♪ Opening theme music ♪
Hello, and welcome to this episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
My name is Diane Kolin.
The series presents artists, academics, and project leaders who dedicate their
time and energy to a better accessibility for people with disabilities in the arts.
You can find more of these conversations on our website, artsably.com,
which is spelled A-R-T-S-A-B-L-Y dot com.
♪ Theme music ♪
Today, ArtsAbly is in conversation with Mercedes Yvonne Lysaker,
a cellist, a teacher, and a scholar based in New York.
You can find the resources mentioned by Mercedes Yvonne Lysaker during this episode
on ArtsAbly's website, in the blog section.
♪ Area Zero Underdepths (excerpt) - PokéCello ♪
♪ End of the excerpt ♪
Welcome to this new episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
Today, we are with Mercedes Yvonne Lysaker,
who is a cellist, a teacher,
and a scholar based in New York City. Welcome.
Thank you so much for having me, Diane.
Thank you.
I know that we went back and forth a little bit.
I know that you are also part of the RAMPD community, which is dear to me too.
I've been following your multiple activities.
I know you have several interesting projects on the go, and I'm looking
forward to talking about all that.
Great. I'm excited, too.
Okay, so I always start these episodes by asking about our guests.
About your background.
Can you tell a little bit more about you?
When did music start for you?
Music I don't remember when music started for me, but I was definitely the kid
that was bouncing around the living room while my parents played music
and let me run down all the energy because it was so overwhelming.
It was such an enormous sensory experience for me as a kid.
But I've been a cellist for a long time.
I don't want to say how long because that will age me.
But I got classical music
education, standard stuff.
I was an orchestra musician for a while.
And then there was the pandemic.
So since then, my work has expanded
from where I started.
I was very much on the orchestral track, on the teaching track.
I got a degree in music education.
I wrote my master's thesis on the relationships that people have
with their instruments and how people have these interpersonal relationships.
People name their instruments.
They have very social relationship with their instruments.
Then my scholarly interests turned towards progressive pedagogy.
Big string pedagogy nerd.
Really, really like how the instruments work.
I enjoy to figure out how to teach them effectively and efficiently.
And since New York City shut down for a while,
and I took that as an opportunity
to pivot towards a little bit more
social music making, in a sense,
because I wasn't going out anymore.
I wasn't doing things in person,
but I was more interested in making music
that was about social things. I was more interested in...
I started doing spiritual music, Jewish spiritual music.
I'm Jewish.
Social issue-based compositions.
And I was on this big plan that I had.
Through the pandemic, I really knew where I was going with all this.
And then I got cancer.
And getting cancer during the pandemic was a wild experience.
I don't recommend it.
But one thing it did was force me to slow down a little bit.
And so I spent my surgery time, my recovery time, my treatment time,
playing a lot of video games.
I think that's probably pretty expected.
That's when I got this crazy idea that maybe video game music
would be a cool thing to do.
Because I had been so caught off guard by this medical event, I think as many
disabled people understand how disruptive that can be if it happens suddenly.
For the past couple of years, I have been a lot into a little
video game music channel where I take
video game music and arrange it for
live cello, of course, in a wide variety of genres, I do a lot of genre mixing.
I do a lot of hybrid forms with orchestral sounds and then
electronic music all mixed together.
So, strangely, this diversion from where I thought I was going with my career
has really brought up some exciting stuff.
I'm very grateful
that I have this experience because now
I'm so active in this field.
All of my projects recently have been in the video game music world,
which is a great world to be in, very progressive, very nice people.
It's been a real joy.
Yeah, I can imagine.
Where did you study?
What was your university where you got your master?
I went to Indiana University.
I was in the pre- College program there.
I did my undergrad there, my master's degree there.
Then I moved to New York and I went to Teachers College for my second degree
because got to go, got to keep learning. I love learning.
That's how I ended up in the city for the pandemic.
I always like to joke that this was an awful idea because I decided to go to
music school during the great recession.
And then within 10 years after I graduated, global pandemic
shut everything down.
I don't think I could have had worse timing.
That's not including the cancer and the car crashes, but it was just...
I don't know how anyone let me do that. Thanks, Mom and Dad.
I love you guys.
The cancer and the car crash.
So I guess that's part of my story. That's when I acquired my disability.
I was in my second full year as an orchestra musician, and I was in
Southern Indiana, so it was all driving.
