I'm an American composer for film, television and video games, and a session and live drummer for radio and records.
As an international speaker and author, I'm passionate about talking to Creatives about the convergence of art and business and the strategies behind building a thriving and profitable creative enterprise as an artist.
I'm the founder and editor-in-chief of SCOREcast, the popular online consortium of worldwide film music and post-production professionals.
I author the creative resource The Conversation, which is distributed monthly to more than 550 subscribers across all disciplines of the creative arts space.
My company, Deane Ogden Creative, Inc., is a global organization that handles my music projects and advocacy endeavors, and also administers my Imaginator Music production library throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, and Asia.
Well... it's official. The experiment is a success. So far, I've hosted two Google+ hangouts for Creatives and it seems that we have something that's catching fire with Creatives. I'm making this a regular series event and calling it The Creative Hangout. The first one was pretty damned great. I joined six fellow composers for a trial run of this program and we had a great time talking about all kinds of cool things, including the responsibility of authenticity as artists, the government's role in art, how to stay musically true to yourself, how to talk to directors/producers about music, and much more. The chat actually spilled over the allotted time and into a Facebook conversation by several of us who had a few more minutes to spend. Last week's Hangout though... holy shit!! It was a barn burner! We had a full boat of ten people this last week, which is the...
This last Monday night, I joined a great group of composers for the launch of my Creative Google+ Hangout series of international video chats. It was a terrific group of Creatives, and we talked for an hour about a bunch of different things, including the responsibility of authenticity as artists, the government's role in art, how to stay musically true to yourself, how to talk to directors/producers about music, and much more. I'll be hosting another CG+H this coming Monday, February 13... but I'll be changing the time to make the talk more accessible for those of you across the pond. Monday's Creative Google+ Hangout will happen at 11:00am PST. What You Need to Do There are a few things you need to do if this sounds like something you might be interested in: These hangouts are a perfect way for you to get networked in with a group of working Creatives...
Once a week for the last three months, I have spent an hour with seven other heavy hitter Creative people on a Google+ hangout. We get our coffee or our tea (or our beer!), turn off our phones, close our doors, shutdown whatever other computer-related annoyances we are all involved in, and we talk openly about creating—the happy parts, the hard parts, the places we need help, and the places we can give help. These weekly meetings have been some of the best time I send every week, bar none. Our little group consists of people who are out there effectively changing the game of the Creative Arts for the better: An Emmy-winning director; the drummer for an über-famous rock band; an Oscar-winning leading lady who has starred in over 50 feature films in the last thirty years; a guy who is a lead animator at Pixar; a New York Times-bestselling novelist, etc....
A few weeks ago, I was privileged to speak at the 2012 NAMM Film, Television and Game Composer Panel with fellow composers David Lawrence and Steve Ouimette. The panel was moderated by Sample Logic co-CEO Keith Robinson. The four of us spoke about a ton of extremely relevant and timely issues for composers of all types for about 60 minutes. During the main discussion, we touched on topics including working with orchestras, the evolution of our writing and producing workflows, handling demanding schedules, working remotely, producing accurate and convincing MIDI mockups, deriving inspiration from various sources, blending samples with live recordings, the responsibilities of creative artists, where music creation technology is headed, and much more. Following the main discussion, we took audience questions for 45 minutes (not included in the recording below). Here is the entire hour-long main discussion from the 2012 NAMM Film, Television and Game Composer Panel. If you cannot see the audio...
I've been seriously kicking around the idea of sharing some of my analysis into certain popular pop and rock tunes and what makes them work so well. I'm a total student of production, so I often tear apart a favorite production to figure out what makes it tick. What is it, when you strip away all the exterior and get down to the bare bones of the tune, that makes it such a kick-ass hooky piece of musical genius? Well, in searching around to see if anyone had already beat me to the punch on this, I discovered several cats who are doing just that, with varying degrees of success, of course. I was excited to discover, though, that my buddy Jeff Tolbert, a successful composer and producer, is doing a version of this at his site filmscoring.info, but with a unique bent that might be interesting to musicians of all types. Jeff...
