The Aurora tragedy has sent shockwaves through the filmgoing community, and has almost silenced the filmmaking one. The senseless act that ended the lives of twelve innocent moviegoers and violently and unnecessarily interrupted the lives of dozens more is a staggering and sobering realization that, when you really get honest about it, nowhere in the world is a safe place anymore. Bad things, horrible things, will happen in public places, and will not necessarily be done in the dark alleys and forgotten corners of your city in quite the way they perhaps unfold onscreen in movies like The Dark Knight Rises.

The hours following the tragedy simply had me at a loss for words. There was nothing to say. There was no hopeful thing to utter, no inspirational quip that would take any of the sting away. The atmosphere, both in reality and online, was just too damned dark and deflated to do anything but sit in the undeniable shock and awe of the situation. As a human being, there was nothing to be done but offer condolences to the families who were directly touched by the events.

But, as a movie maker, as an artist, I absolutely do have things to say about these events. I think we probably all do. In no way do I say this to downplay the events or take away from the extreme horror and selfishness that occurred at the hands of the sicko responsible, but the attack was not just a random attack on humanity — It was also an assault against art.

I’m sure that the man behind the masacre never fathomed this far ahead in his convoluted state, but he essentially caused a ripple effect for a lot of people that stikes at the core of the human creative experience. The people who were waiting to see that film weren’t your average moviegoers. They were diehards; in-costume advanced-ticket purchasers who were making a special effort to wait in line for something they’d been anticipating since 2005. The fact that they had made such huge efforts to be there in the middle of the night proves that cinema is still alive and well in this country and that the naysayers have it all wrong. So long as we create something compelling, interesting, and in their minds worthy of being viewed in the sanctity of a movie theater, we are doing our jobs.

An Assault On Art

And that is what I’ve been pondering for the last 32 hours. The peace of the moviegoing experience.

A movie theater has always been a place of escapism. The place where people go to forget about the plausibility of someone quietly entering a room wearing a gas mask and opening fire. The movie theater is an incubator where children hatch dreams (and even a few old people, too). A place where people are free to reflect on the things that broad daylight won’t allow them to. A place where folks can get real and honest with the things they are wrestling with in their hearts and minds and lose themselves in imagination— a 90 minute dream sleep, if you will; a coming-to-grips with certain things that perhaps a film will challenge them on that no other entity in their lives will have the balls to. That is the beauty of the movie theater. It is a place of wonder, challenge, and fearless anonymity.

But what is it now? Is all of that now ruined because some mental case walked into a midnight screening and forced his alternate universe down the throats of 100 innocent bystanders? For some, yes. Definitely. For some, this event has stolen the freedom a movie theater provides them to completely go on autopilot for two hours and simply “enjoy the ride”. That’s not an insignificant concern and we cannot blame those who now feel unsafe and exposed in a plush red seat.

For me, and I hope for every artist and moviemaker out there… I say “Fuck that.” Strong words, I know, and I do not mean any irreverence toward anyone or anything other than Mr. James Holmes and any other savages who would dare take up his cross. To them I say… If you think you’ve downed humanity, you are obviously delusional. We get kicked in the teeth from time to time, but we never lay down for more. If you think you’ve leveled off the moviegoing experience, wrong again. Maybe for a second, but it will bounce back. It always does.

As for art and creation as holistic concepts? If you think you’ve stopped the proliferation of artistic expression — or even put a dent in it or slowed it down in any way — you are crazier than they are giving you credit for in the press. Art is bigger than you, Mr. Holmes. It is stronger, meaner, nicer, better, worse, funnier, sadder, saner and more delusional than you could ever hope to be or imagine being. Art has built empires and taken down dynasties. It was here long before you were even a twinkle in your mother’s eye — long before the world even thought about giving way to you or the bloodline that produced you. Art has been around for millions of years; since the inception of thought, really. It will be around for millions more. In fact, dare I say that as clever as you might think you are, you haven’t arrived at any original thought here that art hasn’t already beat you to in the pantheon of storytelling.