And hit a deer.
The carpool I was in hit a deer, totaled the car.
And I just felt real weird for a couple of days.
Went to the doctor and they said, Oh, probably a head injury.
You might want to do something about that.
And I never recovered.
Just never came back to where I was before.
But you know what?
Ironically, I think being a musician was very helpful because I did not
rely on a 9:00 to 5:00 office job, which I cannot do.
That was never something that I needed to do.
I never had to be in a room with fluorescent lights
surrounded by people talking to me.
Ironic that I was already in an accessible field,
although we can come back to that later about how accessible the field really is.
You studied classical performance with an acoustic cello?
Correct.
At a certain point, you switched to an electronic cello, or electric cello.
The real reason that I went to music school, and I have a professional answer
for job interviews, but for stuff like this, I can be honest.
I was really into Apocalyptica,
a heavy metal band that's all on cello.
Discovered that in middle school.
Middle school is when you have those heavy metal feelings
that you have to deal with.
That's when those start.
Obsessed, just absolutely obsessed.
Whole discography, knew all these songs back and forth.
I would just play them on my cello.
I would put on my headphones and turn up the music real loud
and try to figure out the parts.
Then I went to music school and we didn't play very much Metallica
in the conservatory.
But then when I graduated, I just had this crazy idea that I was on route to go to
a friend's new place in South Carolina, and we drove through North Carolina
where the electric violin shop is.
I was like, Well, I never played an electric cello.
That sounds cool. I might go check it out.
Oh, boy, was that a bad idea?
Because I could not get that out of my head.
It was just the most electrifying experience, possibly, of my life,
because I could be loud, because I could really wail on this instrument.
My acoustic cello is the love of my life.
Her name is Amelie, good French name, and my ecello is in the background.
Her name is Rosie.
But I suddenly could tap
into that initial feeling
that got me obsessed with the cello.
I could be loud.
I could cry in a way.
That was what was harder for me to do on the acoustic cello.
One nice thing about the electric cello, obviously, can add effects to it.
You can make it sound like a guitar.
You can make it sound anything you want.
It is also very quiet because it doesn't have a resonator.
I live in a New York City apartment building.
Hey, I am practicing recording at 3:00 AM and nobody cares.
Little bonus there.
So from that, is that...
When did you start considering, Oh, I should
create my own identity as a fusion
metal rock player or something like that?
When did you start considering because I know you have a name
where you perform that genre, right?
Yeah. I started that path
mentally and emotionally.
It took a little bit for things to crystallize.
In 2016, when there was a presidential election that was very difficult,
and I realized I'm not a lawyer.
I'm not a policy person. I don't work in politics.
I didn't feel like there's anything I could do.
All these things were happening that are happening again.
Yeah, sorry...
[Laughs.] I'm sorry.
I'm very sorry.
But I realized...
I felt like there was something that was just missing,
that I was just seeing all these things happening, and I couldn't do anything about it.
It took a little bit before... At least I can make music.
I can make music that's angry, and I can make music that's sad,
and I can make music that, at the very,
very least, mocks something in this time.
I think my first... I adopted the name Contraforma
in 2020, 2021, somewhere in there.
That came to me when I was writing.
I was writing a journal article, and I was trying to come up with an antonym
for conform, because I had this image,
this sensory feeling of...
I think of Play-Doh or Silly Putty,
and you squish it with your hands and make into a shape.
The Play-Doh conforms to the shape.
But what would happen if the Play-Doh refused and expanded instead
of you pushing in and expanded out?
And I came up with contraform.
Instead of conform, contraform.
And then I threw an A on the end because I'm a lady, you know.
That feeling of pushing, pushing back,
feeling all this pressure to be smaller
to be quieter or more palatable, whatever it is.
I'm just saying, No, I'm good, and actively pushing that out.
My first single was about the Texas abortion ban
that I think hit in 2021 or 2022.
It was called Aid and Abet.
That's where that came from.
I just felt I got to do something.
I have all these people around me who are smart,
and I'm just like, I play the cello.
But having that really gave me an opportunity to at least try.
Got to try.
Yeah, but speaking of smart, it was
very smart to use this contraforma that
you're mentioning that is now the name
of your identity as a fusion cellist and
to play Johann Sebastian Bach and Vivaldi in fusion and in rock and in metal.
It's so natural.
