May 2020 Wrap-Up

Again, I think the first and most important thing this month is that I'm hoping that you and your loved ones are all safe and healthy.

As we all were anticipating when all this started, the creative industry (among many other branches) took a big hit worldwide over the last months. I keep reading more stories about artists and musicians who really lost most of their yearly income for 2020 and struggle quite a bit to make ends meet.

On the positive side, at least in big parts of Europe it seems like the big wave is behind us and things start to slowly open up again. In all this it is great to see that some concerts are  being played again and in spite of the weirdness that seeing musicians on stage with big distance between each other and only a handful of people in the audience, it is better than no concert at all.

Yet, this is of course only a symbolic and by no means economically viable but for now we need to see every bit of returning normalcy as victory. And it seems like we need to learn to live with this for quite a while.

As for this Patreon page, I'm very happy that the biggest part of you remained here and seem to enjoy the content that I provide here. I had a few patrons who wrote me messages that they need to reduce or pull out of my Patreon for current financial reasons, which I can totally understand. On the other hand I had alsp patrons who increased their pledge only because they like the content and want to support more. So THANK YOU again! Also, we still gained a few new members this month, not as many as the months before but this platform already exceeded my expectations by far on how well this content would be received.

There is one thing that will change on July 1st which has nothing to do with me but rather with the platform Patreon itself. You will be receiving an email by them on June 1st. Essentially, they figured out that they need to pay more sales taxes in some territories than they did until now. As far as I'm concerned, the majority of my Patrons will be not affected by this but there are a few territories and states that weren't properly charged until now who will most likely see a small increase in their fee starting from July. I have nothing to do with this increase as it will not have any influence on what Patreon pays out so if you want to direct your frustration about it anywhere (in case you are affected), please write angry emails to Patreon and not to me :) In any case, I hope you find the content that I provide here worth to spend about max 10% more than you currently do in case you are affected. If you would prefer to terminate your patronage, I can totally understand as well and thank you for your support! As I said, you will receive a separate email from Patreon in the next few days telling you whether you are affected. The changes will take effect on July 1st, so you have a month to think about it in any case.

Now what to expect on here in June? As expected there are now new orchestra recordings that I recorded in May as well as no projects that I can share but it seems like a few new projects are lining up that would be worth sharing with you guys.

However, I have a lot of material that I want to write about.  Of course, I will continue with the Compositon Walkthroughs for Hero as well as the Tutorial Series about Voicings. There are also a few more multi-part tutorials that I have in the pipeline as well as more multitrack downloads to experiment with. So there's a lot of new material coming up in the next weeks.

I received a few message over the last weeks that told me that the technical aspect I was talking about here was a bit advanced and they wished for a few more basic coverages of it which is what I'll try to incorporate a bit more in the future. However, after doing this Patreon for a few months now, I think the it starts to fill a gap that I see a lot with online education. There is a huge amount of content out there that covers basic things for people who just start out but a tremendous shortage of content that is more advanced which I hope to cover here.

However, I'm not entirely sure if you all agree on this. So I've set up a little poll which you can find in the post below to find out what you think about this issue. Please spare a second and cast your vote.