andreastolpe.comReviews of andreastolpe.com

I’m going to give my honest input. I tend to think about all the things that I would’ve liked to experienced and here is a list. 1. We shared a bedroom which was fine, but our bathrooms were not serviced. I didn’t know where to put the dirty towels and the trash cans were overflowing. 2. The food was very creative however, I would’ve liked to have more fresh fruits and vegetables. Bananas, oranges, apples as snacks. The option of using real coffee cups, and water glasses. 3. The guest speaker as a group it would’ve been nice for us to be able to put together a list of questions we like to ask the guest speaker and give them before hand so that they were able to have our questions answered to stay on purpose. 4. The handbook was really good and well put together, but I didn’t feel like we followed it enough ~even if we could just going through it from beginning to end as a group to get an overall picture of what the teacher wanted to communicate throughout the retreat. Perhaps some setting. 5. The video -audio recording could’ve been higher quality. That would’ve put us into having a more professional experience. 6. I would’ve liked to have gone over the journey of taking a song, writing it, and the journey it would take or the possibilities of how it can be introduced to the music industry. 7. Songwriting group dynamics or co-writing ideas of how to work in groups. 8. Song Anatomy: Listen to songs and breakdown the Verse, Chorus, Refrain, Bridges. 9. Listen to successful songs and have an open discussion about what makes them. I think these courses are very valuable and can be improved upon.

It's a good retreat for someone that is just staring to write songs.

It was more people than I was expecting. I found the amount of people a little overwhelming and it was difficult to connect until late in the course. Perhaps better 'break the ice' exercises at the beginning instead of all introducing ourselves in such a big circle which was quite daunting. Not enough breaks to just take it all in. 14 hour day with only breaks for meals felt very intense. My accommodation was a long walk away from the main venue so the round trip meant I had to take everything I needed at the start of the day and did not really get a chance to go back to my room unless I missed the communal meal experiences. I had not expected to do so much cowriting with people who were quite inexperienced . That made the experience quite difficult to be really thoughtfully creative and became more about working on one's levels of patience and tolerance. I found Andrea captivating, sensitive and very knowledgable.

For me the third session was really helpful. I found the 1st and 2nd sessions to be good but maybe at an intermediate level. So I didn’t feel I learnt that much. For me a 3 hour zoom was too long too. Probably more effective if spread over say 2 weekends with homework / tasks in between. Also I did not 100% agree with matching emotional content of the music with the lyric. A lot of the best songs I know are the opposite. Using a very sad story but put to upbeat music. Think of songs like It’s a Shame or Red Wine.