I think that everyone who hears, especially for baroque music in a certain way,
you only have to hear it a certain way once, and you can't unhear how much
in common it really has with the sound
profile, the atmosphere of heavy metal.
When I put those effects on and was playing...
Okay, the Vivaldi came from a teacher training that I had to do.
I had to perform the piece, I had to memorize it.
I was practicing, and I was really bored.
Then I thought, Let's put some effects on this.
That's how that came out.
I was just like, This is the best thing I've ever heard.
It worked so, so well.
It was very cool.
What about PokéCello?
Oh, boy. The only way that I got through cancer,
besides my family, I love you.
Thank you, family, played a lot of video games.
It was such a way for me to be engrossed in something that was not the disruption
to my life because I couldn't work. It was the pandemic.
If I got COVID, I would have to not get surgery, not get treatment,
and I just had to be isolated.
I realized how many people rely on
something trivial, like video games,
as a support mechanism.
I was sitting there just, How am I going to get back to this?
How am I going to move forward?
I thought, Well, what if I just go play one of these themes on the cello?
That was kind of fun.
I realized that one thing that I could do
to at least express my appreciation
for the way these video games helped me in this hard time
was to celebrate their music.
It started out as a little side project, something I would do when I
was procrastinating on my other projects.
I realized how much I loved arranging and orchestrating.
I would take these themes that were not written for cello.
Many of them were not written for human plate instruments at all.
They were written for sound chips, for the Game Boy
and the Game Boy events had their own chips.
Never meant to be played by a human being when they were composed.
So it was a really, really neat experience
and almost an academic exercise to take these themes,
try to extract some melodic component, and then build up
from, I get it, sometimes a very thin
original material, a whole foundation of
keyboards, of strings, of brass, of synths.
And I started out doing really, really simple things.
My most recent project was a complete reimagining,
a complete reorchestration of a new theme
from this video game franchise.
I did not expect...
Starting a YouTube channel, you got to stick with it
if you want to see any gains from it.
I was really surprised that because I had found this niche completely by
happenstance, by circumstance, I was able to build a little name for myself.
My channel is doing well.
It's very tiny, it's microscopic, but there are people who listen to my music.
There are people who listen to my music when they're having a hard time.
Because I started this for my own hard time, that's been very
rewarding, I think.
You're also a teacher.
Yes, I am also a teacher and a writer.
My teaching has slowed down a little bit because, again,
of the whole global pandemic.
But writing was also one of those things that I was really able to focus on
when things shut down because it's just me and my brain, which works sometimes.
Not a guarantee, but sometimes it does work.
What about these publications?
I know you published a lot.
You did also some conference presentations about your work.
I'm interested in the topics that you're treating in these publications.
My big focus has been progressive string pedagogy.
Progressive education and music education have somewhat of a history.
It's not as significant
as other types of education.
But what I noticed was that the really foundational philosophies of progressive
education had not made their way into how to teach people to play the violin
because the classical music education industrial complex is impermeable.
It's very, very difficult to get anything to change.
I realized that in music education, you basically had two things.
You could go the classical route where maybe you would get a great teacher,
maybe you get an abusive one.
That It was very, very common where I went to school.
Or you could go to someone who was progressive, but who wouldn't
give you anything of rigor.
They would just, Oh, you're doing great. That's a great job.
It was very difficult for me to move these things closer to each other
so that you could have the intensity, I think, of classical training
where you have laser focus on the smallest,
the finest of fine motor skills.
You're really thinking about body mechanics.
You're thinking about how to achieve
very minute movements that can blossom
into this whole repertoire of technique.
I was very excited by the possibility that
we could still to have this
great tradition of very rigorous,
very intense classical training, where we could train people to play these
instruments to a really high level,
while also perhaps shedding some of
the conservative elements of conservatory.
I was very interested in changing repertoire.
I was very interested in changing the Suzuki method because
I am a Suzuki-certified teacher.
I did a lot of Suzuki training.
I really, really liked the scaffolding, like the sequencing.
I did not like that you had to play Vivaldi.
When I was teaching in the city before the pandemic, I met so many
students who loved the craft, almost.
They were very, very interested in figuring it out.
They saw the cello as a puzzle.
They saw it as something that they could really explore.
They did not want to play Suzuki Book 1.
They wanted to play the We Shop menu.
They would come up with... They would say, Can we play Chicken Nugget Dreamland?
I was like, What's Chicken Nugget Dreamland?