Good vs. Evil

It is interesting to note that the very nature of the Batman character is the antithesis of James Holmes’. Batman never kills anyone. He doesn’t use weapons to hurt or maim, steal or destroy. Instead, he chooses to fight evil with good and to stand for something most of us are realizing we have less and less ability to stand for on our own: Justice. For us to turn our focus from being a people who love and partake in entertainment to a people who love entertainment but are now unwilling to be entertained would be a travesty, I believe. Instead, it is time to turn our eyes toward the goodness in people, to recognize now more than ever that the prevailing triumphs of art and creativity are what feed a lot of that good to begin with, and to continue on making the most amazing things we’ve ever made. To think less, dream more, and work together to achieve masterpieces. Those kinds of works cannot be toppled. They can never be taken, destroyed, or ultimately even marginalized by anyone or anything.

To say that this event is horrific is to drastically understate the situation. It will never be forgotten and it will never fade from view. For those directly touched by it, it will serve as a terrible reminder of what happens when evil gets through the door unchecked and interferes with those we treasure most. But my hope is that as art has been a healing balm for many of society’s past wounds, the The Dark Knight Rises will and can help us heal from this too. After all, underneath the great costumes, the cool gadgets, the Batmobile and the action set-pieces, what people are really coming to see is the good guy prevail against the bad guy. That doesn’t always happen the Hollywood way — sometimes the bad guy gets his licks in first. But in the grand scheme of the story, we good guys always just keep surging forth, evolving, and staying fierce. As for movies… well… in this ever-changing business, who the hell knows. But somehow we will continue to entertain people, whatever the format looks like in years to come.

For art as an ideal? Not to worry… Art wins. It always wins. It’s too big, too important. It’s the cornerstone of the ecosystem that supports our very existence as human beings. We need it too much to let it die at the hands of even a few, let alone one singular entity. Was the temple defiled? Absolutely. Perhaps in a way that it never has been. But, the temple still stands. It’s a little bruised, a little battered… but it refuses to be moved.

(Image: Barry Gutierrez /AP/msnbc)

Deane Ogden visits with Ultimate Ears‘ general manager Philippe Depallens at the 2012 NAMM Show about their new in-ear studio reference monitors.

If you cannot see the video below, click here.

NAMM 2012: Sonokinetic Vivace

Episode Description

In this second episode of SCOREcast’s “Developer Series” podcasts for NAMM 2012, SCOREcast founder Deane Ogden chats with Sonokinetic founder Rob Vandenberg about his newest creation, “Vivace”.

Community Discussion

Weigh in on this episode! We want to hear your thoughts—Log into the COMMENTS below to leave your opinions and participate in the discussion!

On-Air Questions

Have a question or a comment you’d like addressed on-air? Send Deane and Brian an email at scorecastonline@gmail.com

In five years, SCOREcast has grown from a grassroots few to a far-reaching worldwide trade organization with tens of thousands of participants. Propelled by the forward momentum of our incredible community of composers, we continually witness and experience the need for expanded leadership infrastructure and feel the push from composers around the world to be bolder, braver, and brighter than ever before for the industry. It is always a wonderful moment when a familiar face from the SCOREcast community comes to the table with fresh and innovative thoughts and ideas that can help shape the future of what we do and how we do it.

As SCOREcast’s 5th Anniversary celebration rolls on this month, there couldn’t be a better time for some of those faces to be added to the leadership ranks within SCOREcast, providing for an even richer experience for our readers, listeners and community members.

For two-and-a-half years, London-based composer James Semple has nurtured and faithfully led our SCOREcast: London community chapter using a variety of events including meet-ups, seminars, and the popular SCOREcast Composiums to grow the group into London’s premiere network of media composers. As SCOREcast: London has gained notoriety across Europe (with composers flying in from as far as Greece and Germany to attend group events), James has established himself as a lightening-rod organizer who knows how to forge a strong community around a common cause and bond people together through industry camaraderie.

It is with great pleasure that SCOREcast announces James Semple as our newly appointed Director of Global Community. In his new role, James will work closely with all of our community leaders to effectively build and strengthen our SCOREcast Chapter Community program, as well as lead a team that will develop and plant new community chapters in strategic cities around the world.

