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How I do it
Jun. 15th, 2024 02:25 pmOne of my goals for water fitness is to do a new playlist almost every time, at least in my own class. If I'm subbing? I'll probably just choose one of my playlists I created for that week. The first time I subbed in Everett, I did an alternate version of the playlist from the day before, but just swapped in a favorite track I really wanted to do but wasn't sure Marysville was ready for.
What an incredible mashup! I think it's better than any of the songs it's made from, even my favorite of them.
There's really no reason to think my process for playlists would be different from how I do just about everything else, which is in spreadsheets. The first tab is my playlists tab where I keep lists of songs I want to use and their lengths in the first columns, one set for faster ones and one for slower ones. Lengths are done with decimals instead of seconds for easy adding, so four and a half minutes is 4.5. I constantly have to divide seconds by 60 on a calculator to figure that part out.
After that I have a playlist template column, followed by where I create the playlist. When it's time to make a new one, I insert columns so the most recent one is visible on the screen and I can scroll to the right to go back in time. Using all that, it's pretty easy to plan out a playlist, using autosum during the process to ensure it's an hour long.
I use YouTube music for playback during class, so the next step is to recreate the playlist on YouTube and open it in the music app to double check the length and then hit download to ensure all the tracks are available for offline playing. If everything's fine there, I go back to the spreadsheet, copy that playlist, and paste it into the routines tab. Cells get inserted, moves get pasted or typed in. I've got a pretty solid routine I'm doing right now but I still make the individual sheets because I want to be open to new stuff.
Once I'm happy with the routine, I copy it and paste it as plain text into Word. The document gets narrow margins, landscape layout, and two columns. Everything's single space, and I add spaces to break up each song, the title of which gets bolded. I make the font as big as possible while keeping to two pages so it prints on one sheet, and make sure the time to flip it over happens at a handy point like a break. Then I laminate it because I'm totally convinced that if I don't, I'll drop one in the pool.
Then I add 15 minutes of other songs after class so the music keeps going while I put everything away and wrap things up. I also have a pre-class playlist because I take over the speaker 15 minutes before class starts.
The spreadsheet has a few more tabs. One called Ideas where I can work things out such as when I planned what to do for that song above. There's a tab I call the Sorter where I can occasionally copy a column of songs from the first tab, alphabetize it, and paste it back in. And finally there's a tab for Tabata interval training songs. There just aren't that many of them so they don't deserve their own column on the main sheet.
Strangely the most challenging thing is the TV theme songs I use for my three scheduled breaks during the routine. So many TV themes are too quiet compared to the other tracks but the main issue is that most aren't available for offline playing in the music app.
Some instructors will just put a station on and wing it and the idea totally stresses me out. But I can see why people would read about how I do it and then not want to do all that.
What an incredible mashup! I think it's better than any of the songs it's made from, even my favorite of them.
There's really no reason to think my process for playlists would be different from how I do just about everything else, which is in spreadsheets. The first tab is my playlists tab where I keep lists of songs I want to use and their lengths in the first columns, one set for faster ones and one for slower ones. Lengths are done with decimals instead of seconds for easy adding, so four and a half minutes is 4.5. I constantly have to divide seconds by 60 on a calculator to figure that part out.
After that I have a playlist template column, followed by where I create the playlist. When it's time to make a new one, I insert columns so the most recent one is visible on the screen and I can scroll to the right to go back in time. Using all that, it's pretty easy to plan out a playlist, using autosum during the process to ensure it's an hour long.
I use YouTube music for playback during class, so the next step is to recreate the playlist on YouTube and open it in the music app to double check the length and then hit download to ensure all the tracks are available for offline playing. If everything's fine there, I go back to the spreadsheet, copy that playlist, and paste it into the routines tab. Cells get inserted, moves get pasted or typed in. I've got a pretty solid routine I'm doing right now but I still make the individual sheets because I want to be open to new stuff.
Once I'm happy with the routine, I copy it and paste it as plain text into Word. The document gets narrow margins, landscape layout, and two columns. Everything's single space, and I add spaces to break up each song, the title of which gets bolded. I make the font as big as possible while keeping to two pages so it prints on one sheet, and make sure the time to flip it over happens at a handy point like a break. Then I laminate it because I'm totally convinced that if I don't, I'll drop one in the pool.
Then I add 15 minutes of other songs after class so the music keeps going while I put everything away and wrap things up. I also have a pre-class playlist because I take over the speaker 15 minutes before class starts.
The spreadsheet has a few more tabs. One called Ideas where I can work things out such as when I planned what to do for that song above. There's a tab I call the Sorter where I can occasionally copy a column of songs from the first tab, alphabetize it, and paste it back in. And finally there's a tab for Tabata interval training songs. There just aren't that many of them so they don't deserve their own column on the main sheet.
Strangely the most challenging thing is the TV theme songs I use for my three scheduled breaks during the routine. So many TV themes are too quiet compared to the other tracks but the main issue is that most aren't available for offline playing in the music app.
Some instructors will just put a station on and wing it and the idea totally stresses me out. But I can see why people would read about how I do it and then not want to do all that.