They would play it for me. I'm like, Okay, let's play that.
That is not in the Suzuki books, by the way.
It is a bop. It is a banger. You should check it out.
What I could do was I could take these really, really important principles for
approaching the instrument, for getting a foundation, build those smoothly.
Then ideally, my students
would leave with enough ability
to play what they wanted and to play when they wanted and how they wanted.
If they wanted to be a professional, that's great.
If they wanted to play at a family party, fantastic.
If they wanted to do exactly what I did, put on their favorite music
with their headphones and play along to get through
the horrors of adolescence, that's worth it. That's important.
And I think that's the excitement that I got from maybe finding
that little missing piece of education.
So my scholarship has been mostly about how to approach building curriculum.
A lot of the things that you see in progressive education,
progressive music education is very abstract, and that's not good.
We have teachers are so overworked and underpaid that they have to use
the materials we give them, so we got to give them better materials.
What materials can we build?
I wanted to just add a little bit
to the library that we pull from when
we teach so that we could have maybe just
a slightly wider pool of instrumentalists in the next generations.
Did you do professional developments for teachers or people
who wanted to go further in that?
Yeah, I've done a couple workshops.
I've done talks at universities
and education departments.
One of my more recent ones was
adapting a framework from literacy,
from reading education, actually, to music.
The framework was how literature shows us
windows into other people's lives.
And it can also show us mirrors and show us our own life reflected back in them.
It makes a lot of sense in literature.
And I thought, well, What does that look like in music?
What would a musical mirror look like?
What would a musical window look like?
And I went through some of our more common
string education materials,
and I said, Hey, who has mirrors here?
Who has mirrors? Who has windows?
What does that mean?
What does that change for the learning experience of that student
when maybe those things are not balanced?
For sure.
Did you have an answer?
[Laughs.] Oh, boy.
Well, as an academic, you never have any answers.
You got to write more papers.
Yeah.
I know.
There is something I read in your biography,
and that - I have to ask the question.
I read that you're working with some national trade organizations
advocating for disability rights and string education.
What are these national trade organizations?
Well, one of them is called RAMPD, of course, the dear organization
Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities.
One thing that I did notice as a scholar,
well, scholar sounds a little,
not a very accessible field.
Not a lot of people who were interested in
non-superficial accessibility.
I feel like there's a lot of things where we have a ramp.
We have a wheelchair user in our promotional materials.
We have a performer with a limb difference.
We... check. We did it.
I just happened to see on Twitter many, many years ago, it feels like now, that
there was maybe this new organization.
And that did really crystallize a couple of things for me because I realized
that this feeling I had about the inaccessibility of,
I mean, not just performing,
but also teaching also being something of an academic,
trying to talk to people, trying to share ideas.
There was a gap there.
There weren't a lot of people in those rooms who were thinking about the things that
RAMPD is just loud about.
I mean, disability culture, blank looks.
Very, very little interest in adjusting
how we do things because of the pandemic.
Being at somewhat of a higher risk
for COVID complications, suddenly, nobody -
everyone was fine with me no longer being there.
I like to stay at home and do nothing.
So sometimes I was also happy with not being there.
But the feeling that
suddenly I didn't really know
how to advocate for myself I knew intellectually
that something was wrong, but I also knew
that there were probably dozens, hundreds
of other people like me who are being pushed out, who were feeling that they did not
have anyone who would listen to them.
They didn't feel...
Maybe they didn't have an opportunity to voice things.
And so finding RAMPD helped crystallize
some of the the principles of advocacy
and activism and being loud.
I think that's the thing that really draws me to RAMPD
is that it is not polite all the time.
I mean, maybe that's not a nice thing to say, but we're very interested in
getting equity, getting access,
and we're not going to be pretty pleased about...
There's an insistence that I think is necessary, especially in these times,
and a defiant celebration
that we're here,
we know what we're doing, we're professionals,
and it's time to let us in.
We're promoting disability culture, which is very important,
and trying to show that accessibility in the art is important.
While in these times, someone is just
saying that EDI is not important and
removing important pages from important websites, I wouldn't name this person,
but really, it makes it even more important for us to talk about that.
Can you give us a meaning or a definition
of what it is for you, disability culture?
I...
Recently, I had a really great experience with Lachi.
I worked on some music videos with her, and this was my first
COVID safe production that I had really done where I was not...
Usually, I am the person wearing a mask and avoiding things, right?
