Organizing Charts

On Saturday morning I went to my occasional salsa ensemble class (we have all been jamming together in one form or another for years now, since before my first son was born!). They requested I send the music for Wayne's arrangement of El Cantante, which I wanted to work on, beforehand. So on Friday night (I considerately figured people could download it at 6 am Saturday before class ;-)), I started scanning and I discovered an amazing organizational tip that I will now share with you: You can scan your music charts in black and white as PDFs, adding multiple pages as you go, and you end up with compact files that you can easily print in the future rather than laboriously collate at a copy store one hour before the gig!

My greatest fear is losing my charts, many of which I've hand-written (I studied music manuscript in college--a dying art), or brought back from my teachers in Cuba on government-issued music paper that has a small picture of Che Guevara on the margin (see above). I also worry about giving the last copy of one to a musician on a gig and then realizing later I don't have any left. I've developed elaborate systems of hidden folders, secret bookcases and backyard burrows to safeguard my original charts. Now, with the invention of the computer and the scanner, it looks like those days are over! My only complaint is that if I scan something in wrong, say, with the first page askew, and I don't realize it until later, I seem to have to scan the whole thing in all over again (i.e., all pages of an 8-page chart). Perhaps Adobe Acrobat or some PDF editing program would let me fix a single page? Another positive is that I believe there's pretty accurate OCR on some of the new music software like Sibelius, and you can import your old charts (assuming you have $600 to buy the software, which I don't).

Anyhow, I got so obsessed with scanning charts that I was up until 4 am doing it! And I'm about to scan all my drummer charts right now. What fun!