the spring concert.

The more I type about your topic here, the more I think the best thing (for me) to do when encountering these situations is to reduce the music to "march size", take my shop magnifiers with me (that we wear to examine tiny little band instrument parts), and use the sousaphone with a lyre for any outdoor jobs that involve tuba playing and sheet music.

dp wrote: Mon May 05, 2025 7:04 am Well this morning I saw this, and immediately wanted to "share"...the people marketing them are called "Stand Tray"

Any chance you could post a link? If you were going to pick put a name that would guarantee a web search would produce thousands of results that are not you, “Stand Tray” would be near the top of the list.

It’s SB Tray:

https://sbtray.com/product/music-stand-magnets/

tadawson wrote: Mon May 05, 2025 7:59 am . . . are easier when the music is not flying down the block . . . :-) :-)

… beause you used proper music clips that allow for page turns, perhaps?

You cannot turn pages with these magnets because you have more than one item to remove, reset the page, then replace. Not a good idea unless your group limites itself to one- or two-page pieces, which is not really a good idea.

bloke wrote: Mon May 05, 2025 8:17 amThose events are NOT EVER about the music. If someone isn't playing for a half a minute or so while getting their music re-scotched, it just doesn't matter, even if it's just something like a brass quintet. I've played outdoor brass quintet jobs whereby we played some long medley of armed forces hymns, and we all just stopped at the same time and got our pages straightened out and then continued... So what?

Um, outdoor orchestra or band concerts, with a live mic in your bell, well-known, audience-beloved pieces, with parts of 25 to 30 pages in the strings, with constant page turns, five to ten thousand in the audience and a steady breeze coming off the lake and tens of thousands of dollars in ticket sales at risk if you do a crap job… So what?

Also, the most common music stand in the nation is still the Manhasset, which uses a non-ferrous, aluminum desk.

Magnets do not stick to them.

I'm not arguing those points.

The outdoor orchestra concerts that I play feature staked-off areas with food and liquor...oh: and cannons...and - "out there" - loud-ass talking...and sound guys balancing a symphony orchestra like a rock band...tons of fiddle (eeeeeee !!!), tons of (WOOF!) string bass, and brass mics (yes, in our bells, but) sorta turned down (at least, based on phone recordings that some of the wealthy drunks put on their facebook pages).

OK...TELLING A FUNNY STORY ON MYSELF...

freeway philharmonic squeezed in run-out (a town's festival) on the same weekend we had a pops.
We rehearsed at a university and then played - early evening (only time we could fit in) at an outdoor venue.
There was intermittent rain...
There was also a pop-up tent right next to the (you know: those fancy huge rigs) elevated stage.
A cellist was in the pop up tent.
I'm so paranoid about damaging stringed instruments that I TOTALLY wasn't away of myself setting my music folder up on the edge of the stage (at the edge of the pop-up tent) and cleared out of there (even though rain...because of the who-knows-HOW-expensive cello).
I had to tell the M.D. that I had NO idea where my folder was (I had even driven back to the university and checked the rehearsal hall.)
He laughed his ass off and said, "bloke, don't sweat it. You know that all we're playing is a big pile of $h!t, today."

ok...so did I play or not?
The 3rd trumpet set up a hot spot, the bass trombone player went and got his tablet, we downloaded all that jazz onto his tablet from the orch. website, and (again: a fear of tablets on music stands) I gaff-taped his tablet to my music stand...

...and found my folder - sitting over there - 12 feet behind me, on the edge of the stage - after the concert.

https://www.olight.com/store/oclip-pro- ... -red-light

I use a pair of these. They have a back clip so they can be used to clip the music to the stand as well as a serious magnet on the back so it can be used in a similar fashion to the above SB magnets to hold the music to the stand. Also serve as a stand light / illumination. Several levels of brightness including lighting up the entire hall. Also useful for dark backstages. Plus it’s just a great EDC pocket light. Really useful if you have to open the car hood out on the road in the dark or climb underneath it or change a tire etc. I’m amazed at how much use I get out of this light on a daily basis. Clip it to shirt or coat for walking the dog. A red light mode as well to preserve night vision and a red sos strobe too.

