Lee Wilson The only reason I suggested Skyrim is the sheer number of views on YouTube compared to your other videos (Skyrim = 5 million+, closest otherwise is He's a Pirate at ~3 million). I have no data on album sales, etc. so obviously you are a better judge of what's your popular music. I was simply suggesting saving the most popular (whatever that may be) for last, that's all :) I did like Bolero, actually, and I understand your reasoning. It's a tough call, but here's a point you may not realize - only people who are really skilled in the violin can tell if something is your most technically brilliant or not ;) To the rest of us, it all pretty much sounds equally amazing from a technical viewpoint, so all we can judge on is if we actually like the song or not. When I was a young programmer, I used to spend a lot of time tweaking and rewriting code to make it the most elegant it could be. I would show off these little programming gems to fellow programmers and they'd ooh and ahh appropriately. When my manager asked why I was taking so long to do some code, I answered with engineer babble about refactoring and trying to get better efficiency and all that. He agreed that these were important things, but then asked "does it work as is?". "Well, of course it does", I replied. "Then check it in and move on to the next task", he said, which frustrated me immensely. Then he gave me a little gem of knowledge that has helped me greatly over the years. He said (and I paraphrase): Only other programmers are ever going to see or understand your code. The end user only cares about how fun the game is - not how technically brilliant the code behind it is. Yes, you are amazingly skilled in playing the violin and I think we all admire how talented you are. For me, though, I care more about which songs you choose to play and how well I like them. The fact that you play them brilliantly makes the songs even better, but I don't have enough skill to judge the technical merits. I just know 1) it sounds great, 2) I like the song. Looking at your YouTube most popular is actually interesting in itself to me - your top 5 are all of songs that people LOVE anyway. Not terribly surprising, really, but it does suggest that people listen to songs they like - if the artist playing them is brilliant, that's a great bonus, but I suspect that even the most brilliant and technically flawless performance will still flop if people don't actually like the choice of song :) ALL of your songs are ones that I like, but I'll be honest - I like some more than others :) As for the Game of Thrones, yeah, I can understand (and agree with) your reasoning behind not playing it. I was just kind of excited about the new season and the song was on my mind. No big deal. Anyway, please don't think that I'm criticizing you in any way, Taylor. I think what you're doing is tremendously difficult and scary and I admire you for doing it, especially with a notoriously harsh audience like Youtube. All I'm trying to do is help with the best advice I know of - it's your job to accept or reject it :) In any case, I'm proud to help support you, and even more so after I saw you live (in fact, I more than doubled my pledge after that show!) Keep on playing them wicked tunes :)

April 10, 2014 23:57:31 · Reply

Lee Wilson Well, so much for formatting in that block o' text. Sorry about that. No idea how to make it pay attention to line breaks to make readable paragraphs. :/

April 10, 2014 23:58:30 · Reply

Taylor Davis Wow thanks so much for that Ed, that's so nice and I really appreciate it :) I definitely hope that I have the chance to do another SF show again in the future too! :D

April 10, 2014 23:29:01 · Reply