Kate Ellis performing ‘In your own time’

Here’s a video of Kate Ellis performing In your own time at the Music and Media Technologies Show in May 2012. Kate did a really great job of turning a collection of ideas I came to the rehearsals with into something really wonderful. It was a real pleasure to hear what we had worked on come alive on the night.

Kate Ellis

Cellist Kate Ellis is a versatile musician dedicated to the performance and exploration of all new music. With an interest in the use of electronics, Kate has commissioned and premiered works by numerous Irish and International composers and has toured and broadcast in Australia, the USA, Europe and China. Kate has performed with Bobby McFerrin, Iarla O Lionaird, Gavin Friday and Karan Casey and plays regularly with Tarab, Yurodny and the Ergodos Musicians.

Release – In Your Own Time Part #3

This is the third in a series of post rounding out my experience of putting out In Your Own Time in April 2013. The previous posts covered the inspiration behind the project and putting it together as an app. This post will talk about putting the app out into the world and what that has meant for me.

Release & Press

The release date for the app was April 2nd and in advance of that I sent out some press releases to magazines and blog who I thought might be interested. There wasn’t an immediate take up on the idea. It had a summary write up in Noise in the first week. It also got a tweet from Harmless Noise. Largely though, initially at least, the response was a bit disappointing. Read more

Pre-release – In Your Own Time Part #2

This post follows on from a previous post about the inspiration behind In Your Own Time. In this post I talk about taking the prototype that I created for my thesis and recruiting people who could help turn that idea into a reality. Read more

Inspiration – In Your Own Time Part #1

The length of the initial post was starting to get a bit out of hand so I’ve separated it out into two posts. This one contains the backstory of the app: the inspiration behind it and how it came into being as a masters project. The second post is about what happened when the app went out into the world. What worked, what didn’t, the ups and downs of putting something out, and the lessons I learned along the way.

It’s been a little over a year since I, along with the help of Shane Finan and Mick Cody, released In Your Own Time. The app has now been downloaded over 1000 times in over 20 countries and has been a massive step for me both personally and artistically. I want to share the journey to date with you here. Read more

2013 – a look back on the year that was

The year of Our Lord 2013 is almost over and at least 2013 things have happened to me this year, but rather than list them all here is an abridged summary. Lots of travelling, meeting new people and hearing interesting things in interesting places with interesting people.

Learning

This year was a pretty hectic in terms of education. I’m out of my masters a little over 18 months and I’ve been trying to continue to learn as much I can. I’ve been luck enough to get the opportunity to study on a number of courses, both in Ireland and internationally. The first was the Young Composers’ Meeting in Apeldoorn. This was a pretty terrifying experience as I got to write for a 16 piece ensemble with voice. Most of the instruments were ones which I had never written for before, and I wrote the piece as we drift softly (into the fog) for the course. Read more

In Your Own Time at MusicTechFest

I’ve been following Andrew Dubber on Twitter for a while. He’s a pretty prolific social media user with lots of interesting ideas about everything but I’m mostly interested in his writings on the music industry. To cut a long story short I saw that he is heading to MusicTechFest in London this month. I had a look at the website and immediately got super jealous. There’s going to be an amazing lineup at the festival from lots of different aspects of the music technology. I spent a while drooling over the website and playing with their html sequencer, but then had to get on with my life and put it out of my mind. A few days ago though I got an email asking me if I’d like to give a talk about In Your Own Time, I was over the moon!

First post of 2013

The year of our lord 2013 is upon us and in spite of the people’s misunderstanding of the Mayan calendar we’re still here. There’s some exciting stuff happening this year and I’ve decided to start the year as I mean to continue, with a to-do list–masquerading as a blog post. A couple of website announcements first, you might have noticed that my domain name has changed. No longer am I davidbcollier.com, 2013 means the shiny new domain of davidcollier.ie (I felt the ‘b’ was holding me back) and a little update to the look of the site. Any links to the old site will redirect to this one, so no worries there. As well as that I want to announce that the website for the app In Your Own Time–which I’ve been working on over the last year–is now live! The app isn’t out yet but the website is there to give an idea of what to expect when it is released in March. You can stay up to date with it’s progress on Facebook and Twitter. Read more

In Your Own Time #1 – A mobile music app

I’ve been working away over the last few months making an app for a masters, which is similar to the works I’ve been covering in my ongoing posts about Mobile Music. I’m really excited about the possibilities of creating music in that way and wanted to give it a go myself. I hadn’t been able to try most of the works I’ve been writing about so I was interested in to create a musical experience that I would be happy with as a listener and that I could make available to other people. Read more