Carlos from Venezuela wrote me and told me to relay his regards to the fellow Scaler community.
He and his family have Covid, and due to the dire situation in Venezuela, they can’t afford medicine, treatment etc.
I was thinking, with Carlos’ outstanding musical skills and experience, but given his limited Internet and electrical power availability, how can we help him? The recent collaboration about “The Mountain & The City” was really well received on Youtube. Unfortunately I don’t have enough of a YT following to monetize my feed, or I would donate the proceeds to Carlos’ family.
But what I thought we could do, get a couple of his recordings, mix them with various contributions and create an album, or EP to the least. And then market it on Bandcamp or whatever better method the more professional musicians here might know of. And then funnel the proceeds to Venezuela. Sort of like the Benefits concerts of larger scale, LiveAid etc. Just smaller and more focused.
I agree that this would be an empathetic and civilised project and support it. It may or may not succeed, but as ever, not to try is to set out to fail.
It should probably be genre specific, because that seems to be the way (although I am ignorant on such matters) in which music is monetized.
Should we consider something like https://www.gofundme.com/ ? We’d have something to give to any donors in that they would get a digital EP or LP.
We might need to set up a parallel communications framework for a small group dealing with the non-musical side, to keep the off-topic traffic from the board.
I can offer web / shared cloud facilities if that helps, especially if Carlos has comms challenges.
One other item is to see if we can find a vocalist(s) … maybe a post on the board asking if anybody knows someone who might contribute.
I think you are volunteering as Project Leader for this ?
The problem is that the money can be stolen in the middle, considering the high bribery rate in that country
And, we don’t know how much can be needed to save them
That said I don’t know how much time is needed to collect money in that way
so maybe better & faster doing donations through the usual channel used so far (his Spanish friend)?
I’d like to think positively…and yes, I was thinking that very same way that some of us already helped out, and that money seemed to have arrived, per Carlos’ confirmation.
Yes, I was thinking about that too. I just don’t have any experience with music distribution, even if indie. I was also thinking about possibly riding the NFT wave with Carlos’ music…again, no experience where to start, hence the shoutout to the community.
Not a big friend of being a central leader (you probably know the German word for “leader”?)
I believe in self-organizing, collaborating teams that don’t need a central figure. I was just giving the impulse, since Carlos has made it obvious to a few of us of the dire need.
It’s maybe one of the rare legitimate uses for crypto (with apologies to any Bitcoin investors / holders)
Maybe we need a rapper for @ClaudioPorcellana 's ditty, although it might be necessary to modify the lyrics to a PG12 rating [In the UK that’s “Parental Guidance; for 12 years and above”]
I’m all for that, and maybe ‘Leader’ was the wrong word. I’ve had great success with ‘unmanaged’ teams, but it’s been my experience that sometimes it’s handy to have some form of ‘orchestration’ for want of a better word, although that might be a revolving task ?
Maybe it would also be useful to have a poor man’s equivalent of Microsoft Teams if it’s focussed on closely collaborative working … there are open source apps I can host. if needs be.
Yes indeed, but perhaps I should tell you that German was the only public exam I failed at school. I put it down to the teacher, who was in fact German; Wilhelm Wohlhart, I recall. Must be long since expired.
I did try out my failed schoolboy German when I first started with my frequent trips to Zurich. On day one I was taken to the wrong place because I was unaware of the (Bavarian) pronunciation of ‘2’.
All:
I will stop adding to this thread in this forum now. Anybody interested in pursuing the original idea to help Carlos please DM me for exchange of emails to coordinate beyond this forum.
[In the UK that’s “Parental Guidance; for 12 years and above”]