December 2005 – the Winter Olympics are approaching and the Austrian broadcasting corporation ORF wants to have some fresh tracks produced.

The 3 of us (my 2 co-producers and me) go to work. I do my teaching and then spend the remaining hours of my days producing tracks to meet the ridiculous deadline so that our material would end up in the roster for the broadcasting.

We get great feedback on our tracks, but when we watch the Olympics we don’t hear any of them.

Apparently something didn’t work as expected with the new upload/online access system the broadcasting corporation was testing and the reporting crews in the field ended up using tracks they already had on their local drives or on CDs.

What’s a setback like this when you are young, having fun, learning a lot and now your foot’s in the TV door?

Nothing, so we continue.

We produce more tracks, actually, a ton of tracks. The feedback gets more enthusiastic with each release as well.

We catch our tracks on TV. You turn on the telly and there’s a slow motion summary of the Kitzbühel ski race (arguably the biggest skiing event after an Olympic or World Championship race) and in the background there’s your music providing the sound track for the winner jumping down the Mausefalle.

Awesome.

So, we’ll be rolling in the dough come royalty payment time, right?

Continue Reading…

Back in the stone age of the pre-digital era when I started with piano lessons, a metronome was a weird device.

First you had to turn a key mechanism at the back of the device – like in a music box to wind it up. And there was a small weight attached to a pendulum where you could set the tempo by adjusting where the weight thingie would snap into place on that pendulum-like stick.

The lower you put the weight, the faster the metronome ticked.

And all those Italian terms engraved onto the backplate to help you set the tempo to the desired speed sounded so exotic and suave – Adagio, Andante, Allegro, Presto, etc…

Even as a kid I could appreciate the craftsmanship and the thought that went into this little contraption.

But once you had to practice with that damn thing, the relationship turned sour rather quickly. It had the annoying habit to change tempo on you. In easy passages it always got slower, while in difficult passages it increased the tempo “forcing” you to mess up.

A device constructed by the devil, indeed. 😉

But we all know that developing good timing is essential and well worth the pains you have to go through. So, a love/hate relationship with metronomes, is that what it boils down to?

Continue Reading…