How To Effectively Organize Music - Part 1
"It's always a good thing to be well organized as we prepare to play and lead God’s people in worship on the Lord’s Day."
How do you effectively organize music?
Over the next few weeks, we'll be looking at 7 different aspects on this subject. It's always a good thing to be well organized as we prepare to play and lead God’s people in worship on the Lord’s Day.
I’m going to walk through some pointers that many of you may already be familiar with, or it might be new to you. Hopefully, there will be something helpful.
So once we’ve selected our songs, the specific format of music, keys, styles, and genre, we want to organize that music as best we can. There are 7 things to consider as we do this, and they are as follows...
Our music storage
Our music labeling
Our music format
Our music folder (or device)
Our music back-up
Our music admin
Our music record
So, starting with the first one...
Our music storage
This basically refers to where we store and organize our music. For some of us, it will be completely digital, on a computer or device, and for others it will be physical copies stored in a folder of some sort. Or, if you're like me, it’s a combination of both.
I personally like to be able to quickly grab some physical paper copies of music if I need it to play, but for some people, they find it just as easy to use a device like an iPad.
The main thing here is to be organized, which means whether our storage is digital or physical, we need to have well structured folders so we can find the music, according to title, key, theme, style etc. If you also provide PowerPoint slides, it’s good to have these filed in such a way that it’s easy to match the slide with the song, and a big part of this is making sure the words on the slide match the words in your music.
We may be constantly adding to this collection so try to avoid the temptation to just quickly save something to your desktop or put it in a pile on your desk somewhere. If you never keep things in the same place, you'll find it a lot harder to access them in the future - I have been guilty of this many times and have certainly learned these things the hard way.
So, keep your music all in one place for easy access, and you will save yourself a lot of headaches!
Our music labeling
This is what helps us to store our music in a way that’s easy to access. This could involve how you title your music, as some are titled by the first line while others have their own title that isn’t always the same as the first line. Unless you know this, you can spend ages looking for a song like “How Great Thou Art”, only to find that the version in your files was titled, “O Lord, My God, when I in awesome wonder”! So, it's definitely good to be aware of this.
Personally, I find it helpful to include, in the title of my digital files, the key of the song and also if it’s a chords or words only file (as I would often have copies of both so that the singers only had lyric versions).
This makes it a lot easier to select keys when choosing a set of music.
Then you can take this as far as you want to, and label songs according to theme, or have folders that separate theme and Scripture topic; you can even double up songs in those folders for easy access. It’s really what works best for you. Also, you'll find it helpful to categorize music according to whether it's full notation, chord charts, lead sheets, or music for singers or other instruments.
Depending on how you do this, it’s also helpful to use the search function to find key words in songs when you’re trying to match themes and topics. I’m sure there’s probably an AI something out there that can handle this all for you if you want it to!
Our music format
This is all about making sure the music we are reading is in the easiest format for us to play effectively from. That might be the size, the layout of the chords, how many pages we have for each song, or even making sure we have edited the music to make it the easiest it can be to play. This makes it so we can actually worship and also sing as we play.
What you want to avoid is poor photocopies that are hard to read in low light, or words that are too small, requiring you to squint and lean forward. However, all of these things can be avoided with preparation.
Next week, we'll be looking at the last 4 aspects of effectively organizing your music.
[Return to The Church Piano Player Website]
This blog post was written by pastor and pianist Kris Baines, from The Church Piano Player. Kris lives in the UK with his family, having recently moved back from New Zealand where he worked as a pastor for the past 26 years (also leading worship/worship teams). Kris has also spent over 35 years writing, recording, and performing music and is now bringing all that combined experience together to help equip church piano/keyboard players.
Check out the church piano player website for more information on online courses by Kris Baines.
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