Kurier
The Wiener Neustadt start-up Marschpat wants to modernize music bands with digital marching books.
fromCaroline Ferstl
At some point it was enough for Patrick Rupprecht: “It can’t be that in the 21st century we still have to laboriously drag music books and laboriously turn pages while making music,” thought the 28-year-old, who plays the clarinet at the St. Veit Music Association Triesting (Baden district): “There had to be a solution for that.”
Apparently not.
That’s why Rupprecht simply developed it himself – together with two colleagues from the University of Applied Sciences Wiener Neustadt. Two years later, in June of this year, the “solution” – Marschpat – entered the market and is used by several marching bands, such as the Upper Austria military band.
Marschpat is a digital music management system. The app is installed on all PocketBook e-readers. “It took us months to convince us to get that far. We also had to convince the composers and publishers of the music books of our idea. You can’t just use their music like that, ”says co-founder Carina Eigner.
The software works like a sheet music platform: you can fill in a playlist on the computer and then synchronize it with e-readers. For each voice of each instrument, the sheet music can be explicitly downloaded.
Well-known investor
The Pittental march band was the first to be modernized. Cropping music sheets, wedging them in foil, replacing them if they get wet or lost – that is now a thing of the past.
A lot has happened since June: the start-up moved into its own office in Leobersdorf. Investor Michael Altrichter, known from the Puls 4 start-up show “Two minutes, two million”, has joined the company. Marschpat is now also represented on the German market.
“An update will be released on November 16: You can use the app to create meetings, manage gigs and trainings. In this way, the musicians can train separately from each other even in times of Corona, “explains Eigner, and continues:” The most important thing for us is customer feedback: We try to implement what the customers want. “