But this was the first event production that I'd been to where
everyone was wearing a mask because I was there.
I had my little trustee air purifier.
What was very interesting to me was that every person in that room
also had access needs.
Because I was focused on the COVID safety as an access need.
But I was not the only person in the room who had needs.
And some people needed the lights to not flash, no bright light.
Some people needed to see people's mouths to read lips.
And that was a rare occurrence for me.
I am very used to being the only person in the room with access needs.
And so suddenly, that was just normal.
That was just what was happening everyone had that.
And there was this real feeling of safety, of camaraderie, of community,
because I wasn't the weird one anymore.
I always I feel just a little bit off, and I wear these glasses
because of the lights, and I have really bad light sensitivity.
I look a little odd sometimes, and I'm very used to being the one person
that's like, Hey, I need something.
I need this, I need that.
Very few other people are expressing their needs, their access needs.
But being on this production with Lachi really crystallized for me that
disability culture is a way of life, is a way of interacting with people where your
access needs are like everything else.
I have a name, I have an identity, I have a role, I have access needs.
And that's exactly the same for you.
It was the same for every single person on that set.
I was not the only person anymore with access needs.
And feeling that, feeling that just be normalized,
that just being part of the process,
Revolutionary for me, frankly.
Disability culture for me is that feeling of community.
This is not something that makes us different,
it's something that makes us alike.
Yeah, that's very interesting because the access need is something
that either is not frequently talked about or treated as an exception
or something that is like, No, you're the only one who has an access need.
Everybody has an access need, even non-disabled folks.
They have access needs because they need a desk that sometimes surrelevates because
they have back issues or they frequently travel, so they have these always
carrying all these suitcases and needing something that is easy to roll.
It's an access need.
That idea that
everyone has access needs and
one thing that we can do is make that normal.
I mean, that just blows the door open for not just disabled people,
but single parents, people that work multiple jobs,
people that are caregivers to their family members, everyone that has access needs
who doesn't have a space to
say them, to ask for them.
That door can be kicked open for them as well.
I think that's pretty cool.
Do you have this conversation with your students sometimes about
access needs or different way of playing
that might be different than the traditional
way they are learning, things like that?
When I started teaching, I had no real goals.
I had no real plans.
I'm going to be completely honest with you, when I started,
I wanted extra money because you got to make money as a working musician.
But when I started doing my training, I realized that a lot of the things
I was being taught to do were -
I didn't use this language then, but I can use it now,
they were not accessible.
They were for one type of student.
If that student had, I mean, performance anxiety, if that student had
emotional regulation issues, if that student
was not a cookie cutter, right?
I would fail them as a teacher, but they would fail.
I would be the true failure, but they would be the one who were labeled.
The failure would be placed on them, and the blame would be placed on them
for not being capable.
And I remember in my very first training, I brought something
like this up because it shocked me.
It really bothered me that I knew people who would not respond to this teaching.
And I said, well, hey, what do we do when we have a student who
says this or needs this or asks this.
They didn't have an answer.
They just really didn't.
So my real impetus for actually going and getting
training, going back to grad school for music education, was because I noticed
the way that we teach children, especially when they get
to be young adults and they go to college, can be very damaging.
I knew people in college with real, real problems that came from
their teachers not meeting their needs.
And I think that if you are a freshman in conservatory and you walk into that studio
with a great master, you're not going to advocate for yourself.
The power dynamic is too strong there.
And so it gets very, very easy to put all these things on yourself
to say, I am the one who is failing.
I am the one who is not good enough.
When really there are things that the community can do.
There are things that your teachers can do.
There are things that the administrators can do.
There are things that the institutions can do.
When I was a teacher and I started observing this and looking at this,
I wish I knew the term access needs.
I wish I had that direct language because that made me really mad.
Did not like that.
Did this realization impact your music, your performance practices,
or the way you were seeing your music?
It definitely made me
a little bit more clear-headed.
It clarified things for me in terms of what I was bringing in
to the practice room.
Love practicing, obsessed with practicing.
I can be alone in a room and no one is allowed to talk to me
for hours, like a dream scenario.
The issue that I certainly had at maybe the end of college was that
it was bringing more into practice room with me than the instrument.
When I started looking into this issue, when I started teaching and started researching,
one of my very first questions was,
how do we help students?
How do we help other professionals only bring the stuff they really need
into the practice room?
