Shea's Violin

This song is gorgeous! Thanks for sharing it with me and collaborating with me‪@endlessrepeat‬

1 month ago | [YT] | 19

Shea's Violin

This is getting out of control. I go to my "Trending Videos" tab in youtube studio to see what is popular recently on a regular basis. Today I thought there might have been two non-ai (a record from 1974?, nope completely hallucinated by AI).

This is what is popular right now, and this even has survivorship bias where these are the ones that are successful. There's a firehose of AI music being generated and dumped on this site. I can't compete with this, and this is what people prefer to listen to and watch.

The unfortunate truth is that with AI sucking up all of the space, there's no room for small human artists like me to get impressions on this site anymore.

It's exhausting and terrible. Please, PLEASE support human artists, even if they aren't me. I know that anyone that sees this probably will vehemently agree, but TELL PEOPLE! The only way this dies is if people refuse to interact with it.

If human artists can't afford to make music, this is all there will be left in a few years.

1 month ago | [YT] | 62

Shea's Violin

The Album Is OUT! I've been getting great feedback from everyone that's listened to it, and I'm going to try to do a little more outreach to see if I can get more ears on it. I *know* there are more people out there that will enjoy this.

If you haven't listened yet, put it on and let me know what you think! If you love it, I'd really appreciate if you shared with some friends!

Thanks everyone for coming with me on my music journey and supporting me! I wouldn't have finished this without the help of everyone in the community.

tr.ee/Maus65lbqP

1 month ago | [YT] | 30

Shea's Violin

My Chrono Trigger collection "Liminal Echoes" is releasing on streaming services and digital stores on Friday!

This was a labor of love over the last year, and I'm so proud of everything that I learned while arranging, recording, mixing, and mastering it.

Thank you so much to all of my supporters for following me on my journey, and listening to and sharing my music. And a special thank you to those of you supporting me directly through Patreon, Ko-Fi and super thanks! Your support has helped to smooth over the bumps in the road along the way as I hone my craft and share it with the world.

You can pre-save the album on spotify and listen next Friday when it goes live! open.spotify.com/prerelease/4tze3aoV1RgflAdGV2xFGy…

2 months ago | [YT] | 40

Shea's Violin

Hello friends! Happy 4th birthday to my Youtube Channel! Thank you so much for joining me on my art journey and sharing tears, joy, and memories from old and new music. I wanted to write a recap of the year and ask your input on direction for next year.

The last few months have featured a heavy focus on Chrono Trigger as I work toward finishing up the album for release in early 2025. I'm making great progress, and I just talked with an artist about an album artwork commission to make it extra special.

I've been trying over the last four years improve my music content and reach more people with my work, and I had my best year ever in 2023. People loved my Agnea's Theme cover enough to reach the monetization threshold near the beginning of 2024, which is amazing!

In 2024, I collaborated with at least 75 other artists -- some for game soundtracks, some for contests, some for streaming services, some for albums, and some on youtube. Of those people, at least half of them have worked with me multiple times, in some cases 10 times or more! All of those collaborations have been really rewarding, both creatively and by the friendships that have come from them.

I've been putting my heart and so much energy into music to try to reach more people, but the truth of youtube today is that I can't compete with video essays, reaction content, and AI music. I'm lucky to have as many repeat visitors as I do (all of you are wonderful!), but my work isn't competitive enough to vie with other kinds of content here.

I sat in on a workshop for partnered youtubers today with people that earn a living from this. Someone asked the question: "what should a music channel to grow on youtube today." The panel expert's answer was that a music channel HAS to do music-adjacent content to have a chance of reaching an audience. Music isn't enough anymore.

My channel doesn't have to grow for me to be happy with the work that I've created. I'm probably my biggest fan. I'm making the music that I want to hear, imagining songs the way I'd like to hear them, and I'm enjoying the end result more and more as I learn.

I would like to be able to put the money that I earn in music back into the channel to make my art better. I would like to be able to hire an artist for the singles that I haven't released yet instead of only commissioning art for an album, and that's possible if I grow my channel. I'd like to be able to hire some of my friends to do VFX for projects. I'd like to be able to maintain my instruments and maybe buy some new ones some day. This year I started a patreon to help support my art, and that money got me through migrating my workflow off adobe when I lost access to creative cloud. It helped me upgrade my lights (you'll see the difference with the new lights if you look back to march of this year). It helped me upgrade my editing and mastering tools and buy a piano VST. And it will help toward paying off the laptop that I bought this winter to make my production computer mobile.

