Hi all, and welcome to the Projected Frame Blog.  My name is Michael and in the coming weeks and months, I hope to bring you news and insight into my personal journey through this crazy world as well as interesting stories and events I happen upon.

I’ll start by telling you a little about myself.  I am currently finishing my Doctor of Musical Arts degree in music performance at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.  I live in North Carolina, near where I grew up with my wife, Sara, and two dogs, Mattie and Buxy .  Like many of you, I hope to one day make a living with my art.  Also like many of you, school has prepared me for a lot of things, but running a business wasn’t one of them.  But every once in a while, I find/learn something that makes my life much easier.

Since getting married in 2007, my wife and I have been on a joint (ad)venture of trying to make money playing percussion instruments for weddings and church services?!?  When most people hear the word “percussion”, they think of drums (or don’t know what the word means).  Wedding/church music is certainly not what comes to mind as a good match.  We play relatively unheard of instruments, the marimba and vibraphone.  Heard of them?  Likely not, and unfortunately, most people haven’t either.  This was our first major hurdle when starting our business; how do we explain what we do?.  It sounds simple enough, but we still struggle with this problem every day.  Interested to find out what these instruments are and what they sound like?  Try going here.

Did you go to the website?  Do you know what we do?  Do you know what the instruments are and sound like?  I certainly hope so.  Problem solved?  Not completely, but it’s a start, and it has certainly increased our number of clients as well as our visibility in the community (both physical and cyber).  The best part is that I know very little about web site design and I certainly didn’t make the website look that good on my own.  It’s actually a service that creates these web “portals” and all I do is plug in the pictures and audio and now the public face of our business gets as many compliments as our performances do!  The company is called Dynamod and is primarily used by musicians and others in the performing and visual arts because of the attention it gives to presenting music and video and images in a Flash format.  I can also update it from anywhere in the world and from any computer since the files are saved on their servers.  There’s no clutter on my computer and everything works 99.9% of the time!

That company gives us a professional looking product which makes us look better as a small company without the large budget of bigger companies.  This is exactly what Projected Frame is trying to do for you and your company in the world of accounting and bookkeeping.  It is taking the hassle out of something that often gets in the way of your primary purpose of making art!  We don’t work in a office building, so we need a product that goes where we go and allows us to do what we need quickly and efficiently.

Keep checking back, as I’ll try to keep this blog updated with interesting articles and events going on in the various arts.