My Steem Story - by @partitura

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MY STEEM STORY

A Power House Creatives Initiative

Everyone has a story – and all our stories have something in common… we all started from nothing and knew nothing. People want to hear stories. They want to hear OUR stories — they want to know who we are, where we are from, what we are doing, who and what we love, what we have learnt and where we are going. People also want us to hear their story! Being a part of the Steem network is an individual journey for every single one of us and through this initiative we will share our stories not only with all who are already here – hopefully inspiring, guiding and informing them… but doing the same for everyone else in the world too. Through our stories we will prick the curiosity of those who have not yet arrived and illuminate and widen the already open doors to our one in a million blockchain.

We invite and encourage each and every one of you to participate and share your stories too! You can find the "how to" details at the end of this post.

MY STEEM STORY - BY @partitura

I was invited by @bengy to participate in this initiative of the Power House Creatives collective. The rules for the post are a bit strict (see below), so I hope they give enough room for my story. I am not much of a writer anyway, so I'll just start with inviting some of my fellow organists to participate in this initiative:

@organduo
@tormus1958
@jeremyowens9501
@michaelcalabris
@drugelis

And I would include @contrabourdon as well if he wasn't already invited.

Where My Steem Journey Began

What eventually led me here was that I started a website, 5 years ago, called Partitura Organum (http://partitura.org). On that website I publish newly typeset scores of (mostly) unknown organ music. I typeset the music from the original manuscript sources, available online as digital copies. The copyrights on these digital copies of manuscripts is pretty tight: no commercial activities allowed, and always ask for prior permission before publishing material based on these manuscripts.

The work I do for my website is a work of love for the music, and a bit out of principal as well. The music of Bach, Buxtehude, Franck, Mendelsohn, Reger, etcetc hardly needs promoting, as they are well known (at least in the community of organists). They are the pinnacle of the organ music literature. And because people look at the high summits of creative musical ability, they often forget that the slopes leading up to those pinnacles can be beautiful as well. There is a wealth of beautiful music, that is ignored because it was not composed by Bach of by Buxtehude. In quality it is often not much less than the music of these great masters. The 'litlle' masters are forgotten, though their music is not 'little' at all.

So I create new scores of the music of these forgotten masters and publish them on my website. Some of the compositions available there, are unique and not available elsewhere, not even commercially. I dare say that in the 5 years since I started this website, it has become a valuable resource for organists world wide.

Because of the licensing of the source material, and because it is my intention that this music should be available as widely as possible, all scores on my website are free for download.

I devote a lot of time and attention to the creation of these scores. Perhaps because I come from a family of printers and publishers, I will not publish anything that does not look good. Scores have one single purpose: they are meant to play music from, and should therefore be as readable as possible. And it takes time to not just enter the notes, but to create a readable page lay-out as well.

It would be nice if I could make a litlle money out of all this activity. Sadly, that's not possible without asking money for the scores, and that's precily the thing I don't want to do. And then, two years ago, I stumbled across Steem.

The potential to get rewarded for just posting, was appealing. Perhaps I could make a tiny little money from my publishing efforts by cross posting on Steem. And there you have it: I came here for the money.

My Initial Challenges

I really did not understand Steem at all, in the beginning. Staking, upvoting, resteeming, it was all completely foreign to me. I remember pushing the upvote button a few times and thinking: "okay, and now what happens?". And by the looks of it, nothing happened. So, I just forgot about all that. I cross posted my publications on Steem, saw that it earned a few cents every now and then, and was happy with that.


If you don't expect much, it's hard to get disappointed.

Than after 10 months or so, one of my postings got picked up by one of the curation trails, and suddenly the reward was about 20 times higher than I had previously seen on one of my posts. And I realised that even with a niche product like new scores of unknown organ music, it was possible to attract some attention. Though it does take time and patient persistence.

My Steem Blockchain Knowledge

When I came here, I knew nothing about blockchain technology. To me "blockchain" was just a buzzword, that everyone seemed to talk about, without really understanding what is was. And if I'm completely honest, I still have a very vague grasp of what blockchain technology is. I think I understand some of the basics of it (blocks get produced, the chain is immutable, information is preserved in a garantueed way), but fail to grasp the economics of it and the visions of a better world blockchain technology is going to bring. In essence nothing has really changed since I started posting on Steem: I just happily publish my organ music related stuff without really understanding blockchain.

My Steem Favourites

I am fairly single sided in my contributions here: music, music, music. And nothing much else. It won't be a surprise that my favorites here revolve around (classical) music as well. I mainly use steempeak.com as interface for reading and writing, and steemworld.org as information source for my account. They are both valuable resources.

My Golden Nugget Advice

I think the most important thing for new Steemians is to be patient. Don't expect too much in terms of response or rewards. You'll only get disappointed. From my experience it takes time to familiarize yourself with the platform, and to let the platform know you exist. Equally important is to be genuine: write about what you find interesting and not about what you think might attract a lot of attention or rewards. Again: you'll only get disappointed.

My Steem Hood & Its Peeps

This is probably a language thingy, I don't really understand what is meant by "my steem hood" (hood? what hood? like in Robin Hood?). So, I'll just concentrate on the peeps.

The most important aspect for me in the last 10 months has been @organduo's community "Secrets of Organ Playing". And specifically his weekly contest. I started participating in his contest 10 months ago. And it has been of enormous importance for my development as an organist.

