Music - The Creative Force Behind Our Homeschool Project

Hello again, Steemians!

This past week we went into post-productionon on our first music CD for our Saturn Music and Entertainment homeschool project. Since music is the creative force behind many of our homeschool projects, we've spent the last year creating an entire CD worth of music to showcase the characters and scenes for a comic book series created by @haydenpatrick.

Thanks to our fabulous music composition tutor, Willow Goodine, and the hours and hours of Skype calls we’ve had over the last year, we've sure learned a lot! It was a pleasure to get to meet up with him in person as we delved deep into post production sound details.

One of the joys of creating these homeschool projects is that, in many cases, I get to learn right along with my kids in our creative environment. Prior to this project I had no experience in music composition (which is why we found a tutor). Willow has helped us understand the varying dynamics of each instrument, their limits and strengths, how they work together, and most importantly – how they would sound live vs how it’s heard via a digital music program. We’ve put together a full symphony piece for this album and it definitely took a long time to develop the 29 different instrument parts to work together.

The album will feature theme songs for the main characters, as well as theme music for scenes within the comic book series. Fourteen year old @haydenpatrick created most of the catchy melodies and this CD is a glimpse into his creative personality. The music has a variation of genres, which, I think, makes the album more fun and kid friendly. While the three of us built the music into full pieces, it was Hayden's creative vision that inspired us. “I just hear the music in my head”, he says casually when people ask how he comes up with such catchy tunes.

This CD is very special for me, as a Mom and homeschool parent, because we needed a project like this last year to lift our spirits and give us something positive to focus on as we learned how to manage Hayden's Epilepsy diagnosis. Once a very active outdoor family, learning to adjust to a new, more sedentary way of life (while traveling) meant we all had to grow through this experience. And we did - together - through music and art and special homeschool education.

While Ludwig the Platypus and friends are super heroes in their home-town, it’s sixteen year old Madeline (aka, The Brains) who is the super hero big sister in Hayden’s real life adventure. She has supported Hayden's vision of Saturn Music and Entertainment relentlessly. Every day she works on something that builds her brother's vision and our family vision to create fun, positive, entertainment for children. She’s become quite the master at the Adobe suite products and Sibelius music software.

We are now in the final stages of completing the album. As we get closer to launching it online, we will share snippets of a few songs on an easy to use crypto platform (like Decent or LBRY or Open Bazar). The kids are exploring the platform sharing options which they will be writing about in an upcoming New Kids on the Blockchain homeschool report. Do you know of any other decentralized, encrypted file sharing sources? If so, please let us know in the comments section.

As you can tell by the concept art, the kids have given this project a lot of time and consideration. We hope you consider supporting their creative work in some way – whether it's a shout out to your friends on social media about the project, a purchase of a song or book, or an ‘at-a-boy’; everything helps. Because this is a homeschool project and not a company, all funds made on creative works go right back into future creative works. The purpose of releasing this music CD now, is to generate enough funds to have the artwork for the comic book completed - which we recently discovered is a lot more expensive and time intensive than we realized when starting this project last year.

Thank you for reading. And thank you for your support.

@cm1 (CryptoMama)

Fun Fact: Composing the music before finishing the script for Ludwig the Platypus also sparked more fun ideas for the storyline. In one instance, we changed an entire section of the storyline to fit the music piece (I’ll share which one in a future post).