It's good to spend time with your colleagues
It's good to spend time with your colleagues
And make sure to sign up for Advanced Sampling Techniques: Sample Yourself
Sign up for my new class, Advanced Sampling Techniques: Sample Yourself and learn new ways to finish your songs
Writing music is amazing and super cool. It can also be like pulling teeth. When we rely exclusively on inspiration, we run the risk of it running out — which it often does quickly. Usually, inspiration hangs out long enough to help us get a song started, but rarely long enough to finish it. That’s where you need to have tools and techniques available to help you finish your work.
In this two hour workshop, you’ll learn how to finish a song by sampling your initial musical idea to create new sections. Together, we’ll break down my song “It All Comes Back To You In The End,” from my EP, Fever Dreams at Ruger Place, which was entirely composed using sampling-based songwriting techniques.
I love having techniques like this in my musical tool belt and I love sharing them with others even more. The class will run live Saturday, December 2nd from 10 am to 12 pm pacific and the recording will be available to rewatch indefinitely afterwards.
GameSoundCon was rad
I’ve just returned to Seattle from a short week in Los Angeles. Alongside the rest of the team at Plant Based Audio, I moderated a panel at GameSoundCon called Starting Your Game Audio Career: Turning Strife into Success. Our panel was nearly at max capacity and the audience seemed really engaged. If you attended GSC this year, you can watch the panel on the Whova app until October 2024. If you didn’t, consider inviting us to talk about this at your next event/class/lecture. Side note, the Whova app made me this cute little graphic telling me that I did a good job because people came to our talk. (Session with big attendance!) That’s nice.
GameSoundCon always feels like a long awaited family reunion. (At least, the kind that you actually want to go to anyway.) I spend the vast majority of my time in my office alone and it can be rather isolating. I enjoy the fall conferences particularly because they’re my chance to re-connect with my professional and creative communities — a sentiment that might be familiar if you’ve read my PAX West recap from this year.
GameSoundCon is particularly wonderful because it’s time spent with other game audio folks. In some capacities, these are the friends with which I share the most camaraderie because our lives are driven in such similar fashions. It’s nice to be in a room full of people who recognize the value in all that you’re doing and are able to commiserate with you on all that you might be struggling with. I always fail to take enough photos of these trips (something my spouse rightfully chides me over) but I’d love to share the few that I do have.
New Beginnings, Thoughts, Goals, Visions
What I love so much about attending and speaking at conferences is that I always walk away with clarity of mind and purpose. It always helps me consider the bigger picture of my career and where I want to go. If I’m being honest, my mind so often is drawn strictly into logistics: am I managing my calendar? Am I earning enough this month? Am I saving enough for taxes. Those questions have a tendency to make me think small. To make me think in terms of survival. To make me think in terms of scarcity.
What conferences always do is help me return to a place of vision. To think big picture about where I am and what I want from my career. My calendar, income, and even my taxes are all realities within service of the bigger picture. And, if I don’t remain anchored in the big picture, I cannot find within myself the drive and energy needed to realize my goals. Perhaps it works for some folks, but I don’t wake up every day and work hard at my craft so that I may better pay my taxes.
One goal that’s become more and more apparent to me is that I want to write music for AAA games. I spend much of my gaming time playing deep, open world games. These soundtracks are rich, expansive affairs that are hybrids of styles and techniques. This year alone I’ve spent a lot of time listening to Vampyr’s wonderful fusion of classical and industrial music, Horizon Forbidden West’s synth-y textures, and I’m currently going through my annual playthrough of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Every fall I want to be in that game’s Prague.
I have some work to do to achieve this goal, though I am confident in my ability to do so. If I had to self-assess my abilities, which I’m happy to do, I’d say my orchestration skills are currently my weakest when compared to the other necessary skills. I’m comfortable in my abilities as a composer, an electronic musician, a sound designer, and a producer. What I’ve yet to establish for myself is who I am as an orchestrator. While it is a skill I’ll spend my life developing (like the rest I listed above), I do think I can find the answer to my question — who I am as an orchestrator — relatively quickly.
The nice thing is that I’ve got two projects on my plate that will help me work towards this AAA hybrid style. First, last month I signed on to do a soundtrack for a yet to be announced game that will let me flex these muscles. I’m a few cues in and it’s genuinely some of the best work I’ve done for any game I’ve ever worked on. Second, writing an opera (ICYMI I’m writing my first opera) is also going to help me fill knowledge gaps. It will be a chamber work as opposed to one for full orchestra but it’s an exciting opportunity for me to see what my musical voice is like in this format. And, when I really think about the orchestration question, that’s the crux of it: figuring out how to apply my musical voice to acoustic ensembles interweaved with synthetic textures and electronic instruments.
I share these goals with you in part because I want this space, this newsletter, to not simply be a highlight reel of things that I have done. I want to share my experiences, things I’ve learned, and the path that I set for myself in my career. Growing up, I was desperate for the opportunity to see the day to day of another composer’s career and, in some small way, Keep Living With Music is my way to offer that for others.
Until next time.
Quick Hits
Point Blank Music School posted a lengthy interview with me. In the interview we chat about this newsletter, my teaching style, how I produced my new EP, and more. Read it here.
I wrote music for the first VR Barbie game. This month, Peeka and Mattel released Barbie: You Can Be a Fashion Designer VR. Learn more here.
Do you need help with your music production or composition skills? I offer private one on one lessons over Zoom. You can sign up for lessons here.