Interview with Mario Stallbaumer

Mario Stallbaumer is a gifted and hugely successful pianist, arranger, and ArrangeMe self-publisher based in Köln (Cologne), Germany.
He has worked with singers, instrumentalists, bands, choirs, and orchestras all over Germany, and in recent years has shifted his focus from performing to arranging piano covers and creating stunning videos for his YouTube channel, which has 78,000 subscribers and achieved over 20 million views!

Mario has been publishing his arrangements with ArrangeMe since 2018.

ArrangeMe: Tell us how you got started with arranging!

Mario Stallbaumer: I was fortunate to have a really great piano teacher who gave me a classical piano education from about ages ten to twenty. That's where I learned all the basics regarding music theory and music notation. Over the years I started exploring other genres like pop and jazz, and that led to all kinds of collaborations: accompanying singers, working with bands and orchestras, the occasional wedding gig, all the kind of things that would require some basic arrangement work.

About 10 years ago, I began doing some work for an educational piano app. I created arrangements in the form of MIDI files that would then be visualized in the app. So I didn't write sheet music to sell, but I was still doing piano arrangements and gaining experience doing that.

Once I stumbled upon an opportunity to actually publish and sell arrangements in the form of sheet music, that just seemed like the next logical step. In late 2018 I published a few Christmas pieces on SMP Press (ArrangeMe), and within a few days I had a sale—which I hadn't expected at all! So that really encouraged me to keep at it.

AM: What does your arranging process look like?

MS: I've always been interested in finding ways to make a song sound as good as possible. For me, there's always the question: "What's the best way to do a song justice and to translate a song to the piano?” . . . to find the best compromise between everything that is happening in a song and the limitations of two hands on the piano.

So when I work on the arrangements, there's a lot of experimenting with left hand accompaniment patterns and different voicings and moving elements between hands. I always try to capture the essence of a song while keeping it playable and fun and good from a pianistic perspective. I can never tell how tricky it will be to do an arrangement of a song just from listening to it; the only way to find that out is to sit down and actually get into the arranging process.

AME: What is your most popular arrangement?

MS: My most popular video on YouTube is a cheesy pop song called "Love Is Gone," which isn't a favorite song of mine, but for some reason it worked very well on YouTube. As for sheet music, my biggest sellers have been, “Can't Help Falling in Love” by Elvis Presley and “Just the Two of Us” by Bill Withers.

AME: What is your most favorite arrangement that you've ever done?

MS: I do like my arrangement of “Just the Two of Us.” I think I kind of nailed it, and I think it became popular for a reason. From other arrangements that I've done somewhat recently, I think the ones I liked the most were “Blackbird” by the Beatles, “Scarborough Fair” by Simon and Garfunkel, and maybe “Easy” by the Commodores. It was tricky in some ways, but I figured it out in a way that I really liked at the end.

AME: What do you find most rewarding about arranging music? What do you find the most challenging?

MS: I'll begin with the challenges. Generally, what I find most challenging about arranging is that there are so many decisions one has to make. There are always endless options of how it could be and it's never clear what the best option is. And you know, I'm pretty perfectionistic about what I do! I always want it to be really accurate, but that doesn't always lead to the best results. So it's a challenge for me to kind of let go and allow myself to take certain freedoms and find my own twist on the song.

On the other hand, it's really rewarding when everything falls into place, when it feels like an arrangement is making sense and there's this feeling of "this is exactly how it should be played," like you cracked the song and figured out the best way to play it in that moment. I find that very satisfying.

And then there's positive feedback, of course. I get a lot of comments on YouTube from people who find my arrangements helpful or inspiring, and that gives me a lot of joy.

AME: Where do you find inspiration most often?

MS: It happens very randomly. You know, I hear a song on the radio or on the street or in some social situation and for one reason or another, it just hits me and I feel like I really want to do an arrangement of this song. I have long lists of songs that are waiting for me that I really want to do at some point. So the inspiration comes by accident a lot. And of course, there's music that I find very inspiring. For years, the most inspirational piece for me has been The Köln Concert by Keith Jarrett, and I happen to live in the city of Köln, so that hits home in more ways than one.

AME: Your YouTube channel is really impressive. Tell us a bit about how you create your videos, and how you promote your sheet music using your channel.