I have a few options for the next few years to try to reach those goals for my art:

1. Keep doing what I'm doing, but focus more on collaborations and session work
2. Add some new content types to the mix (Reactions? Video Essays? Weird instrument DIY builds?)
3. Ask for direct support and improve my exclusive content

Let me know what you think in the comments, and thank you so much for all your support on my journey so far! I'm so proud of what I've accomplished together with friends and your support, and I'm looking forward to a future of possibility, creativity, and art!

-Shea

4 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 51

Shea's Violin

The streaming experiment from the last four or five months seems to have been a bit of a failure. There's been less interest lately, and over the past few months I've noticed that when youtube is pushing impressions for my streams out, the rest of my content is sidelined. Since the click/watch rates are low on the streams it seems they're doing more harm than good.

I'm going to cancel the scheduled streams for now, and maybe if there's renewed interest in the future I can get back to it.

Going forward, I'm going to be working as much as I can on collaborations with other artists, since those opportunities get far more reach than the work I do on this channel. If you know anyone that needs one of my instruments (especially if it's a paid project!) let me know!

I plan to spend more time on each release here and relax the schedule a bit so that I can devote more time to finding ways to make this project sustainable with session recording and collabs.

6 months ago | [YT] | 33

Shea's Violin

I'm so excited to share my new EP with Lucas Cooper that's out today on streaming services! Lucas gave me free reign on all of the violin arrangement for this EP, and I love how the melodies, harmonies, and countermelodies come together over the canvas of his gentle piano playing. I still don't know which one is my favorite, but I'm leaning toward either Mabe Village or Inside the Houses.

Let me know if you have a favorite in the comments, and if you'd like to see more collaborations in this style!

Here's the album playlist on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7NgF...

And here's spotify: open.spotify.com/album/3XKwNjArYoZQg6jqA6SX7M

6 months ago | [YT] | 29

Shea's Violin

Because of the technical problems with the stream and the audio sample dropouts in all of the source files, I need to finish re-recording all of the audio from the stream last week. I wasn't able to finish that and the video this week since I also had three our four collaborations that needed work.

The last time I had a backlog of work to finish, I skipped the stream so that I didn't create too much work that I wouldn't be able to finish in the following week.

For tomorrow, would you like me to:

6 months ago | [YT] | 5

Shea's Violin

I'm going to take this week off for the Friday arrangement stream. I wasn't able to get the Corridors of Time video and mix finished to publish this week, and I had three other paid projects this week taking up recording time and mental space. I'll do my best to finish it up for next week, but I don't want to give myself too much backlog mixing work to do and overwhelm myself by adding another project.

I just finished up arranging, recording, mix and master for an EP with Lucas Cooper that should be releasing within the next couple weeks with music from Link's Awakening.

I have two new pieces of news I can't talk about yet, but I'm excited to share those when I'm able to eventually!

Thanks so much for all of the comments on Secret of the Forest! That video was the best-received in over a year, and I've never had a video get so many likes in one week before. Welcome to all the new subscribers, and thank you so much for joining me on my musical journey!

If you have any suggestions for music that you think would be a good fit for my style to interpret after I finish a few more for the Chrono Trigger album, feel free to leave a comment on this post and I'll add those ideas to my list. Thanks!

6 months ago | [YT] | 20

Shea's Violin

This week the collaborations I'm a part of pushed my artist profile past 50k monthly listeners! Thanks so much for listening!

I'm still having trouble getting my solo work above 1k streams in a year to earn royalties, so I haven't been uploading it much lately, but I'm hoping that over time I'll grow enough of an audience there to be able to earn a little from the work I do.

If you would like to continue to support me making music and distributing it, please consider following me on Spotify or other streaming platforms! If you don't use a streaming service, I appreciate all you listening and watching here!

If you would like to support me directly, I have a patreon and kofi, but just sharing my music or leaving a comment is great!

7 months ago | [YT] | 13