August 2021 - Wrap Up

With summer coming to an end (at least here in Germany), things are becoming busy again. In fact, behind the scenes, this Patreon has been very busy in the last weeks.

In just a few days we will have our very first ORCHESTRA DISCOVERY SESSION in Prague! We will be recording pieces for Woodwind Quintet by five of our patrons with some excellent musicians at Smecky Studios, Prague. The five composers and I have been working tirelessly on our pieces over the last weeks with a lot of feedback rounds and with leaving comfort zones. But I have to say that it was worth the struggle and we have some excellent pieces lined up with a very wide range of styles and approaches so it's really exciting to see how this will all come to life.

Even better is that four of the composers will make it to Prague personally to be there and experience their music coming to life, watching the musicians play and taking influence on the performance. So it will also become a nice way to meet up and nerd out about music in the wonderful city of Prague.

And best of all: we all documented the process of how these pieces came to life, what thoughts we had and how they developed into their final state. This will be published bit by bit on here as well as the final recordings so you all will be able to have an insight into this process.

If this all goes well and with more people hopefully joining this Patreon I hope to be able to do regular sessions like this with varying (and growing) line-ups as I feel like first hand experiences are way more beneficial than just reading about it. So let's hope this is just the beginning of a series of sessions as I really enjoy doing things like that way more than just putting out content to a passively consuming crowd :)

In the last couple of weeks, I was also addressing some urban myths in the composer's world with the Polls of the Week with some very interesting results. Of course they are not representative but we can state that:

Most of you can and do work remotely from where their clients are but a lot of you still say that physical location plays a role. In general however, at least the people who are on here tend to be more the "generation internet" with a growing development towards remote work which is also what I have observed over the last years. The younger clients that I have are way more happy with remote interaction while older clients rather prefer to work face to face.

On tight deadlines, you have mixed views. Most voted that they can sometimes make you more inspired and sometimes cripple your creativity. Quite a few also said that deadlines don't influence their output quality.

We got very interesting results on the poll how much output you guys have per day with an average of about 1 minute a day. Nobody went beyond 4 minutes and quite a few say that they stay below 30 seconds a day. 

Most of you still rely on stationary desktop machines for their work, most often even a mixed use machine with a few people using a dedicated machine. Slave setups are not really popular with you guys with only two votes for Desktop + 1 slave machine.

Most inconclusive was yesterday's poll about how Covid affected your work with the extremes on both ends getting a lot of votes but also "no difference" getting a lot of votes. So the general statement that Covid made life worse for people working in the arts is obviously not true, at least regarding the people on here. A few people shared their personal story in the comments with postive and negative sides of how their life was impacted. For everybody who is struggling, I keep my fingers crossed that we are back on the path to normality and things will improve again.

I mentioned it already last month but it seems like the flood of new online courses about music doesn't end. Unfortunately (as expected) some people try to use it as a cash cow. I recently saw a composer coming out with a course  that contained about 3 hours of video material and only very general coverage of the topics with an asking price of USD 500. 

Cases like this in my opinion put a bad light on the online music educational sector of which I see myself part of and it is frustrating to see how some people feel like this whole thing is a nice way to make some money on the side without investing much effort. 

As a little reminder: we do have a Discord server as well where we have discussions and talk about music related things and have a more direct way of interaction. Currently, 25 of you are already on there, some as passive readers but quite a few actively in the discussions, which is great to see. If you want to join the fun, you just need to connect your Patreon account to Discord and you will be automatically added to the server.

Lastly, I want to thank you all for being part of this community. For everybody who will not be in Prague for the Orchestra Discovery Session, I will make sure to post a few pictures and snippets so you can at least join virtually!

Robin