TromboneChat

Hey everyone, me and a mate are currently rehearsing "conversation for tenor and bass trombone" after I purchased a downloadable PDF online, but the page turns are a nightmare! is there anywhere I can get the individual parts online? I live in New Zealand so hard copy by post is no good, it just takes too long, like 6-8 weeks, to get here, thanks!

Is it a score with both parts? If so you could edit it using something like GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). Just make sure you work on a copy of the image. You could adjust which lines to put on each page to fix the page turns.

If you are ambitious, you could work on MuseScore transcribing each part, but with the learning curve it may take you 6-8 weeks to create the parts

Seems like you could just print it out one page to a sheet instead of front and back and use a couple of stands. Maybe not ideal, but that might have been how it was originally printed…

cmcslide wrote: ↑Mon May 12, 2025 4:49 pm Seems like you could just print it out one page to a sheet instead of front and back and use a couple of stands. Maybe not ideal, but that might have been how it was originally printed…

Yeh that was my suggestion. Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

The piece is currently available on the Musescore site with individual parts available for download. (I know nothing about the accuracy or legitimacy of this version.)

Or if you're desperate you could go very old school. I did this with a score (trombone and piano) that I played for solo festival in high school- way back before home computers were a thing.

Make a copy of the score

Cut all the lines out individually on the copies

Tape/paste the individual lines for each part on a separate piece of paper

Make a fresh copy of the taped up pages

Cheesy but it works, takes only a few minutes, and is better than having so many page turns.
Also faster than using an editing program.

I needed to do something like this recently. I used an online pdf-to-jpg converter (https://www.pdfgear.com/pdf-to-jpeg/), then used a paint program to do the cutting and pasting, then used an online jpg-to-pdf tool (https://www.pdfgear.com/jpg-to-pdf/) to produce a new pdf.

(I used to do this sort of thing using Acrobat Pro, but my ancient copy of Acrobat Pro XI has finally stopped working)

This probably takes a little longer than scissors and tape, but is essentially lossless.

JohnL -- if you like Acrobat, you might like GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), Originally for Linux, it's now available for Android, IOS, and Windows.

BGuttman wrote: ↑Tue May 13, 2025 11:12 am JohnL -- if you like Acrobat, you might like GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), Originally for Linux, it's now available for Android, IOS, and Windows.

I've used GIMP before; it's more of a Photoshop analog than a substitute for Acrobat Pro.

JohnL wrote: ↑Tue May 13, 2025 9:27 am I needed to do something like this recently. I used an online pdf-to-jpg converter (https://www.pdfgear.com/pdf-to-jpeg/), then used a paint program to do the cutting and pasting, then used an online jpg-to-pdf tool (https://www.pdfgear.com/jpg-to-pdf/) to produce a new pdf.

I do essentially the same thing using only screenshots and Google Docs. I use a Mac but presumably Windows would be just as easy. Open the source PDF on the screen; "cut", i.e. screenshot, the portions that you want; create a new Google doc and drop the saved screenshots into the doc; "download" the doc as PDF.