We’ve recently had an influx of new people at the Charnwood Training Band, which is wonderful. It fills in some gaps where people had moved on and we’ve also gone from not having any French Horns (for as long as I’ve played with the group) to sometimes having three of them. One consequence though is that we need to make sure new players have music to work from.

Working with the band’s librarian, I have been developing an online system for doing this. My eureka moment this week was figuring out that I can both stop the music being available more widely than it ought to be and not bewilder players with too many choices by ask them to login with just the email address we already use for our third-party online events system. If I’ve got a table that stores their name, the section of the band they belong to and (for security) a hashed version of their email address, I can hook up the email to a suitable selection of parts. It is safe enough for our purposes and means nobody needs to remember an extra password.

Band members probably know the email addresses of some of the other members but we’d share the parts with them if they wanted anyway. Sometimes people do move from one instrument to another – I went from electric bass to tuba although, in that case, both are part of the bass section. I’ll also need to think about whether there is a similarly simple way to give certain people, like the conductor and librarian a “golden key” allowing them to see everything.

Tonight I finished the programming groundwork. Now I need to complete the data table and start filling in the gaps in what is available to share.