Performed Pieces Catalogue

[Nate.heron]

I'm trying to think of a good way to record (by writing down) all of the music that I have performed at all of my concerts. I can't think of a good way to organize it where it's easy to search by piece or date performed or with which band I performed it. Does anyone have any experience with this and recommendations of a spreadsheet setup or an application that they use?

[davewerden]

I would think a spreadsheet, such as Excel or Google Sheets, would work fine. Most such programs have options for sorting and/or filtering (i.e. looking for "concerto" in the text) a column. Just make sure to include all the columns that are important to you.

You might consider adding a column for the length of the piece, which could be helpful in the future if you are looking for ideas to fill a certain spot.

[Nate.heron]

That was my initial thought as well. I was just hoping someone had a secret application or something that made it even easier.

My reason why I haven't fully dove into a spreadsheet is that I can't think of an easy way to organize the songs into concerts without just having it be an implied trait because of the date column and band column. (And also a spreadsheet isn't the prettiest of formats to look at if I'm browsing for nostalgia's sake.)

[John Morgan]

That was my initial thought as well. I was just hoping someone had a secret application or something that made it even easier.

My reason why I haven't fully dove into a spreadsheet is that I can't think of an easy way to organize the songs into concerts without just having it be an implied trait because of the date column and band column. (And also a spreadsheet isn't the prettiest of formats to look at if I'm browsing for nostalgia's sake.)

Spreadsheets can do a lot and are highly customizable. You could have columns like:

Song Title, Composer, Length of Piece (time), Date Performed, Band / Ensemble, Concert Title (i.e., Spring concert 2022 or Christmas concert 2021)

And add more columns if you need/want to capture more information. There are many ways you can get data from the spreadsheet and put it in a useable form. You could get all the pieces from a particular concert (in order by title, for example), or you could get all the pieces played by a particular band or ensemble, again by title, or composer or date played, etc. Spreadsheets allow you so much ability to organize, list, categorize, sort, rearrange, etc. Pretty handy tool, they are.

[aroberts781]

I will also suggest Excel as a very customizable and easy way to catalogue your performances. I do not intend to insult the OP's intelligence, I only ask because when I was a junior in high school, which I think Nate is, I had no clue how to use Excel to sort columns (alphabetically, largest to smallest, etc...). I assume that high schoolers now are more skilled with Excel than I was 20-something years ago, but if you aren't yet comfortable with filtering and sorting in Excel watch some YouTube tutorials and see if you pick up any useful ideas.

I will agree that although practical, A spreadsheet is not necessarily attractive. You might try searching other "hobbies" and see what types of things people use to chronicle their journeys. Looking forward to hearing what you come up with!

[iMav]

There are several web-hosted “database for dummy” services that are turn key that would allow you to create an online database (and give you various view/report options). But those would cost money.

Excel or Google Sheets would probably be the most straightforward and cost-effective.