Gruber’s 2020 Patreon Update!

Hey everyone, happy new year, hope you had a great holiday!

First of all, THANK YOU, as always, for being a part of this community. Whether you’re here for music tutorials, Pico-8 music, jazz piano articles, or good ‘ol community support, I appreciate it.  Of course, I’m always happy to hear from you.  Feel free to reach out anytime.  What are you interested in? What are you working on? 

A new year means updated goals and directions. There are a few changes I’ll be making over the coming weeks that I think will be of interest.  This includes:

• New Feedback Series
• Piano Performance Streams
• New Masterclass Schedule

Pausing MilkyTracker Tutorials – New Feedback Series!

Probably the biggest change will be to new tutorial videos.  My MilkyTracker tutorials are extremely time consuming to produce and rarely viewed.  There are two more videos left from my Let’s Create a Drum Beat series. After those have been posted I’ll be pausing my MilkyTracker tutorials.

In their place, I’ll be starting a “Feedback Series” in February, with a focus on Pico-8 and composition.  $10 patrons can send me their music (Pico-8, MilkyTracker, piano, etc.) and I’ll make 15-20min videos with commentary, feedback, and ways to improve.  If patrons aren’t currently working on music, I’ll pick random music from the Pico-8 forums. 

I’m hoping these videos will be less time consuming to produce, more spontaneous, and more relevant to everyone’s interests here.  My goal is to continue posting at least 2 videos every month, but because these will be less scripted and more spontaneous, I may be able to produce more.  We’ll see how it goes!  What do you think?

Piano Performance Streams

As you know, I’m regularly streaming my piano practice sessions.  You may also know that this doesn’t make for entertaining streams!  

Starting this week, all of my piano practice will be done off stream.  I think I over estimate how much focused, deliberate practice is necessary to improve anyways. I won’t get into the specifics, but from a time-management perspective, I think I need to “practice” less, and “play” more.

I hope this means my streams will be “nicer” to listen to.  Of course, I’m always happy to chat and answer questions, but overall, I’ll be mostly playing tunes and improvising.

New Masterclass Schedule

I’m really enjoying this format. We’ve had some interesting people share their music - everything from Pico-8, boogie woogie piano, ambient/chill EDM and video games - which has led to some fun, interesting conversations.  So, here’s the new schedule!

If you haven’t been to masterclass, I’m basically hanging out with chat, listening to music, discussing, and giving feedback (if appropriate).  If chat is quiet, I’m working on my own stuff.  But it often gets fairly busy, and I’m happy to be distracted.  Come say hello!

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Those are all the updates for now.  You can still expect to see some jazz piano articles (about once a month).  There are also some composition projects on the horizon, but I’ll share those when there’s more to show!

Happy New Year again, looking forward to 2020!!

Gruber / Chris