Hello everyone,
Hello everyone,
Feeling a bit introspective at the end of the year is almost inevitable. Like many of you, I tend to review what I’ve learned, goals I’ve accomplished, and goals I’m still working towards. For me, 2022 was an exciting year when it comes to the Flat community. We set up some new projects and are working hard on some great ones to come. Today, I want to share some 2022 community highlights with you. Ready?
5 composers you should listen to
Being closer to you
Our community is the heart of our project. We know how important it is to be accessible to you, not only to provide assistance but to listen to your needs regarding the platform! We have different channels of communication, in case you weren't aware:
Support
If you need any assistance or have a suggestion, ping us at hello@flat.io!
Social media
Instagram: We share music theory tips, product hacks, community news, challenge updates, and more.
Twitter: Stay informed about our latest product updates. Also, this profile is more focused on the education product. If you are looking for music teaching and learning tips, I’m sure you’ll enjoy our content there.
YouTube: Find video tutorials, additional resources, and user creations!
😉 By the way, it would be amazing if you could follow us.
Newsletters
Once a month, we send a Newsletter with some music hacks, information about our product and community, plus resources that you might find very useful.
Official Flat Discord server
This server allows us to be even closer to our community and to facilitate interactions between our users. Here you can share your scores, give and receive feedback, get updates about our challenges, and grow as a composer.
🔗 Join now
Community features
New Flat Power badge
In line with the evolution of our product's Power features, we wanted to redesign the Power icon, keeping the already recognizable lightning bolt - which represents strength, power, and energy - but drawing straighter lines to achieve a more mature, professional, and, most importantly, more readable icon.
New community stats page
Keeping track of your efforts is important to remain motivated. This is why we reworked the stats page, showing more info as well as your collaborations:
Enhanced default privacy settings for consumer Flat accounts
- Private accounts by default
With millions of people using Flat, there are many public profiles on our Flat platform. We wanted to make sure that only the people who explicitly want to participate in our public community have a public profile. That's why we decided to make the public community profile creation an opt-in feature.
- Code of conductTo keep our community healthy and promote a good atmosphere, we have added a community Code of Conduct.
Social media links for profiles
Add your social media accounts to your profile in Flat, making it much easier for those who love your music to follow you and be part of your musical journey.
Profile pinned scores
Highlight your best creations on your community profile with this feature.
💡We suggest pinning from 2 to 3 scores.
Composer of the month
The idea is to choose one talented composer who merits having more followers in Flat and to share their music/story with the community.
How can I become a composer of the month?
If you have original creations on Flat and a small audience, send us an email (hello@flat.io).
These are the 2022 composers:
- Yellow Gamer Girl is a great composer from Long Island, New York. In addition to her musical talent, she is a charming and interesting person.
- RedProductions is a 19-year-old composer from Oregon. Both his musical landscape while growing up and his musical tastes have given him a particular way of composing.
- Will Strassberger is a seminarian, studying to be a Roman Catholic priest at the Diocese of St. Augustine in North Florida. His story with music started at a young age. In middle school, he began to study organ and piano, instruments that he still plays in the seminary.
- Audrey West captivated us and moved our souls with her music. Her playing dates back to when she was young: at just 6 years old, she started taking piano lessons.
- JM is from 🇨🇴, and besides his music, we were impressed by his sensitivity.
- Oliver Andrews, shows how a love of music can span from classical music to mid-century jazz to MarioKart.
- Dylan French´s composing technique is based on a simple principle: when a melody jumps into his head, he’ll use that as the starting point and see where it takes him.
- Silverblaze reminds us that there is no wrong way to write music.
- Mr. Bari dreams of composing huge orchestral scores such as those found in epic films.
- Prof P comes from a talented family that introduced him to different ways of making music, with his dad specializing in electronic music and his mom singing and playing the guitar.
- TJ Bruce has been greatly inspired by the classical composing of 38-year-old composer Wilbert Roget II, whose work is most often heard in video games such as Call of Duty: WWII.
The challenges
Following the growing number of great original creations made in the community, some community members started to host small contests. We were so amazed by the quality of the content created that we decided to support this kind of initiative by launching our own 🚀.
Just one thing: the challenges are meant to inspire you to create and have fun, not to generate a sense of competition in the community!
🏆 The prize is a yearly subscription.
Scoring system update
Previously, a person who won a challenge would not be considered for a new win. The idea was to give others a chance to get the prize and the attention. Now, previous winners are eligible to win in every challenge!
If you win more than once during the period of the yearly subscription you won, the prize will be applied as follows:
- You can give away the yearly subscription to a person of your choice who does not yet have a premium subscription.
- If you decide to keep the prize for yourself, we will add one extra month to the annual subscription you already won.
Challenge highlights
So far, so good! Every month we see new users joining the challenges.
You can check out our playlists with the top 10 scores for each challenge on our Youtube channel.
We've received wonderful submissions every month and we want to mention 2 composers who have stood out. I am talking about the two-time winners Thomas Bozarth and Redstonecat123. If you don't know them yet, I highly recommend checking them out!
5 composers you should listen to
I never tire of saying that our community is full of talent. It’s impossible to make a full list of suggestions because it would be endless. But today, I want to tell you about four composers who have left me speechless this year with their compositions and their participation in the community.
Groovy
This one won’t be a surprise to most of you. When interviewing a user and asking about their favorite composers, Groovy always has a place on the list. Still, to be honest I did not know about him for a long time. But around the 5th time someone mentioned him during an interview, I decided to check him out. I was already curious, and what I found exceeded my expectations. What’s more, I had the pleasure of meeting him a couple of months ago, learning what a sensitive and nice person he is!
This is my favorite piece of his:
Josh Holmberg
Similar to what happened with Groovy, I discovered Josh Holmberg's music thanks to other users suggesting his work.
Fun fact: he was the winner of May's challenge with this piece:
Fiona Jane
I discovered this composer very recently and she has left me completely inspired!
Fiona Jane came in second place in the November challenge with this song:
Rory
The first time I talked to Rory was because I listened to a piece he wrote, and I wanted to interview him about it:
He is constantly suggesting new music created in the community by other users. Thank you for that, Rory!
Check out the interview:
John Raskopf
The first time I listened to John Raskopf's music was by accident – a very happy accident! I loved his piece called ''Piano Concerto in A Major mov. 2'' so I reached out to him. That was in 2021, and I am very excited to see how much he has grown as a composer since then.
This is one of his most recent and popular works:
To finish, I just want to thank you all for being here! I can't wait to see what 2023 holds for us.
See you next time,