How do we get them to leave their teacher's voice in the hallway,
that internal critic that's always seeing something wrong with what you're doing?
How do you leave the pressure of auditions in the hallway when you go to practice?
Some people can do that very naturally, and they are the ones that get ahead.
Other people who can't do that naturally, they're the ones
with substance use problems.
For the first time, I was able to really put language to that.
I was able to say, I do not need my teacher's voice in my head.
I do not need that in the practice room. I need a metronome.
I need a tuner.
I need my étude books.
I do not need an internal critic.
Having that did help my approach to the instrument,
which I hope makes me a better teacher. I don't know.
Fingers crossed.
I want to go back briefly to what you're doing now.
Is there something you're working on right now that you want to talk about?
Well, I have a...
Well, I'll say this, you can check back with me in about a year
and I'll have more to say.
But I've been, this year,
planning to expand my video game channel
to a broader production company, and I am starting
to write original video game music.
I'm starting to do actual...
I mean, not actual, but arrangements that are notated, that are,
I can put in PDFs and make portfolios of.
And I am hoping that by the end of the year, I will have
a little company name to plug on your podcast next year.
But that is the place that I'm going.
And I'm hoping it is a difficult industry, it is a difficult economy,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But I've loved this project so much that I am hoping that maybe you will see me in
the credits of a real video game someday.
Well, fingers crossed..
We need some luck, but you know.
[Laughs.]
That's awesome.
Okay, so I have a last question to conclude this interview, and it's about
people who might have influenced your career or counted or motivated you.
If you think of people who you cross path with and you really said, Oh, that person
really helped, who would it be and why?
To be honest, I think that one of the
most influential people in my path from
musician to advocate or activist,
or at least active musician, in that sense, was
the professor I had in grad school who accused me of forging my doctor's notes.
I was in a car crash in my first semester of grad school.
I was in another car crash in my second semester of grad school.
Very bad luck just happens.
You never know when that's going to happen to you.
I needed incompletes because I couldn't use a computer.
The lights were too bright. I couldn't think.
I couldn't string a sentence together.
It was really difficult, really difficult time, a lot of neurological problems.
And it was April.
It was the end of the semester, and I went to my professors
and was like, hey, I need incompletes. It just has to happen.
I can't finish the work.
And I had one professor who wouldn't give me one.
And if I failed that class, which I would have
because my work after the car, because of these car crashes,
was not great, and I couldn't finish the assignments,
I would have failed the class, which would kick out of the department.
So I had one person, one person,
whose doubt could have just
derailed my entire career.
I would have lost almost everything that I worked for to that point.
That one person definitely
motivated me, I will say.
That person, in a sense, gave me the permission to see myself as disabled
because I had not started doing that yet.
I did not see myself as that at that time.
But the moment someone saw that in me and assigned that label to me and then
used it for discrimination, that gave me the permission
I needed to say, You know what?
I do have access needs.
I do need to wear these glasses.
I do need all of this administrative support so I don't forget things.
I suddenly had neurological problems that I never had before,
and I probably would have just
shrugged and struggled along without that
graduate advisor telling me that, well, are you sure this is from your doctor?
Because it just looks like you copied the header on a piece of paper.
Now I am here. I am in RAMPD.
I am on this podcast.
I am very proudly disabled.
I am happy to be part of the community.
And as much as my teachers,
as my family, as my cats have supported me,
someone pissing me off
was actually a little bit more helpful
than maybe I realized in that moment.
It's very interesting.
It's incredible that a negativity
pushed you to become positive with
everything that was happening to you.
Well done.
Fight is a very powerful motivation.
I would encourage anyone who has experienced something like that, use it.
Use it to your advantage.
Let it fuel you.
Because I might still be living in my parents house
if I had let that person just walk all over me, and if I had let her kick me
out of the department, if I had let her take those things from me, I don't know.
I probably wouldn't have all the things I have today.
So let those things motivate you.
Well, thank you for all these bits of experiences.
Really, it was very interesting to chat with you about
your experience in this musical path.
Thank you.
Well, good luck for your big project.
We are going to follow that.
There's going to be a resource page where we're going to definitely publish things.
So yeah, hopefully it will come soon.
And, yeah, for every other project that you have.
Maybe see you in one of the RAMPD events, maybe see you around.
That would be very nice.
I agree.
Okay. Have a great day.
Thanks, Diane. You too.
Bye. Take care..
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