I’m past it now. I’ve dealt with the harsh reality. I’ve come to terms with the fact that basically… I’m a professional chimp.

I assist a composer. It’s what I do. You can dress it up all you want – Scoring Assistant, Technical Score Consultant, Assistant to Composer, whatever – but the fact remains that I do what I’m told and I’d damned well better like it!

I know what you are thinking. It sounds so glamorous. I know. “Ooh! Aww! You get to work on movies!” Actually, I ride herd on studio racks, install plugins, go get takeout… I totally just do what I’m told.

And it kicks ass. I have learned more doing this than I have in three years of music school (and my boss pays me, which is also something they don’t do in music school!) I’ve read a ton of books on film composers and sat through countless hours of lectures at school on theories of orchestration and compositional technique, but I’ve learned more in one afternoon of watching how a cue comes together at my composer’s writing desk. Therefore, my appetite for knowledge has become insatiable. As an assistant now, I consider this to be my time to soak up as much as I can so that when I get my big opportunity, I can hit the ground running. In the simplest of terms, I’ve essentially become an information whore… and I likey.

The biggest thing I’ve learned from my composer is the importance of knowing film music history. He’s big on that. Annoyingly so, in fact. But adopting his habits in this area has tipped the scales for me in terms of depth of knowledge and understanding of what we do and why we do it.

I’m gong to spend Launch Week sharing with all of you some things I’ve found online in my research that have been extremely beneficial to me in learning more about what we do as composers. Some of them will be links to articles, some of them will be videos, and some of them will be interviews with other composers or sites that you ought to be aware of.

As I post these this week, drop me a line in Comments and let me know what you think. And of course, if you have anything you can share, by all means… let’s have it!

Let’s start with something amazing….