Merry Music Organization

It's officially the season and if you are a musician or a vocalist you know that the holidays can be a stressful time.  I've played the piano for pretty much my entire life and when it comes to Christmas, I am expected....no, REQUIRED to play for family and friends - which I don't entirely mind.  I enjoy entertaining people with cheerful piano music and I love to play during the Holiday season.  What I do mind is lugging 8 or 9 piano books all over the place to play a couple of songs out of each one.  It's a pain and sometimes I forget one and then I can't play one of my favorites.

Here's my solution:

 I put this simple little binder together full of all my piano music. Ok, maybe I got a little carried away with it.  But it looks super cheery and festive!

Anyway, I copied every song I play on a regular basis during the holidays and placed them (double sided) into the binder.  I made sure I put them in an order that I could play from start to finish.

So, all my slow songs don't get played at the same time and all my upbeat songs don't get played together.  This is helpful so that my arms don't want to fall off from exhaustion halfway through the book. I also have a few by the same artists and I tried to make sure they were evenly dispersed too.  This way I have a nice mix of holiday music to play.

To do the outside I used our brown paper wrapping paper.  We got a huge roll of it 2 years ago at Home Depot for Christmas and we're still going through it. If you don't have any you can use a paper bag like the good old days when you were covering text books.  Then, I picked out a pretty ribbon (I got this one at JoAnn Fabrics) and made a bow.  I hot glued the paper and the ribbon to the binder so that they don't slide around or come undone.  And voila!  You have yourself a music binder.

Sadly, it's taken me 8 or 9 years of lugging my music all over the place to come up with this but so far I'm pretty happy with the results. If you are a musician who has to play at a bunch of different houses during the holidays, try this out.  It's pretty helpful!