Equally as exciting is the appointment of Marie-Anne Fischer as James’ successor at SCOREcast: London. Marie-Anne has been a member of the chapter since it’s launch in 2008, and has already been working along-side James as a principal coordinator in the group for some time. Marie-Anne brings with her a long history of experience and respect within the London film community, deep relationships with European software developers, and as an accomplished composer, a body of work that truly speaks for itself. As James and I have fully considered the future of the London chapter, we’ve both agreed that the perfect choice to lead the SCOREcast: London chapter is Marie-Anne, and we are already thrilled with her enthusiasm to boldly jump right in and begin positioning SCOREcast: London for even greater feats through 2012 and beyond.

Please join me in welcoming Marie-Anne Fischer to the SCOREcast team, welcoming James Semple to his new post within our administration, and congratulating them both on their tireless service to the London composing community as well as the industry at large.

It’s been a long time since I put the first SCOREcast podcast up on the air. Since then, an ever-evolving group of film music creatives has steered the very idea of SCOREcast via a process of trial-and-error and with a blind, white-knuckle, “why the hell not?” attitude. None of that would have been possible without the steadfast commitment of our amazing community—the SCOREcast Army—as well as the incredible team of contributing writers, guests, podcast hosts, and editors that have had a hand in the creation of the SCOREcast entity. The people who have made SCOREcast what it is today include composers, engineers, orchestrators, educators, copyists, music editors, assistants, contractors, and conductors.

As we move into yet another incarnation of the website, the podcast, and the new horizons of community-building across the film music universe, I am excited for the future of SCOREcast and I want to tell you personally how grateful I am for the part that you have played in our success. We are excited to bring even more awareness, information, opinion, editorial, review, and debate to the already incredibly diverse SCOREcast audience in this fifth year.

SCOREcastOnline.com

We’ve redesigned the website—the third version since its launch in July of 2009. The new site will push to the web today, in conjunction with our anniversary festivities (watch the site for details on all that’s happening this month for our anniversary!). I believe the new design brings with it several key features that are going to revolutionize much of the way our film music community interacts with one another. Forums (in beta now… with much input and guidance from all of you), multi-author collaboration, videocasts, product reviews, and reader-submitted content are only a few of the new features that we are implementing for this re-launch.

Channel Content

We have divided the site up into “channels”: Business, Technology, Community, Workflow, and Composition. Each channel has a senior editor, with a cadre of contributing authors working with that person to bring the most up-to-date and relevant content to the forefront on each channel. More on this in a second…

Advertising

We are also opening up the site and podcast to outside advertisers for the first time in SCOREcast history. Manufacturers and developers have hounded us about this for years, but I’ve been a big proponent of us thoroughly researching this tactic before we actually pulled the trigger. I have always believed that the unique authority we’ve built so quickly within the community has come about partly because we are beholden to no one—we’ve never taken corporate sponsors, advertising money, or endorsements by anyone other than the aforementioned academic institutions. After years of careful research, thought and consideration, the Advisory Board has devised a way to enable software and gear manufacturers to partner with SCOREcast in advertising to our community without a muzzle being placed on our contributors, product reviewers, and authors. I am very pleased and excited about this model for advertising on SCOREcastOnline.com, and you will start seeing the first of these partnerships towards the beginning of 2012.

Chapter Communities

In 2009, we launched SCOREcast: London—our very first international Chapter Community. James Semple, our SCOREcast: London chapter director, has done one hell of an amazing job cultivating and caring for the large SCOREcast community of UK composers in that region of the world. Off the success of SCOREcast: London, we also launched SCOREcast: Hollywood, which blew up with over 125 community members within the first two hours of launching, and is being spearheaded by Los Angeles composer Johnny Knittle and his team. We are now training chapter directors for Boston, Austin, Berlin, and Toronto with our “SCO In a Box” program, and we plan to launch several more Community Chapters throughout 2012.

Senior Editorial Staff

To better serve our readership and community, we are adding to the editorial staff that will oversee each of the previously mentioned channels. Our international team of contributing writers, reviewers, community managers, and forum moderators has grown exponentially and we are excited to introduce all of these people to you over the next three weeks as we roll out our anniversary festivities.

