Why I Built eSuite

There is a moment in every musician's career when something goes wrong at the worst possible time.

I watched mine happen from the audience.

My wife was performing—she is a world-class pianist, vocalist, organist, and violinist—and the person sitting beside her to turn her pages missed a cue. One wrong move. The whole performance teetered. She recovered, gracefully and professionally, the way only someone with her level of training can. But I sat there thinking: we are living in 2016 and this is still how it works?

That question has driven the last ten years of my life.

I did not grow up in a musical family. Music is, if I am honest, largely foreign to me. I am a tech person—an early adopter, someone who has been doing things digitally well before it was mainstream. Digital textbooks, digital notes, digital everything. I paid extra for e-books when physical copies were cheaper. I scanned documents rather than carry them. The analog-to-digital transition felt inevitable to me in every area of life, and I have watched that transition happen, one domain at a time, for as long as I can remember.

Then I married someone who lives and breathes music, and I stepped into a world that had, in many ways, missed the memo entirely.

When we got married and I inherited my wife's sheet music library, it filled an entire closet. A dozen bins representing years of careful accumulation. And every time she performed, she had to find the right edition, bring the right binder, and hope that whoever was turning her pages would not throw off a performance she had spent months preparing.

I knew there had to be a better way. I bought her the largest iPad available, an Apple Pencil, had the binding cut off her entire library, had everything professionally scanned, and uploaded it to the best digital sheet music app I could find. It worked. She was able to practice and perform from her iPad, carry her entire library in her hands, and never worry about forgetting a piece at home.

But here is what I also learned: making that happen required someone who was already deeply technical, deeply motivated, and willing to invest significant time and effort into a solution that, frankly, should have already existed. The app we used was powerful—and nearly unusable for anyone not already comfortable navigating complex software. There was no standard. No single destination where a musician could go to find and manage their music. The experience was fragmented, inaccessible, and years behind where it should have been.

That gap is what I have been thinking about ever since.

I believe that every person, regardless of discipline, deserves an intuitive, well-designed digital experience for the tools central to their craft. This is not a luxury. It is foundational to living and working in the modern world. Musicians have been asked to accept less than that for too long.

The technology to build a better solution has existed for years. What was missing was someone willing to close the gap between what was technically possible and what musicians actually deserved.

So I started building it. Every morning, before my family wakes up, before my day job begins. Not because there is a business case I am trying to prove, though I believe there is one. But because I have a wife who is one of the most gifted musicians I have ever known, and a seven-year-old son who is just now taking his first music lessons, and I want both of them to be able to pick up an iPad, open an app, and have an experience that actually meets them where they are.

That is the range eSuite is built for—from the beginner finding his footing to the professional who cannot afford a single missed page turn.

Watching digital sheet music adoption grow slowly, concert by concert, year by year—one more iPad on stage than the year before—has been equal parts encouraging and painful. Because I know that most of those musicians are getting a fraction of the experience they could be having. The technology exists. The design principles exist. They just have not been applied here yet.

That changes now.

eSuite is my answer to a question I have been sitting with for ten years. It is built for my wife. It is built for my son. And it is built for every musician in between who deserves a digital experience that is finally worthy of their craft.