After all that... wouldn't it be much simpler to just scan it?


I had considered that when I was playing in the church orchestra especially for the Christmas musical/stage show/production extravaganza, that we did every year.

We literally had a 3 ring binder and orchestra music being what it is with the DC al coda's and the other various road signs in the music. There was a need to place tabs on the sheet music pages so that I could flip back a few pages to grab the repeat, then a few bars later, jump ahead to the ending.... that, was a real pain. Some of the tunes were easy enough to learn and commit to memory but others were not so easily committed to rote memory. Especially the ones with tons of chords and changes and modulations.....etc...

I started to do a cheat sheet of just the chords but due to the length of the entire production, that idea was quickly abandoned. The bass player and myself tried it in the rehearsal and found it to be less than desirable. The problem was, when the director stopped and then restarted... he would call out starting at measure 58.... and we were like "huh?"..... We knew that the production would not stop and start in the middle but we had to get through all the rehearsals too. For that year, we simply ended up using the 3 ring binders and I copied the needed pages and bars of the repeats and put together my own custom binder..... with the music in sequence and "peeks ahead" at the surprises coming in the first bars of the next page that I needed to be aware of.


For the following year, and for other similar church musical events, I thought it would be easier to simply scan the pages and use a laptop. This idea occurred to me as we were in the middle of the actual public performances. With a quick tap of a key we could page to the next page, and repeats could be inserted as the next page rather than going back and forth.... just keep it rolling forward.

I never got to try it out since the MM director and myself had a pretty significant "disagreement" during the "Spring Musical Extravaganza" and a parting of ways. Basically, I quit. Long story that I'm sure you don't want to know.

So I never got to the point of actually scanning it all in and building a document to use in those events. I do think it would have worked well. Some time later I saw that many other musicians are using such things...... technology is good. Use it.

You can find my music at:
www.herbhartley.com
Add nothing that adds nothing to the music.
You can make excuses or you can make progress but not both.

The magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding.