Eric Barfield

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Happy Birthday! A Reflection on Two Years of Blogging

Two years ago today, I started a blog about my life as a musician. I really had no idea what I wanted to cover each week. All I knew was that I wanted to share my thoughts about music, and more importantly, I wanted to help people. 

 

You all have made this blog such an amazing collaborative experience. You’ve encouraged me, challenged me, and reached out with so much love and kindness it’s blown me away. Some of my favorite moments over the last two years have been: 

 

 

• After posting a few MainStage patches that I used onstage at my church, I had such an outpouring of interest in MainStage that I started devoting one blog a week to helping people with MainStage. I also created packs of worship presets for MainStage, and you all bought dozens of them. Thank you! 

 

 

• I’ve helped hundreds of you for free to learn MainStage for your worship music. It’s been amazing to get to know people from all of the world, including helping keyboardists that play with Carrie Underwood, Chris Tomlin, and Hillsong fix and fine-tune their rigs. It’s such an honor to help people focus more on the music, and less on the technology.

 

 

• This spring I wrote a short blog about metronomes. I was checking my stats the following weekend, and because you all shared it so many times on Facebook and Twitter, it went viral. The blog was viewed of 110,000 times and counting, and shared around 5,000 times on Twitter alone. Thank you for help spreading the word, guys! 

 

 

So where am I going with this thing in the next two years? I’ve got a few ideas: 

 

• Since I’m moving to Nashville to pursue my career as a musician, I’ll be posting a few more biographical blog posts, since my career will most likely be a little more interesting in Nashville (I hope). I’m going to be learning a lot in the next few years, and I’ll be sharing as much as I can.

 

• I’m going to continue to help anyone I can get technology out of the way of making great music. If you have a tech question about setting up a keyboard rig, particularly if it incorporates MainStage, write me and I’ll help you. Free.

 

• I’ll be doing more video blogs, especially as I land more fun gigs that are interesting enough to film. 

 

 

You make this blog. Thank you.

 

Cheers,

 

Eric

 

P.S. I want to send a special shout out to my email subscribers. Thank you, Aaron, Bethanne, Dale, Don, Elizabeth, Jamie, Jeff, Jihae, Johanna, John, Jordan, Kyle, Lori, Mark, Matt, Matthew, Micah, Michael, Monica, Natasa, Steve, Stuart, Sue, Terry, and the hundreds of other subscribers that read the blog each week. You are the backbone of this blog, and who I think about when I’m writing each post.