February 2021 - Wrap Up

I'm very happy to see that we keep gaining more new patrons in the last months and are now close to 100 people which is an insane number that I would have never expected to reach when I started this thing. So let me first start by welcoming everybody who's new here and thank everybody who has been supporting this patron site for a while now. I really appreciate your support!

As we're all pretty much still locked down hoping that the vaccines will finally make life easier again in the near future, it feels like things are moving slowly currently and everybody is kind of waiting for normal life to come back. I have been working on a few projects over the last weeks that kept me quite busy but quite a few of the projects that are scheduled for this year are currently in the mode of "We're waiting a few more weeks/months before we get into full production with this."

Regarding the content for this Patreon, I'm quite happy with the state that it currently is in. I'm still trying to optimise things (especially with the composition screencasts that are relatively new) but I feel that the trajectory is quite right.

When I started this a year ago, I was actually not quite sure how long I would be able to find new content that I can put up here as obviously, even the world of orchestral music is finite but by now I have accumulated a large backlog of topics that I want to cover here as I constantly keep stumbling over things that I feel are worth discussing and that I haven't seen covered in literature or anywhere else on the internet. For instance, the post I wrote last weeks about the release of notes turned from a "I should write something about these weird tied over eighth notes we keep seeing everywhere" into a relatively complex and comprehensive topic once I thought a bit more about it. So I'm hopeful that I will stumble over more topics to talk about in the forseeable future to keep this page alive.

Of course I'm also thinking about the more distant future of this page and where this eventually will go. Even only after a year there already is a huge amount of content that probably is already quite overwhelming for new subscribers and takes a lot of time to catch up with and I fear that at one point the sheer amount of content that accumulated here might even scare off people. Additionally, I personally feel that the search function of Patreon is relatively slow and it always takes a while to filter or load posts by specific tags or search terms which makes it not too enjoyable to browse through the content, especially as I would like to have a better way to sort things other than just by tagging it so I could provide something like a table of contents at the beginning for everybody to click through. I could theoretically already set up something like this in a regular post but I hope that Patreon will provide a native feature for something like a "site map" in the future.

Lastly, I want to address our first Orchestra Discovery Session that is still currently "on hold" due to obvious reasons. Unfortunately, Czech Republic and also Prague is currently hit quite heavily by the new forms of the virus with quite high numbers. I know that the studio/orchestra is still recording and also some composers go there in person but I feel that this is too much risk and struggle for a "fun" project to take so nothing else has changed at this for now but hopefully we can make plans for this soon.

Other than that I hope you're all well and healthy and that we all can enjoy a more normal life soon. Thanks again for being here!

Robin