Thank YOU

Thank you. Thank YOU. You have been huge in this, and you may not even realize it. All of the commenting, the visits, the Retweets, the Facebook status messages, the discussion, the debate, the disagreeing, the nods of approval, the sharing… it all has meant so much to us. It really keeps us going. It makes this all worthwhile in every way. Please don’t stop. Keep helping us spread the message that a career in the film, television, and game music industry is one of the most rewarding and creative careers out there.

Thank you for sticking with us for five long years. We’re ALL excited to see what happens this year. If you want to be even more involved than you are now—to take the next step and become part of the team around here—drop us a line and let us know what you have in mind. There are many places to serve. It’s a big community!

(reprinted from DeaneOgden.com)

“WHAT? You’re moving to Los Angeles to do WHAT?”

That was the reaction from the majority of my Oregonian friends when I unveiled my plan to come to Hollywood and score films full-time. To this day, I catch shit from my friends up north for “going California”. They don’t understand how I could just voluntarily forfeit the simple life of Oregon to live and work in one of America’s busiest and most expensive cities… not to mention in an industry that serves up entertainment and fictional escapism as its mainstay product. (We won’t mention the fact that they flock to the cinemas in droves on weekends to sample what we are serving up. We’ll just pretend we don’t know about that little tidbit.)

I love this city. I’ve been here for over a decade now. Although my work over the years has forced me to become more of a citizen of the world, it’s always a great feeling when my key hits the lock at my home in Los Angeles. However, that luxury has come with a lot of trial and error. When I moved to Los Angeles to do this gig, I didn’t know a soul. I had no family here, no friends, no acquaintances. For about the first 12 to 18 months, I was shooting in the dark. I didn’t know anything about the studio system and I had no connections to people who did. Even though I had been moderately successful as a player and could come in from that side every once in a great while on something, it was almost always a playing gig—Nice for paying the rent, but not so hot for advancing my career as a film composer. I wasn’t coming in straight out of USC, UCLA, or NYU, so I had no residual school relationships that were of any value to me in my new environment. I was, as Paladin’s calling card read, a knight without armor in a savage land.

However, as I began to find my way around, I met a few people here and there and started to pay attention to the community happenings that were being advertised throughout town. “Film Music Magazine presents a Film Music Panel at the Beverly Garland Hotel – Friday night, 7pm.” “ASCAP Music Expo – $300 bucks for three days of great stuff!” “The SCL presents an Evening with Thomas Newman – free for all members, or $35 for non-members.” This stuff was everywhere and once I figured out how to access all of it, I started attending anything and everything that had the words “film music” in the title. At these various seminars and events, I started to receive all sorts of information and advice from people on how to get a sure footing right out of the gate. The advertising for many of these events read like a magic bullet for my woes: “Get Started Making Money NOW in the Exciting World of Music for Media.” Everyone had a program. There were schools, seminars, events, panels, expos, classes, salons, meetings, mixers, showcases, symposiums, groups, websites, forums… a plethora of “help” for newly transplanted aspiring composers.

The problem was… they didn’t help.

As I banged my head against the wall, I really started to analyze what it was that I had actually done. My inner compass started speaking and I discovered where I had gone wrong:

I’d moved to a place I knew virtually nothing about, amongst people who didn’t know I existed and yet I expected them to all of a sudden stand up and take notice of me.

How ridiculously unrealistic (not to mention self-absorbed) was that? All the time I spent blaming Hollywood for being an “exclusive closed-off” community and here I was approaching a long-established system without a proper understanding of that system’s schematics. The blame, I discovered quickly, was all on me.

I think I speak for many composers out there who are now working successfully after years of “paying dues” when I say that while a lot of the frustration and confusion of trying to “break in” can be be attributed to the fact that it’s just plain tough to do so, the majority of the struggle of a beginning composer can be adequately described as a dangerous cocktail of inexperience, desperation, over-eagerness and naivety. Said another way, I believe that most beginning composers do way more to hamstring themselves than Hollywood could ever do. It is so easy to blame “The System”, but if we’re being honest, it is operator error that is at the root of most beginning composers’ inability to grab a foothold in the community of film music.

