We will start Secrets of Organ Playing Improvisation Contest in one week

Have you ever wanted to start to improvise but found yourself sidetracked after a few days? Apparently your inner motivation wasn't enough.

I know how you feel. I also was stuck many times. What helped me was to find some external motivation as well.

In order for you to advance your improvisation skills and help you motivate to practice, Ausra and I would like to invite you to participate in a weekly Secrets of Organ Playing Improvisation Contest on Steemit platform (www.steemit.com) where everybody gets paid for creating and curating content. Steemit runs on the Steem blockchain.

This is a test. I'm trying to find out if enough people from our Secrets of Organ Playing universe would want to do this to make it worthwhile. Right now we are committing to 4 weeks of improvisation contests starting from next Monday, April 30. After these 4 weeks we will re-evaluate engagement and decide if there is enough need from our community to continue this contest.

This is my and Ausra's effort to promote improvisation and possibly later other areas of organ playing, such as organ repertoire, hymn playing and composition while supporting the community at the same time. Winners would share the rewards that the announcement post will generate. And every participant will get our upvote (upvotes are worth real money on Steemit). Of course other people will want to upvote participant's entries too.

So with this type of contest everybody wins. 

I've sent a preliminary message to about 20 members of our community and a few people already said "Yes!"

Here are the most common objections from others with my solutions:

Not enough time: It will take only 3-10 minutes of your time every week because the length for each improvisation will be limited.

Not enough skill: The requirement for improvisation will be very simple - I will assign 4 notes and you will have to play something interesting using those 4 notes exclusively. You may use different stops, different octaves with or without pedal, different rhythms and meters. Anything you like, just make it interesting. No matter if you are a beginner or an advanced improviser, you can participate. Improvisations on pipe organs and electronic organs are OK.

Don't have enough technical knowledge: If you can record yourself while playing organ (audio), then you can do it. All you need to do is to upload mp3 file to the site DSound which runs on the Steem blockchain, add a title of your improvisation, a suitable photo and use #secretsoforganplaying as the first tag. That's how we'll be able to find your entry. In order for other contestants to also find it easier and support you, we ask you to also add a link to your improvisation on DSound as a comment to the announcement post.

The rewards from posts on Steemit are transferred after 7 days from the publication moment. So this contest of Week 1 will also run exactly for 7 days. In the 1st week Ausra and I will be the judges but starting from Week 2, we will invite a guest judge. This will usually be one of the winners from the previous week.

The guest judge will receive 10% of liquid SBD (Steem Dollars) raised from the announcement post. The 3rd place winner will receive 15% of liquid SBD, the 2nd place winner will receive 30% of liquid SBD and the 1st place winner will receive 45% of liquid SBD raised from the announcement post.

Why SBD? Because the default mode of the rewards for posts on the Steem blockchain are 50% - SBD and 50% - Steem Power which can't be transferred to anybody else. There is an option to receive payout as 100% Steem Power but then we couldn't distribute the rewards to the winners and the guest judge.

If you are interested, go ahead and create your account at www.steemit.com now because it will take about a week for them to activate your account and send you the automatically generated password.

IMPORTANT: Once they activate your account, you have to secure your master password in a safe place so that nobody but you will have access to it (they can't recover lost passwords so if you forget it - your entire Steemit account is lost forever...)

​I will post the official announcement in a week, next Monday, April 30.

If you need more information about how things work on Steemit, this is a good resource to start: www.steemithelp.net

We hope this contest will motivate you to practice organ improvisation.

When you sign up for Steemit, we invite you to follow us there. You will find me at ​https://steemit.com/@organduo and Ausra at ​https://steemit.com/@laputis