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Someday, you'd like to start pursuing paid composing work.
But you're not ready for it yet - or so you think.
So to GET ready, you've been focusing on practicing your composing skills so that your music will be "good enough" to be taken seriously.
And yet, you might still be wondering:
"How will I know when my music IS good enough to get paid?"
Good question.
But what if I told you that you'...
In case you didn’t catch it…
I was recently featured helping out my friend and musician Aurelie Couble on her new video, where she challenged herself to score a scene with NO previous scoring experience:
We chatted in some detail about numerous scoring tips, and I sent Aurelie my FREE Fundamentals for Film Composers Guide for some pointers.
(☝️ If you haven’t grabbed this guide yet, I HIGH...
One of my Composing Career Bootcamp students recently mentioned that they struggle with adding too much to their music.
This is one of the most common traps for media composers, and I’m guilty of it, too. ✋
I find that OVER-scoring tends to be caused by one of two culprits (and sometimes both):
- 🧠 Ego (trying to make something cool, smart, or ground-breaking at the potential expense of making ...
For the last few months, I’ve been hard at work with my friend Weijun Chen composing music for SGRA’s mobile game Dragonheir: Silent Gods!
The studio has been wonderful to work with, offering lots of creative freedom and many opportunities for having our music recorded by the Budapest Scoring Orchestra.
(If you want to skip to two of my tracks, check out 5:34 and 12:12.)
The most interesting...
Coaching students often ask me how I use theory to navigate the many emotions that music needs to convey for effective storytelling.
Theory is a great way to discover new tools, but what theory won’t do is build your emotional vocabulary. To do that, you need to connect emotional language to the tools you learn.
Here’s what to try:
When you listen to a chord progression, don’t just study what i...
In 2021, I decided to really dig deeper into improving my orchestration and mock-up chops.
One of the most eye-opening moments for me was watching some of John Powell's Logic playthroughs, and paying close attention to the piano roll. I realized that--unlike mine at the time--his arrangements didn't just sound clean... they looked clean.
You can literally see the variety of registers, density, a...
A few weeks ago, I went back to my roots and made a Composing in Real Time video:
These are my favorite videos to make. I love sharing my process on-camera (mistakes and all), and exploring the creative process in front of a virtual audience. Hope you enjoy them as much as me!
(And if you want the uncut version, consider becoming a Patron to gain access to all of my uncut footage and MIDI fil...
Here’s a tip that’ll change the way you score scenes forever.
When starting off composing for media, many composers start by matching on-screen emotions 1:1.
If a character is angry, they think:
“What does angry music sound like?”
But here’s what separates the good film composers from the great:
To be truly impactful for an audience, music needs to speak beyond what we see on-screen. 🔎
I...
One of my all-time favorite clients to work for is Team True Potential. They’re a 3-person team of animators who create gorgeous short films on YouTube.
(If you’ve been on my channel for a while, odds are you’ve seen me score at least one of their pictures)
In this video, I walk through my process scoring “The Final Touch”, a short little film about a grumpy dwarf and a capricious elf. The mus
...Wired recently released one of the coolest videos on sound foley I've ever seen.
I've always been obsessed with telling stories through music, but it's fascinating to see how creatives in other departments of entertainment accomplish storytelling through their own means.
In this video Joanna Fang walks us through how different genres of media can influence how she approaches the characteristics ...