*Mario places buttons like these at the end of his videos, which link to his sheet music for sale, his YouTube channel, and other related content.*

MS: When I began uploading videos to YouTube, it was just some simple MIDI visualizers, nothing fancy. Then I began exploring live footage and over time, it became this pretty extensive editing process with all sorts of effects and sophisticated visuals and whatnot.

Obviously there's a lot of competition on YouTube, so you need to stand out in some way and make your videos as interesting as possible. At this point, the whole editing process is pretty much routine. But the most exciting moment is always when I sit down to actually do the live recording because I still get nervous every time the camera is rolling, even though no one is watching. There's always this excitement that's intrinsic to this kind of live recording situation.

A big advantage of YouTube is that it has a lot of tools and possibilities to forward people from the video to the sheet music sites; elements that you can add to the videos that people can click on. So it's a really useful tool to send people to your products.

AME: What is your favorite thing about the ArrangeMe platform?

MS: It's just wonderful to have access to this huge catalog of songs and a legal way to publish your own arrangements. And it's amazing to have that incredible reach to huge numbers of potential customers through this one platform. I think it's easy to assume that the internet is flooded with arrangements of popular songs and there won't be any demand for what you do. Turns out, if you have some consistency and you put an effort into creating good products, you can break through the noise.

“I think it’s easy to assume that the internet is flooded with arrangements of popular songs and there won’t be any demand for what you do. Turns out, if you have some consistency and you put an effort into creating good products, you can break through the noise.”

— Mario Stallbaumer

AME: You always seem to have a sense for the latest pop music that releases and you deliver arrangements of those hot titles as soon as they're available to arrange. How long does it take you to create a new piano arrangement?

MS: It really differs from song to song, obviously. It can range from two hours to a couple of days. Depends on how tricky a song turns out to be and how difficult it is for me to be satisfied with the arrangement. I usually try to create a video for every new arrangement right away or in the days after. I think it makes the product more interesting if there's an opportunity to watch a video of the full arrangement.

I always try to be pretty up to date about what songs are trending, and I keep an eye out for what other channels are doing and what songs other people are arranging. That became part of my daily routine. I read the ArrangeMe and Billboard newsletters, but I also do a lot of research on YouTube, like going through trending pages and a bunch of big piano arrangement channels that are usually doing current stuff as well.

AME: Looking back kind of over the last 10 years, is there anything you'd change from how you started out selling your arrangements? Anything you wish you'd learned sooner or any assumptions that you had to correct?

MS: I definitely wish I had started sooner! I think I have a better feeling today for what people are looking for and how well a product might sell, what people are interested in and what kind of arrangements might be worth my time. Looking back, I probably wasted a lot of time on songs that didn't turn out to be big sellers.

Of course, my sheet music and my videos look very different now than they looked five years ago, so there's been a process and refinement. And when I go back to arrangements I did a couple of years ago, I see a lot of things that I would do differently today. But I'm happy that's the case. It means I learned something and I've gotten better at what I do. And I hope that looking back in a couple of years, I'll feel the same way about what I'm doing today. It shows you're evolving, right?

AME: At this point in your career, what's the next thing that you hope to accomplish?

MS: Actually, last month was the first time that I had a million views (for one of my videos) on YouTube! So that's a really nice achievement that I wouldn't have expected when I began doing that. There's always kind of obvious milestones, like a certain number of subscribers or a certain number of sales on a given day and whatnot. Maybe I'll cross 100,000 subscribers on YouTube next year, which would be wonderful, obviously. But you know, after each milestone, there's another one and I just hope it will continue to be fun and rewarding to create arrangements.

AME: What do you want to want to tell a new ArrangeMe user, or someone who is ready to take the next step in building their catalog on ArrangeMe?

MS: I think the most important piece of advice would be to take the time to create something that you're really satisfied with and to create a product that doesn't look like someone just did it on his phone or something, to create sheet music that actually looks appealing, that you might be interested in buying yourself and that adds some kind of value to whoever might purchase it. And don't be afraid to ask for advice, whether it comes to music notation itself, or finding a good balance between playability and sound. Have people proofread what you do. The higher the quality of arrangements that people create, the better for everybody.