I jumped into stage managing ballet about two years ago after many years of working with stage and musical theatre and it was certainly a challenge compounded by the fact that I usually see one, maybe two rehearsals before we hit the theatre. As you may have gathered from here, there really isn't any one way to prepare your calling sheets, just do whatever you need in order to call the show correctly.
Our company performs to track and sometimes to live music, both of which requires a different technique. With tracks, what I do is load all the cues into my Macbook running Q-Lab, and I actually trigger the cues myself from backstage. I can use the time on the track along with the waveform display to call certain cues, and use visuals for other cues, it all depends. It is very important that you have your sound guy running a parallel CD just in case, but Q-Lab has never failed me. I built myself an illuminated GO button that makes it super easy
With live music, just like musical theatre, the conductor is your friend, and many cues can be taken from them. I will write down the times from run throughs for each cue, but with live music of course they will never be accurate so I use those times as a guide, letting me know how long I have approximately until the next cue
Though at first it was stressful, I've always had an ear for music and really like dance, so I've found my calling it seems, no pun intended
J\