To enter you have to make a recording of yourself playing something. And when I started the camera stress was huge. By consistenly perticipating week after week I have been able to overcome that camera stress. And as a result of that I have become a better performer. It's not only that I learned to play at my usual level when the camera is active, I feel that my level of playing has risen as well. Probably something with feeling more freedom in expression, or less fear for the fact that people are listening, watching and (probably) judging.

The community of organists may be small here on Steem (maybe 10 or so), they are very active and supportive. In the real world of family and friends I am about the only one who even likes organ music. So it's nice that here on Steem I am not alone in my niche...



GENERAL INSTRUCTION:

  1. Create a post titled: “My Steem Story – By @your.user.name

  2. The first three tags in order are to be as follows:
    #hive-114105
    #powerhousecreatives
    #mysteemstory

  3. ONLY make use of the cover image provided in this post.

  4. Keep the same formatting and placement (intro, footer, instructions etc.)

  5. Replace the personal photo with one of your own.

  6. Tag 5 people to join in on the initiative.

  7. Share your post to twitter.

  8. Share your twitter link and Steem post link in the comments of @jaynie’s “Steem Story” post.

POST INSTRUCTIONS:
Write a post which shares and gives adequate response to the following headings:

Where my Steem Journey began
(How you first discovered Steem and your very first thoughts and impressions “as you landed”.)

My initial challenges & how I overcame them
(Share a bit about the difficulties you faced at the beginning, whether it was navigation, post creation, engagement – whatever – how you resolved them and how differently you feel about it now)

My Steem blockchain knowledge
(Give a little bit of background on your blockchain knowledge when you began your Steem journey versus now.)

My Steem favourites
(What are the things you do mostly on the blockchain – is it blogging, vlogging? What front ends do you like to make use of and what content genre’s do you generally focus on?)

My golden nugget advice
(What advice would you offer to those that are unfamiliar or new to this space)

My Steem hood & its peeps
(Share a little about the communities you belong to, discord servers you frequent and perhaps a handful of the awesome people you follow)



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Great story and history of your time here on Steem. I've been here for just over a year now. I'll think about writing a post like this if I have some free time. Now that communities are here (still getting my head around it), I wish Contrebombarde would come now! There are plenty more organists that need to join the Steem blockchain.

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Yes, communities are a bit confusing. This post, for example, does not show up in in my own profile, only in hive-114105. That way it is easy to lose track of one's own posts...
Contrebombarde would be a great candidate for SMT, with an own coin for the recommendations. As I understand it a website can do that wihout the members having to create a Steem account. But I could be wrong.

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I think in Steempeak you can show all posts by a user. I'll get my head around it once I start using it more. There's an Organ Music community that I created where you can repost into (is that the correct term?).

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(Edited)

I think in Steempeak you can show all posts by a user. I'll get my head around it once I start using it more. There's an Organ Music community that I created where you can repost into (is that the correct term?).

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I think in Steempeak you can show all posts by a user. I'll get my head around it once I start using it more. There's an Organ Music community that I created where you can repost into (is that the correct term?).

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I think in Steempeak you can show all posts by a user. I'll get my head around it once I start using it more. There's an Organ Music community that I created where you can repost into (is that the correct term?).

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I think in Steempeak you can show all posts by a user. I'll get my head around it once I start using it more. There's an Organ Music community that I created where you can repost into (is that the correct term?).

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I crossposted it to your organ music community and it seems the rewards starts counting at zero. It is now 1.59 here and 0.02 in that community. This is going to be complicated...

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And to aff further complexity: I can vote on it here, and in that community. Doest that community pay out in Steem as well?

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I don't get the rewards regarding cross posting either. It seems that cross posting creates a new post with the same content in the community. The original author gets a percentage as well as the community. Of course, you can post directly in the community as well. You can access all your posts from here:

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Ah, I overlooked that tiny little button. Thanks!

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It would be wonderful to read your story :)

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I am really happy You came to Steem! @laputis and I continue to be amazed at your growing skills as an organist. I believe you should be able to make a living while recording organ music. Hopefully Steem, Creary and Spotify will help you achieve this sooner rather than later.

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Now there's a dream to live for! It 's a bit like the motto of your website: if you keep playing, miracles can happen!

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Thank you for this. I’ll have to put my thoughts together and post something.

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Great that you joined this! @contrabourden and @remlaps and I are starting to get the Classical-Music community up and running.

Subscribe to the community: https://steempeak.com/c/hive-193961/created or https://steemit.com/created/hive-193961

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I already joined. Probably the first subscriber. If you need help with the community I'll be happy to help setting it up.

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Thanks! At the moment it is just getting the word out to people who might be interested (tell the organists!). We might end up needing a few more people to hide spam/plagiarism but at the moment it is pretty clean!

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A lovely introduction to something I know little to nothing about, I am aware musicians battle to get up and running, I did look down the comments and feel you will find a happy home with @bengy

Thanks for participating, we are meeting many people with such wonderful interesting talents on the platform.

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Thanks. Organ music is a bit of a niche, but the struggle of musicians to get noticed is universal.

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I am fairly single sided in my contributions here: music, music, music.

hahahaha!!! Well there is bsolutely nothing wrong with that! It sound like it is something that you are incredibly passionate about and when we follow our passions, our lives unfold as they should! It is really great that you found a space where you can continue to share your loves and also get positively rewarded for it!

This was a great story and a wonderful contribution to the My Steem Story initiative! Thank you for taking part!

!tip

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