I began publishing relaxdaily music on YouTube back in 2011. Today, many wonderful people all over the web, like maybe you, too, enjoy what I do on a regular basis, which makes me a very happy person!
The internet and its most successful platforms are a tremendously wonderful thing. For me, YouTube and SoundCloud, among many others, are wonderful places to share my work and connect with music fans. This is so much cooler than the super narrow programmed TV and radio channels of past decades. No one could ever imagine the tens of thousands of YouTube channels that would arise and be truly helpful to their audiences only 20 years ago. Respect for the makers of those platforms for connecting us.
What makes me wonder though, is that somehow someone forgot to implement a sustainable support mechanism for the majority of creators, be it on YouTube, on SoundCloud, or on so many other places on the web. Because the free access against advertisement and even the subscription model simply does not generate a sustainable income for the majority of independent creators, even though they enrich the lives of oftentimes large audiences. Income is a wonderful thing though. It allows us creators to focus on and develop our craft and to create more beauty.
That’s where Patreon comes in. Patreon is one of the planet’s most trusted places where fans can help funding their favorite creators' projects. Entertainment projects, educational projects, podcasters, philosophers, painters, music creators and so many other creators find fan support here on Patreon.
With this Patreon page, I invite you to join me on my musical journey and become part of the inner circle of my personal supporters. Your support helps me to continue creating the best music I am capable of. One tune at a time. During our journey together I'll share what happens behind the scenes, how I develop this project, you can message me with your ideas, and most likely you'll hear one or the other beautiful creation that might make you smile, or make you feel relaxed, knowing that your contribution made this possible :)
Michael Fesser - music creator
(a.k.a. the kid who still believes "I can do this better. I can create music that sounds different than the one I hear on the radio.")
...If you want to know a little more about my musical journey so far - here’s a story of a kid who just couldn't do otherwise but to create music on his own:
I was about 9 or 10 when I first discovered a musical instrument that really meant something to me. It was a white keyboard a friend was playing when I visited him at his house one day after school that made me tremendously curious: That sound, all of those different sounds that came from this white box at once: A single human can trigger this? I mean, I heard someone playing the church organ before, I knew how a simple tune on the piano sounded, but I never saw someone hitting a few keys and such a rich and colorful soundscape would come out of a device. Looking back, this probably was one key experience that helped to spark my passion for creating music.
After listening to music more carefully, mostly on the radio and cassettes back then, at some point, a bold feeling came over me. I simply thought: "In this radio program I’m listening to right now, there was no really cool tune for an about one hour now. I can do this better. I can create music that sounds better to my ears than what I hear on the radio."
There it was. Bam!
I was still a kid, and I didn’t know anything about recording and music creation. I could only play two melodies and three chords on a keyboard, but somehow felt I could create music, too. It would only be a matter of time.
We didn’t have the means for an acoustic piano, and maybe I was already looking for more diversity in sound, so my parents and I decided for a 2nd hand electric organ. We started with one, upgraded to another, a better one - I remember upgrades usually happened on Xmas, with me happily adding a few hundred bucks from my saved money to the get a new tool - instruments are more expensive than a pair of socks, and we were 4 kids... At some point, there was a portable keyboard around - a box with a few hundred sounds and standard rhythms. But after a while, I wasn’t interested much in using those prefabricated rhythms. They sounded OK. Well done. But also kind of “standard”, like from a past era, somehow not that artsy, ...and I guess just not my own. So I continued my musical journey.
I experimented a little with electric guitars and saved up for something that was called a synthesizer workstation. A pretty expensive keyboard-ish box that would let me record musical ideas and arrangements of up to 16 tracks simultaneously (a tune composed of 16 different musical lines). I recorded hundreds of little musical ideas each year, to get closer to my own sound. But I wasn't there yet.
Driven by my thirst to grow, and after my dad won an Apple laptop for me in a local giveaway (he used to put his kids' names in those giveaways, and I was the lucky one this time!), I started installing and playing around with music software on a computer. Not sure if this was the most straightforward way to get to it, but years into my musical journey, I finally discovered what is known today as a DAW, a digital audio workstation, which is basically a set of hardware and software tools that can be used by musicians to create music as professional sounding as the mind of the user allows.
I wouldn’t call myself a computer or electronic musician. The computer (it can also be an iPhone, an iPad or a laptop) and its software replaced the once more or less necessary million dollar music studio - tools like a big, heavy, expensive and today mostly unnecessary mixing console, many, many devices for sound shaping and expensive sounds tools (spaces, microphones, drums, pianos, …). All of that is translated into code today. Code you can store on the size of a coin and that can be run on a tiny computing device.
Today I create music on a laptop. I use a good external audio interface, a pair of good headphones and as input tools a keyboard for playing and recording most of my musical ideas, and a guitar to add another color to my music.
It took me many years from the day I first started experimenting with my own simple "compositions" until I got the feeling "now I’m at a point at which I can start sharing music with the world". The path to get there wasn’t a quick and easy one, but also not an unearthly demanding one. I simply followed my inner voice and the dream of being able to create music I myself and others would enjoy.
I'm looking forward to discovering new worlds of sound together with you!