Five Tips for Organizing Sheet Music
The struggle of organizing sheet music in your piano studio is real. The number of books required for our profession does not always match the size of our teaching space. If space isn’t an issue, there’s the dilemma of where and how to store the physical books and digital downloads.
I may not be able to relieve all your pain, but I may have a few tips–in fact, I have five!
Why get organized?
Before I begin, let’s take a step back and consider why organizing is essential for any busy piano teacher.
Time crunch: Hunting down music books and teaching tools takes away precious lesson time. You know there is never enough time!
Respect your investment: Every book, game, and flashcard set costs money. Taking stock of what you already have prevents you from making redundant purchases.
Self-preservation: Overwhelm spikes when there’s chaos. Chaos usually begins when you purchase something that has not been assigned a designated spot. You neglect it for a bit, then get something new, and pretty soon, there’s a pile that requires decision-making. Soon, decision fatigue sets in, and you give up.
A couple more things before we dive in…
A disclaimer
➡️ I love to help people organize their stuff (just ask my daughter-in-law), but I am NOT a professional organizer.
Three confessions
➡️ I am slightly obsessed with designating a shelf, bin, or folder for things and keeping stuff tidy.
➡️ Sometimes, what’s inside these containers could be more organized–I’m not compulsive–yet!
➡️ When I finish my piano teaching career, I’ll be looking to see if The Container Store is hiring.
Tip #1 Edit your collection
Do you really NEED everything in your library? Could it be time to declutter?
After more than 30 years of teaching, I’m on my 3rd or 4th round of shedding books.
I recently filled three boxes full of music books that I don’t use anymore. My filter?
Have I used it in the past five years?
Will I use it this year?
Two “nos” mean it’s not going to take up space in my studio anymore.
One of my students, who is also a piano teacher, is delighted to be digging through my “dismissed” pile.
Yes, our local Music Teachers Association has a program for buying and selling music, but I have so much, and I’m not sure that most titles would appeal.
#2 Designate a storage place
Commit to a system that could be a mashup of shelves and cabinets, depending on your space and your budget. Storage is expensive!
Open shelves are part of my heritage, so I continued the tradition when designing my studio. Instead of filing cabinets and closets (which I adore, too!), I keep things tidy by using magazine holders and bins.
One of my favorite activities?
Generating labels for each holder and bin!
Current studio book storage. Getting close.
#3 Use an “off-site” location for seasonal books
Consider storing music books that you don’t need to access regularly in a different room. Duets, Ensembles, Christmas, and Early-Level Sacred music books are stored downstairs on shelves in our storage room, which recently saw a significant reduction in items. This has been a thrilling summer for me. 🤓
Concerned that my shelves may not be strong enough for all my books?
A good friend was kind enough to make sure they will NEVER collapse a few years ago.
My son Levi volunteered to check their weight capacity.
#4 Determine categories
Sometimes, I find myself wishing there was a search bar for my music library shelves when I can’t find something.
Unfortunately, it’s up to us and our in-house filing system to keep track of our hard copies. No AI in the world will help you find a missing book.
That’s when it’s time to determine how to group items.
Making decisions on categories is by far the most challenging part of organizing sheet music.
Do you sort by level? By style? By Composer? By Content?
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
As you see in this virtual tour below, I do a little of everything.
The virtual tour walks you through how I recently updated my magazine holders and gave them fresh labels.
It also shows what I’ve been up to regarding my flashcards and games. Those are still a work in progress
Before you watch here are two things I neglected to point out in the video:
Method books are stored on my bathroom shelves. Piano Safari books are large and floppy so I store them in are larger magazine holders to stabilize the books.
I have several bins dedicated to composers like Debussy and Chopin, and style periods like Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Early, Mid, and Late Jazz, and one just for Sonatinas.
Oh..and I mention my Interludes for the Soul—you can find them here. I’d love for you to listen to them on Spotify, too!
#5 Determine where to store your digital files
After I purchase a digital file, it may sit on my desktop until I feel like moving it. Although I can’t stand idle items on my kitchen counter, I tolerate a pretty cluttered desktop. (Another confession!)
When duty calls, I drag the digital download to a folder in Dropbox* labeled “Sheet Music.” Within that folder, there is a folder for each composer. I prefer Google Drive now, but I started collecting sheet music in Dropbox a long time ago and continue using it.
My Sheet Music Dropbox Folder
After I print a copy for a student, and before I move it to Dropbox, I attach the score to an assignment in Practice Space–my preferred method for lesson planning and delivering assignments.
Watch the video to see how I attach the scores, and load the assignments with links in the video below.
BTW: A transcript of the video provided from Loom. That’s what I used to capture this video. It’s not all that accurate but pretty cool that it delivers a transcript!
[0:01 I store digital scores in two different places. First of all, there's a copy in my Dropbox folder and also I add the score to practice space. So I'm going to show you a what I do for that.
0:15 And I'm going to attach a file, add new right here. I'm going to drag and drop my new interludes for the soul came out last month, add the file.
0:27 And then I like to add tags. This can really be fun. Really helpful when you're looking for certain things and I'm trying to be as intentional as possible and adding them.
0:37 So I'm going to add sacred and uh late repertoire. There we go. Okay. Then the other thing I like to do right away is load this assignment with everything I could possibly use.
0:52 So I'm going to go over to YouTube and I'm going to grab a copy of each of the videos of these pieces.
0:59 I'm just going to do one for the sake of time right now, but I suggest getting all the videos that as much as you can packed in this one assignment so that then when you assign it to a student, you can always, uh, you know, delete something you don't need perhaps everything, but I would load the initial
1:21 assignment with as much as possible interlude or the sole opus one, because there's more coming. Alright, and create an assignment.
1:33 So then let me show you what happens with those tags. So if I want to just search for interludes, I can't type and talk at the same time.
1:43 There it is right there. But if let's use the tags as well. Maybe I can't remember what it's called, but I know I put it under sacred.
1:51 So if I go over here and I can just search for a tag, sacred. There we go. I've got two.
1:57 I better get rid of that other one. I'm just going to use the one that's capitalized and there it pops up right away.
2:02 So that's what I would suggest doing is make sure that you create tags. And so notice you can also create one.
2:09 So what if I want to create a new one? Early sacred. Maybe I want that. Oopsie. And it will create a tag for that as well.
2:23 And you can always clear everything and there is your whole library. So that's a great way to keep yourself organized uh in practice space.
2:33 And now when I want to go to one of my students and add that assignment in, I can edit it as I please.
2:40 Hope that helps.]
What are YOUR strategies to wrangle your influx of music books?
Please share your tips in the comments below.
