For ensembles
One shelf, one schedule, and nobody conscripted.
A choir, a string quartet, a jazz band, a worship team: whatever you play in, the parts are scattered across email and the RSVPs live in a group text. This is one place for the music and the rehearsals, where people join by saying yes. Free, and it needs no teacher.
The problem
The parts are in six inboxes, in three versions.
Every volunteer group runs on the same tangle: attachments nobody can find, a group thread that buries the one message that mattered, and two people rehearsing different editions for two weeks before anyone notices.
- The music lives in attachments, which means it lives in whatever version each person happened to save.
- The schedule lives in a thread, so "who do I have on Thursday" is a question you ask by scrolling.
- Nobody chose to be in the group text; they were added, and that is the whole problem with being added to things.
A familiar week
I email the parts out, half the section prints an old version, and the chat is twelve messages deep by the time anyone answers whether they are coming Thursday.
The shelf
One library the whole group reads from.
Share a piece with the ensemble and everyone in it reads the same edition. No attachment, no version drift, no wondering whether the person next to you has the right one.
- Share a piece with the group once and it is on everyone’s shelf, in one edition.
- A member who leaves loses access; the shared piece stays for everyone still in the group.
- Public domain and original material is the fit here; licensed and rented parts are not, because files sit at public web addresses.
Membership
People join by saying yes, and leave when they want.
Being added to a group exposes you to its roster and its music, so it cannot be done to you. Membership is an invitation until you accept it, exactly like a teaching relationship.
- An invitation grants nothing until it is accepted. A pending invitee sees nothing of the group and the group sees nothing of them.
- The creator of a group is a member of it from the start, since they are the one asking.
- Invite one person at a time by email, or share a single join link with the whole section. Rotating the link instantly retires any copy that has spread too far.
What the creator controls
- Invite a member by email; they join only by accepting.
- Remove a member. The creator cannot be removed, and only the creator removes others.
- A declined invitation can be sent again later; declining blocks nothing.
- Any member may leave at any time, without asking.
The schedule
Rehearsals people RSVP to, in one place.
Put the rehearsal on a calendar, invite the group, and see who accepted, declined, or is on the fence. It answers who you have on Thursday without you scrolling a thread to find out.
- Each event carries an attendee list with four states: accepted, declined, tentative, and no answer yet.
- Events are typed: a rehearsal, a performance, a group class, and so on.
- Adding someone to an event emails them to RSVP, and a reminder goes out the day before. There is still no sync to an outside calendar, and a weekly rehearsal is entered one date at a time.
Practice
Members can log against the group. Nobody watches.
A player can attribute a practice session to the ensemble for their own records. That is the whole of it: no leader and no other member sees anyone’s practice log, ever.
- Tagging a session with the ensemble is a note a member keeps for themselves.
- It is attribution, not sharing: the log stays private to the person who wrote it.
- If you wanted a dashboard of who practiced what, this is not that, and it is not going to pretend to be.
What no one can see
- A member’s practice log, to any other member or to the leader.
- Who has opened a piece of shared music.
- Any activity feed or roll-up of what the group has been doing.
Running the group
The parts of the evening a leader actually does.
Past the shelf and the schedule, the creator has the handful of tools a section leader reaches for. All of it optional, all of it entered by hand.
- An announcement is the leader talking to the group, not a chat: members read it, they do not reply in a thread.
- Attendance is entered by hand and seen only by the organizer of that event. Nothing is tracked automatically.
- A join link and per-member parts cover a section; a whole orchestra of stands is more than this reaches for.
What the creator can run
- Post an announcement to the whole group; every member is emailed a copy.
- Assign each member a part and a stand, shown on the roster.
- Record attendance after a rehearsal, present or absent, per person.
- Set the order of the shared music and leave a note on any piece.
Scope
What this does not do, said plainly.
A group tool that pretends to be a whole back office wastes your evening twice. Here is the boundary before you move anyone onto it.
- It is free because there is no billing system, not because a price is waiting behind a trial.
- A piece belongs to one ensemble at a time; a group that overlaps with another shares by inviting the same people, not by filing one piece in two shelves.
- It is new, and it is a small independent project. Say so before you ask a section to rely on it.
Not built
- Storage safe for licensed or rented parts; uploaded files sit at public URLs.
- Sync to Google or Apple calendars; events and RSVPs live in the app.
- Recurring events; a weekly rehearsal is still entered one date at a time.
- Parts tied to a specific score; a member has one part for the group, not one per piece.
- A mobile app; it runs in a browser.
Questions a group leader actually asks
Short answers, and the honest ones where the answer is no.
- No to both. Any account can create an ensemble, invite the members, and share music with the group. There is no teacher anywhere in that flow, and there is no billing system to hit. A quartet of four peers runs it exactly the way a choir of thirty does.
- Either. The choice sets which authoring tools you see, and it does not gate ensembles at all: you can create a group and invite members whichever you pick. If you only ever run a group, student is the simpler pick.
- Two ways, both consent-first. Invite someone by the email address of an account that already exists and they get an email inviting them to accept. Or turn on a shared join link and send it to the whole section: anyone signed in who opens it joins by clicking. Either way the person acts themselves, so nobody is added to a group, and shown its roster and its music, without agreeing to it. Rotate the link and any copy that has spread too far stops working.
- They lose access to the group and its shared music. The shelf itself stays: a piece someone shared with the ensemble remains for everyone who is still in it, and the person who uploaded a file still owns that file. Leaving removes a member’s access, not the group’s library.
- Honestly, it is a poor fit. Uploaded files sit at public web addresses, so anyone holding the link can open one regardless of the sharing setting; the sharing levels govern who discovers a piece in the app, not who can open a leaked URL. That is fine for public domain and original material and wrong for licensed octavos or rented orchestral parts. Keep those where you keep them now.
- No practice, and that is deliberate. A member can tag a practice session to the group for their own records, but no leader and no other member ever sees anyone else’s practice log, and there is no read-receipt on the music. The one thing a leader does see is attendance at events they run, and only because they entered it by hand after the rehearsal. Nothing is tracked automatically.
Start a group and share one piece.
Make an ensemble, invite a couple of people, and put the next rehearsal on the calendar. That is the whole of getting started.