Daily notes about things around my music

Here I will post some notes around my music or philosophic thoughts which popped up during my creative meditations.

Composing Royalities

Reading my royality report by Swiss composer association SUISA I see a huge rise of usage of my music internationaly. Somehow the Google cooperation used my music very often and as it seems also Netflix in one case. Thats really cool. I got signed by a LA music library like 10 years ago and it looks like the music from that library made the way to those huge companies.

I love to be a composer and back in 2008 - 2012 I really pushed it hard to get into that buisness but the competition is huge since it is international. I got quite successful back in these days with many placements in Swiss TV and also ABC, BBC and many other broadcasting companies but somehow I thought the effort to get there is too big for what you get and then I decided to push for the HPCrazy YouTube channel which took off really fast in 2012 - 2015. The royalities from my composing area are still coming and I think I will try to make some free time againg for my composing. It has been a while since I produced music.

I just watched again the movie " Fabulous Baker Boys " with the wonderful jazz piano music of Dave Grusin. The movie shows the life of bar pianists in the mid 90s. That was also the time when I started my career as a pianist in all those jazz piano bars ( Splendid Bar, Widder Bar, Casa Bar and many others in Switzerland ). The film is so authentic that it brings back the memories of that time. I can almost smell the smell of cold ashes in the ashtrays after the bar closed so at 2:00 in the morning, but you stayed a little longer. The film also reminds me of how it was when people still made music for music's sake without paying too much attention to what was popular. Who knows the film, also knows the end of the story. That's where I want to start again. After years of aligning after Alogerithmen I want to make at least in the creative segment of my work (music) again what I really want. And that is also the beauty of the currently very difficult world political situation - you can actually lose nothing more.  Now is exactly the opportunity to do what you always wanted, but you perhaps did not dare, because you were too concerned about security..... it is unfortunately a known law. If you give up your freedom to gain security, you will lose both in the end. This is true on a large scale as well as on a personal level....

Here you can watch the trailer of this great movie :

 

 

 

Thoughts about new creative ways I could go.

7-string guitar

I really want to expand my sound spectrum in my music and my solo guitar playing specially with the touch technique. Doing 10 finger tapping on only 6 strings is really challenge because there is not much space left and you always need to check which strings are free. But the big disadvantage of the 7 string is in fact the tone control is not so good like on 6 strings.

An other thought - I love doing scatting but the range of my voice does not work so well on the regular open string keys - but B minor is just great and works. So I will give a try there.

Composing - Live Playing

I am checking Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Yngwie Malsteen and other players at the moment to get some inspriation for own songs or playings. Today I came to the finding that I would love to do instrumental cinematic guitar music. That would combine the best of 2 worlds - guitar sounds and cinematic sounds. Main problem I currently have is in fact my time schedules to arrange and compose the music for that. But I will send it into my creative channels and see how it evolves.

A little feedback on yesterday's concert in Seegräben. It was wonderful again. About 20 people on site and 50 online and there was once again an improvised piano concert to listen to. The piano in Seegräben does not necessarily meet the highest professional standards and the journey to Seegräben is unfortunately too arduous for many interested people because there is no connection to public transport.  But there is a reason why I always play in Seegräben. I myself once lived in Seegräben and in this church I often sat alone at the piano there and developed concepts and music, which accompany me to this day in my creative work and this piano, which is about 100 years old, is also part of the creative flow. In my opinion the creative flow is much more important than the marketing technical aspects of a concert and with the respective live broadcast the people can still be there.
What is planned for the future ? Now I finally want to integrate the guitar more into the concerts. Up to now there was not enough time to work out a new program. This is the next item on the pending list. I have ordered a new color lighting, which should dip the room more into the played color. Unfortunately it was not delivered yesterday, but I hope that the next concert on 8.12. will be the first time this lighting will be in use.