What I am doing with my vacation

Or, "The post that will probably not interest you if you're not a band geek."

I spent my day organizing music for pep band, and putting it in flip folders. I will tell you what this entailed.

I got to school at around 10:30. There were oh, maybe 20 people that had come to help. I just realized that first I'm going to have to explain what a flip folder is. Imagine a bunch of little sheets of music, each with a different song, that are about the size of a sheet of regular paper folded in half. They get put into little "folder" things with plastic covering both sides, which are hole punched and get attached to a ring, which gets attached to a plastic square the same size as the sheets of music. (Yeah, I suck at explaining things.) This is a flip folder. You attach it to your instrument with a thing called a lyre, so that you can have music to read during football and basketball games.

Anyway. Due to a... lack of organization last year, we ended up with a pile of music - random songs, parts for all different instruments, all thrown together. Our first job was to sort out the music into separate songs. We spent an hour or two grabbing stacks of music from the pile and sorting them into piles of all the separate songs on the floor. Some songs, we aren't planning to play this year. Those got sorted on the other side of the room, and were dealt with later. When we were done sorting, we had to put the piles into score order. This meant sorting each individual pile into piles of the parts for each instrument, and then restacking the pile, starting with flutes, clarinets, etc, etc. This took quite a while. Then, we took the songs that we're playing this year and brought them out to the cafeteria, where we separated the instruments again and arranged each song, with stacks of different instruments, on part of a table. We all took flip folders and got assigned an instrument to do. We went around to the tables and slipped that instrument's part into the flip folder, behind the plastic. There were maybe 30 or so songs, and they had to go into the folders in alphabetical order. If there wasn't a part for a particular instument, we told someone and they wrote it down. When we were done with a flip folder, we would go back and do another instrument, until all the flip folders were done.

Problem was, many of the people helping with this were freshmen, and they had never used a flip folder before. (Oh! For anyone who has actually gotten this far into the post, I'm a junior in high school.) They didn't know that you're supposed to use the front sides of all the folder things first, and then flip it over and use the back when you're somewhere in the middle of the alphabet. Otherwise, it's a pain in the butt to find songs. I guess we didn't explain this clearly enough... it would cause LOTS of frustration later.

When we were done with this, many people left. There were 6 or 8 of us still there. The next thing we did was looking through the completed flip folders to find parts that we had run out of part of the way through, so that we could make copies. While the copies were being made, we went back to the band room and took all the songs that we're NOT playing, and put them into yellow envelopes with the name of the song on them. Then we put them back on the shelf, in alphebetical order. Only like 2 people helped me with this. I guess it wasn't that hard though.

When the copies had been made we went back out to the cafeteria and laid them out, and looked through each flip folder to see what parts it didn't have. We put in the parts that were needed and put the finished flip folders on a different table. This was perhaps the worst part, because almost EVERYONE had screwed up and used the back sides of the folders before using up the front sides. Many people also hadn't left spaces for missing parts, even though we had told them to. So lots of the time we had to take out almost ALL the music to make space for a missing part and then put it back in. Even though we were told not to worry about the order as long as all the parts were in there.... it was a MESS.

By that time it was 6, and time for marching practice to start. I go to the bathroom, and then walk back to the band room. I see my friend who hadn't come to help and she goes, "You're late!"

But on a happy note, I won a drill down, for my first time! I'll save the drill down explanation for another day.

No more organizing for me, for a long time!