Everything has a downside or doesn’t work in all situations. In the summer we play outside a lot. The band makes available plexiglass. I’ve got a proper set of clips. I tend to go back and forth as to what I prefer. Outside of our normal weekly venue where it’s fold up stand time it’s always clips. Less weight to haul less weight on stand.,

To hold the pages down on the fold-up stand, I have used clothes pins mostly and if I need to spread more than three pages I use those carpenter's spring clamps with the orange ends taken off. They can extend the width on a Manhasset enough for one more page but I still have to use the clothes pins to hold the paper to the spring clips. I can play from memory faster than I can read, so sometimes I just do that on trumpet parts, saves a lot of hassle. Last night I noticed a guy's modified mic stand with a 5lb. bar-bell weight slipped on the shaft above the feet. One could do that to a studio-type stand so the whole works wouldn't blow over with your tablet. If the desk has holes in it you could clip the tablet to the desk of the weighted stand. I still haven't joined the electronic age and have books of photo-copied Hal Leonard stuff that's way too heavy for my fold-up stand.

the elephant wrote: Mon May 05, 2025 11:12 am

tadawson wrote: Mon May 05, 2025 7:59 am . . . are easier when the music is not flying down the block . . . :-) :-)

… beause you used proper music clips that allow for page turns, perhaps?

You cannot turn pages with these magnets because you have more than one item to remove, reset the page, then replace. Not a good idea unless your group limites itself to one- or two-page pieces, which is not really a good idea.

Can't use just one clip either, so seems like the same amount of handling either way . . . .(and why I'm testing using a tablet and pedal in those environments.)

tadawson wrote: Mon May 05, 2025 10:02 pmCan't use just one clip either…

What kind of clups do you use? Four magnets per page versus a single 12" clear clip? I'm talking about proper sheet music clips, not clothespins…

Typically large binder clips, but I have to do 4 corners. Even were I to have a single 12 inch clip, I find that the wind will still get under it and flip it up, so need to secure all sides, and it would seem that simply sliding a magnet over and then back is easier than fiddling with even one clip that can be dropped, since it does not naturally retain. That, and clips only work at the stand edges, so if the piece is small, you can't always get to all edges.

I got through a windy outdoor brass band concert saturday evening with my usual setup, but the music was no more than three-pagers, xeroxed, so they were all taped together. I have a plexiglas cookbook holder that hangs on the stand from the top and keeps the middle steady, and both long and regular clothespins that I put on the edges. The Eb next to me had his music go flying just before we started -- and I'm not sure what he did to keep it from doing that again, but there were times when I was playing and he was fiddling with the music.
With magnets, seems to me that, opposed to clothespins, you can scoot them off the music to the side and then just put them back, rather than having to un-clip and re-clip. But I thought Manhassets were not magnetic; apparently wrong-o on that one, maybe I'll get the magnets and try them out, or just go to the hardware store and get some.

I've had this forever and would never have paid this much for it, and it isn't all that useful as a cookbook holder because the fat ones won't fit, but put over the top of the stand with the long side in the front, it has been quite useful:

My real music clips made of Lucite and wood feature clear (not-scratched) Lucite, but the Lucite does distort the notes on the page where it covers them. That being said, I'm not supposed to be sight reading.

If I don't know what is underneath the strips of Lucite, I probably shouldn't be at the gig, yes?

Yeah but I manage to get the distortion between the staves.

My Ipad is laughing right now.

If I had an "iPad" (or even a closer to reasonably-priced tablet...and I'd probably be willing to shell out $100 for a really nice new one with a 10"x14" display (if such actually existed), mine would have hit the dirt/wood/asphalt/concrete (the various times I've played outdoors with sheet music) on days involving wind gusts - whereby any music stand of any mass ends up being blown over.

LibraryMark wrote: Tue May 06, 2025 11:58 am My Ipad is laughing right now.

If you also get phone calls on your ipad (I have no idea if you can) then you could make that laugh the ring tone.
However, if there is a gust of wind strong enough to blow your stand over, it's my cook book cover that's going to be laughing at your ipad.