I have just finished (well nearly) a very large project that very few people will actually get much use out of. Those few who do however will find it absolutely marvelous I believe, and I am rather proud of myself. Bruce (not I) is our stake's choir secretary. Hence we have all of the stake's music filed at our house. For some queer reason, I take an odd satisfaction in doing all of the filing myself. As Bruce ... well doesn't seem as keen as I do... it works out.
Aside - it might be useful to know that we have both been highly involved in the stake choir for about a decade now. It may make me a dork, but I absolutely LOVE it! We have an amazingly talented director, and we are actually pretty good. Choir practices are a major highlight for me every fall / Christmas season. I'm totally psyched about starting practicing again soon!
Anyway, what I was getting at was my new filing system that I came up with and did all by myself (even though I'm not actually the secretary.) The wonderful things about what I've done are:
1) It's online, so our director can look at it anytime she wants and it will always be updated.
2) It has a SEARCH ENGINE. I have taken extra pains to make the songs as searchable as possible. Each song has it's own page with the lyrics included (as many as I could find on the internet to cut and paste in. I'm totally not going to type up 200+ sets of lyrics) This makes it so that even if you can't remember the name of the song that you are looking for, you can just type in a snippet of the lyrics, and the search engine will pull it up. The songs' pages also include the composer / arranger, arrangement type (SATB, TTBB, etc.), and as many applicable topics as I could think of. This way if say you want an SSA arrangement of a song about faith, you can just type "SSA, faith" in the search engine, and bang, there is a list.
3) I also have an alphabetical list with links to each song's page.
4) And here is the REAL beauty of my plan: Most published songs are listed on the web by their publishers with a sample of the music to either look at or to listen to. I have put links on as many of the song's pages as I could find, so you have only to click, and you are taken to the publisher's listing of that song with a sample of what the song actually sounds like or a sample of the sheet music.
How awesome am I?
I still need to do a couple of things like:
1) Make a static opening page for us to list choir news, upload MIDI files where choir members can listen to their parts, and such.
2) Change the url so that it no longer has the word "stake" in it. This is because we aren't supposed to have any stake or ward websites.
These things can both be done, but I have to figure out how first.
Anyway, I think it's a totally awesome tool for our wonderful choir director. And though she and I may be the only people to ever use it, it's still a stroke of genius on my part.
Aside - it might be useful to know that we have both been highly involved in the stake choir for about a decade now. It may make me a dork, but I absolutely LOVE it! We have an amazingly talented director, and we are actually pretty good. Choir practices are a major highlight for me every fall / Christmas season. I'm totally psyched about starting practicing again soon!
Anyway, what I was getting at was my new filing system that I came up with and did all by myself (even though I'm not actually the secretary.) The wonderful things about what I've done are:
1) It's online, so our director can look at it anytime she wants and it will always be updated.
2) It has a SEARCH ENGINE. I have taken extra pains to make the songs as searchable as possible. Each song has it's own page with the lyrics included (as many as I could find on the internet to cut and paste in. I'm totally not going to type up 200+ sets of lyrics) This makes it so that even if you can't remember the name of the song that you are looking for, you can just type in a snippet of the lyrics, and the search engine will pull it up. The songs' pages also include the composer / arranger, arrangement type (SATB, TTBB, etc.), and as many applicable topics as I could think of. This way if say you want an SSA arrangement of a song about faith, you can just type "SSA, faith" in the search engine, and bang, there is a list.
3) I also have an alphabetical list with links to each song's page.
4) And here is the REAL beauty of my plan: Most published songs are listed on the web by their publishers with a sample of the music to either look at or to listen to. I have put links on as many of the song's pages as I could find, so you have only to click, and you are taken to the publisher's listing of that song with a sample of what the song actually sounds like or a sample of the sheet music.
How awesome am I?
I still need to do a couple of things like:
1) Make a static opening page for us to list choir news, upload MIDI files where choir members can listen to their parts, and such.
2) Change the url so that it no longer has the word "stake" in it. This is because we aren't supposed to have any stake or ward websites.
These things can both be done, but I have to figure out how first.
Anyway, I think it's a totally awesome tool for our wonderful choir director. And though she and I may be the only people to ever use it, it's still a stroke of genius on my part.
2 comments:
This is seriously brilliant. Very cool! I'm totally hitting you guys up for advice if I ever have this calling.
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