In this episode of Madsen's Musings, I discuss finding a community of peers to get honest reviews and feedback.
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A transcript is provided below the video.

Hey guys, Nate Madsen here.

I have a couple of days before Inside-Outside retreat, I've been doing a tonne of work on my horn and practising, as you can tell by the chaos on my piano (camera pans to show a mess of sheet music).  Lot's of music... saxophone... and my studio chair is so noisy.

So I wanted to jump in really quick.  A couple of months ago, I was talking to a good buddy of mine who's getting into audio production at work at Site Play.  He's a guitarist, he's got some background, but he has never done audio production so he comes by and we chat.  It's a lot of fun, I really enjoy seeing his passion and seeing him grow as an audio production artist.  I wanted to show him something that I started doing back in 2003.

To share a little bit of context with you guys, I started writing music on the computer in 2000, but it was just stuff that I just put out there to my girlfriend, or to my friends, or my family at the time, and I never shared it with anyone who wasn't directly tied to me so I was always worried when I would get feedback.  "Hey, that sounds good."  I was always worried are they being biased - you know, they care more about my feelings versus being objectively honest.  And then I stumbled across a website called Acid Planet.

Now, for those that don't know, Acid Planet is no longer around, but it was tied to Sony's Acid - Acid DJ, they have a couple of other lines they do, I believe Vegas as well - and so I in 2003 put my music up there.  I put up this little simple song, nothing fancy, maybe a minute or a minute and ten seconds long.  I put it out there, and for the first time I had people who didn't know me from Adam giving me feedback on my music, and it really was empowering.  And it also allowed me to kind of break that barrier, or that internal struggle of "oh you're just saying this because you're my girlfriend" or "because you're my friend" "because you're my mum and dad".  

Instead, people who don't know me give me critical honest feedback.  It was a huge growing moment for me, so my encouragement to you guys and gals, is if you haven't done that, find a community online where you can share your stuff.  It's a little bit harder now.  What I mean by saying it's a little bit harder now, is the fact that there's a tonne of places where you can share your stuff but there's very little feedback happening, and that's one of the things that made Acid Plenty special.  It seemed to be something where I'll put a song up, and have ten people write comments, write reviews "hey I like this track, I like this, I don't like that", and they had a rating system, zero -- or maybe one... one to ten stars -- it could be the whole I scratch your back you scratch mine, because I would see someone review my work now and thank them and I would go off and I would review some of their stuff, so there of course is some personal skin in the game so to speak, it's not just out of the goodness of their heart they're reviewing everything, but it did give you a tonne of feedback.  

If you have an online community - could be a Facebook group, it could be some other website where you feel like "I am getting that kind of interaction with people" please share that with me.  First off, I would like to know it just for my own personal reasons, but also I would love to be able to share that and update people that check out this vlog -- and by the way, thank you for checking out the vlog if you're doing so -- I would love to share that with more people so they can also know about these venues and possibly get the same kind of growing experience that I got from Acid Planet.  

Reach out to people, see if you can find a group of people who can give you input on your work.  It's gonna help you grow in so many ways.

[Parting remarks and outro]