Craft

10. Relocating

Ten years ago? Hell yes! You had to, no question. But in 2013? Don’t get me wrong, Los Angeles hasn’t changed a bit — it’s still the entertainment capital of the world. But the world itself has changed. It’s flat as a pancake now. There’s no need to live anywhere other than where you are most happy. Everybody phones everything in, literally. You could be a successful artist on a tiny island so long as you had a solid Internet connection.

9. Branding

In the sea of noise, both good and bad, and both well done and done extremely poorly… Why not have a brand that is clear and distinguished? What could it hurt? But here’s the deal: DON’T DO IT YOURSELF. Very few musos are great graphic artists. I’m certainly capable of screwing around in Photoshop long enough until I emerge with what I think is the next Picasso, only to realize that I just spent an entire day doing something I’ve never been trained to do and know nothing about. So, instead of taking chances, I hire designers. Usually the unparalleled Ryo Ishido, who designed the album artwork for EASTERN CHRONICLE and just did the refresh on all the branding for our SCOREcast Community Chapters. All of you who are mad at directors for hiring their cousins to do their film scores ought to practice what you preach. Concentrate on what you are good at and let a pro do what they are good at. It’s worth the money. Trust me. Don’t go amateur hour with your branding. It’s too important.

8. Samples/Sounds

Two words: Originality rules. You can buy which ever ones you want, but please, for the love of all that’s holy… Make them your own after the fact. Get creative with effects and learn to manipulate stock sounds into otherworldly noises that don’t resemble anything close to what they did right out of the box. There are some top notch boutique sound designers out there, people who aren’t your run-of-the-mill folks and aren’t being backed by huge corporate and commercialized overhead. Those are the people you want designing your unique sounds. My favorite right now is Matt Bowdler out of the UK, also known as “The Unfinished”. Hunt those designers down and get their stuff. Better yet, hire them to create sets specifically for you and your music. It’s not enough being separated only for your writing style anymore. You have to also have a unique sound. If you think otherwise you are already behind the eight ball.

7. Mac or PC

For God’s sake… Get over it! Just use whatever works for you. The war is over. Except at VI Control, apparently.

6. Streaming Income

It’s still not ready for primetime yet. I don’t care what they are saying and I REALLY don’t care what third party tools you are using to “track” it. What little money that is trickling in for even the most successful Spotify artists is about as much as you’ll find when you vacuum out your couch cushions once a year. Big deal. And by the way, it probably won’t get any better as time goes by, so don’t get excited about it catching on. What you should really just focus on is writing better music. Because no matter what the payment methods of the future end up being, if your music sucks you won’t get the work anyway.

5. Limitations

Just because you can write a great trailer doesn’t mean you are a film composer. Sorry. Writing great scores doesn’t insure you can tell a musical story in thirty seconds, either. Talk to Yoav Goren about what it means to write a truly “epic” trailer cue. It’s not easy. If you can do it, kudos. If you can’t, don’t try to pass yourself off as “epic“. I’m not epic. I have my thing. And it’s not being “epic” (whatever the hell that even means anymore). I know my limitations and I’m not afraid to refer people away from them and into better hands. If you really care about your filmmaker partners, here’s a tip: Do what’s best for them ALWAYS, not what’s best for you. Don’t use your creative partners as guinea pigs if you know you have no business writing Dubstep. If you are on the fence about whether you can deliver, tell them. If they say, “No problem, give it your best shot anyway”, then go for it… And blow their minds. But don’t try to be all things to all people. Better men have tried and better men have died. Stick to what you know you excel at and hit the game-winning shot every time.

4. Using Players/Real Instruments

There’s simply no better sign of professionalism. None. In a blind taste test of samples versus people, people will win every time. If you don’t understand why, you don’t understand much about the game you are playing. Samples can come within what I’d even say is probably 95% sometimes (in the hands of a seriously gifted sample master-manipulator), but that last 5% is everything. It’s absolutely everything. That 5% is where the game is won. That 5% is the difference between driving a BMW down Fairfax or getting to unleash one on the PCH with the top down and your favorite tune coming out of the speakers with your girl next to you and $10,000 bucks in your pocket. There’s nothing like it. When real people take what you’ve done and reinterpret it through decades of hard-earned experience and seasoned perfectionism, your music simply sounds better. It just does. Instead of trying to explain why, let’s just chalk it up to one of those Laws of the Universe, because that’s about the only way to explain how great it is.

3. Getting Paid

Play a game with me: Pretend you live in a world where everything is done completely backwards. People ride their bicycles down the street ass-first. Water runs out of the basin and up to the tap, not from it. The oven is always on in the kitchen but nothing starts cooking until you turn it off and it cools down to 50 degrees or less. At the grocery store, everything is free unless you tell the cashier you …… want…… to….. pay…. for…. it……….. Wait a minute!!!!!!!!! Yes. That’s precisely the world you live in right now as a musician. Everything is free. Say it with me: EVERYTHING IS FREE. Get used to that, because it’s not going to change. The way it works now is that instead of an expectation to be paid, you need to start learning how to show people the reason why you are valuable. Telling them “I’m a professional” is not enough anymore. Why? The Internet. In the olden days, if you had a Yellow Pages ad you were legit. But now everyone has a Yellow Pages ad. It’s called a Facebook Page. It means nothing because everyone has one. It’s a commodity, not a rank. Everyone’s a composer. So you have the burden of proof now against all of “the other guys”. You have to prove why you are the person who ought to be paid to do that work. If you don’t have a solid way to do that (aka “a pitch”), God help you. Do yourself the biggest favor on Earth and learn how to sell. It’s the best tool a composer can have now. Even better than actually knowing how to write the music.

2. Studios

Having a way to write ideas down and remember them is essential to the gig. Having the best studio is not. One of the composers at this year’s Academy Awards wrote his nominated score on Mac OS9. You don’t need the most amazing and most expensive shit to write a memorable melody. You just need whatever you’ve got now. That’s it. Limitations can be great. I wrote and produced EASTERN CHRONICLE out of a backpack. Some of the best music ever heard the composer/songwriter wrote with nothing but a single instrument — the one between his/her ears. Start with what you have and do the best you can do with it. When you have the means to intelligently upgrade something, buy the very best you can afford to buy at that time, but nothing more. Don’t go into debt over your gear. Do that and you are a slave to your machines, versus them being slaves for you. Just get the very best you can afford to get when you can. It doesn’t always have to be the best thing out there to the detriment of your finances. Moore’s Law will take care of breaking that habit in you after two or three times of being burned anyway.

1. Bashing

Just knock it off. So, you hate what another composer did on another film that wasn’t yours. Cool. Keep your damn opinions to yourself. Nobody cares to hear you knock another composer and then kiss their ass when they pop up on your Facebook feed. Look… Just getting hired is a feat we should all be proud of. If you are lucky enough to get through the gig with your sanity intact and with the respect of your director, you deserve a vacation in the South of France. If you are asked back by the same director and get to do it all again, you deserve Umami Burger hand-delivered to your doorstep for the next ten years (Sorry – to me that’s better than the South of France!). What you don’t deserve is some asshole peer looking down on you because he’s butt-hurt over the lack of trajectory in his own career. That’s just jealousy and bitterness plain and simple, and it’s utterly ridiculous and juvenile. I’m tired of seeing composers do that shit to each other. It immediately levels you to the smallest degree of professionalism. Don’t do it. We wouldn’t do it to you if the roles were reversed, so don’t do it to others. You lose a lot of integrity by being a complete shithead.