May 2021 - Wrap Up

Several big changes are coming!

Over the last couple of weeks and months, a few of you approached me, telling me that they are "drowning in the content" that I put up here. Obviously the rate at that I post here is overwhelming a few of you who struggle with keeping up and dedicating the time to properly read/watch/analyze/contemplate the things that I post here. I even heard about people who really liked the content but canceled their membership because they just couldn't keep up.

Now, this could be opinions of just a few people which most of you don't share but I was having a look at the access statistics as well. Especially in the $12 tier (who has the most members) it seems like people are just not keeping up with the content. The view counts on the Composition Walkthroughs are just a fraction of actual patrons who have access to this material. And while I get regular affirmations that you guys really enjoy this content, most of you seem to not be able to take it all in at the speed that I post it.

So I decided that from June on I will decrease the post frequency a bit so you have more time to take it in. This also gives me more time to tackle a few topics that are a bit more laborous. For example I was delaying the continuation of the tutorial series on orchestral voicings because I simply didn't have the time yet to prepare audio demos of voicings, as this just takes way more time than just writing a post. So with the slower posting frequency I will be able to tackle these topics better.

I can see that some people might be disappointed by this decision and I was thinking quite a lot about this. As far as I know, the background of my patrons is quite diverse. Some are working composers who don't have the time to keep up with everything and might appreciate the slow down while others are full time music students who would love to have a higher frequency of posts. It's not possible to please everybody with this decision but I think that in the grand scheme this is more beneficial for this community.

And unless you are a patron since the beginning, the already excessively large back catalog of posts and articles of this Patreon will probably give you enough to chew on for a while.

But wait, there's more!

To make it up to the people who are disappointed by this decision but also because I want to strengthen the community approach here, from now on all tiers from $5/month upwards will have Discord benefits. If you don't know what this is, you can imagine it as a private group chat with different channels. According to your tier you will get access to different channels where I try to answer your questions or hopefully engage in deeper discussions about music or simply just have a chat. For the $12 and higher tiers you will get the chance to get a short feedback on your work in progress and I will share some snippets from my work, ideas, interesting stuff and work in progress there. So it's more or less a more direct interaction. As I'm having more or less regular chats with some of you over different messengers anyway, I thought it might be a good idea to centralize that a bit. I might also in the future do some short live streams there but that's depending on how well it is received.

Your tier will automatically upgrade and you will also automatically gain access to the Discord. Here's a guide how to connect your Discord with Patreon.

I'm not entirely sure how well this will be received by you as I can also understand that some just want to passively consume the material that I post here so they might be annoyed by any "community activity" but I wanted to try it out anyway and see whether we gain some educational value by this new outlet. Just to be clear, Discord will not replace anything that I do on this Patreon but just add another way of interaction. Looking forward to seeing you there.

Also, as I would like to know a bit more about who you are (so I can also better tailor the content),and to make things a bit more fun I will add a new "Poll of the Week" here about all sorts of questions to just get a better feeling of the community here.

With Corona finally slowing down at least here in Europe, we can finally start to plan the first ORCHESTRA DISCOVERY SESSION. I already contacted the participants and we're in the stages of planning the actual session so things are moving in this regard as well. I'll keep you updated on this!

Lastly, with my latest piece OPENING THE PORTAL, I was really struggling with the Screen Recording to document this process as it was just too much for my current relatively old main machine. In fact, I even had to skip recording a few times as it simply wasn't possible to record without frying the CPU. However, as this was due anyway, I ordered a new work machine which should arrive in the next weeks and will hopefully solve this problem. I will write a dedicated post about it soon as I quite often get questions about hardware.

So quite a few changes this month. As always, if you have any concerns or critizism, let me know in the comments below or via private message!

Thanks for being my patron!

Robin