There are hundreds of possible missteps on the way to even a modestly successful career in film music, but I want to outline a specific five that I believe will trip you up quickest as a beginning composer fresh off the truck in Los Angeles (or New York, if that’s more your speed). But before we get into this, I want to make you a deal: Agree with me that eradicating any of these things from your life (or any combination of them) is not going to guarantee you anything in terms of success. Success will only come to you like it comes to everybody else embarking on any purposed endeavor in life: through staunch persistence, absolute flexibility, unwavering resilience, self-motivation, careful and strategic planning… and just plain dumb luck. I cannot tell you how to achieve any of those characteristics—I’m not sure anyone really can. You sort of either have them or you don’t. But I will highlight some practical temptations that I think are worth avoiding… and I’d like to know if you’ve had experiences with any of them, positive or negative. Log-in below and leave a comment. I’ll be watching them this week.

Worst Advice #1: MOVE TO LOS ANGELES AS FAST AS YOU CAN.

I know. Everyone is telling you (me included) that to really get serious about this gig, you have to be in Los Angeles. That’s true. There are all sorts of reasons why I say that and I won’t go into them here because of time restraints, but the main reason is one of proximity—the studios just simply need you close to them. It’s really that simple. If you want to play in the major leagues (the studio system) you need to be able to walk into the league offices anytime they need you to. Where are the league offices of the film music world? In Los Angeles, California.

Are there alternatives? Sure. It is entirely possible to score films in outposts such as Austin, Berlin, Atlanta, Tokyo, Seattle, Philly, Brussels, or Boston… but understand that unless you are an established proven entity with released features already under your belt, you are not going to be considered seriously for work in the Hollywood studio system. If you are okay with that, then stay put and work your ass off. There are plenty of composers who carve out a great living doing indies in their own area. But studio feature composers all live and work here. That’s just the way it is. The studios like their people close by, especially people they are entrusting several-hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars to in exchange for an award-winning score. Think about that for a minute and then ask yourself again if you are better off staying in Hoboken. See the difference?

Having said all that, do not jump on a train today to get here tomorrow. In fact, that’s probably the dumbest thing you could do. A move to a new metropolitan area anywhere in the world takes a lot of planning and consideration before the first action step can even be determined. Have you thought through how you plan to survive once you get here? Living in California is expensive, especially southern California. A one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles (that you don’t have to share with someone who won’t put up with your composing hours) is going to run you upwards of $1,300/month. That’s on the frugal end of the spectrum, by the way. Food doesn’t come cheap either, unless you are super-into Top Ramen or Taco Bell’s “99¢ Menu”. What about transportation? You have to have it if you want to take meetings. If you are planning to bring your car into California, it needs to pass a California State Emissions Inspection, otherwise known as a “smog test”. The test itself will only run you about 25 bucks, but if your automobile fails the test, you are looking at a hefty sum to bring the car to standard in order to pass. State law renders the automobile “non-operational” until it passes inspection, so this could be a huge problem if you have an older car or a problematic one. Additionally, the fee to register your vehicle in California is based on the blue-book value of the automobile. If you have an older car, this might not be that big a deal for you. However, if you are driving a newer car, be careful—you could easily pay up to $700 to register your car in California. Figure in gasoline expenses on top of all this—over $4 per gallon at the time of this writing—and operating your own car in LA can put a dent in the pocketbook fast.

Not bringing your own car? Fine, but you’ll still need plenty of cash in order to get around. Unlike New York City, Paris, or Tokyo, taxis in Los Angeles are not a financially viable option for transportation. A ride across town will cost you at least $25 and that’s if you are traveling during low-peak traffic times. This city is flat, spread out and definitely not built with expansion in mind. Getting from a meeting at Sony in Culver City (south/central) to your next meeting at Warner Bros. in Burbank (northeast) can easily be an all-day excursion. Most cab rides from Santa Monica to Burbank run about $32 bucks. Conversely, the Metro system (LA’s answer to underground public rail) will get you there cheaper, but not any faster. Navigating the Metro’s transferring system (which you’ll have to do at least twice if traveling north and south) is frustrating and nerve-wracking when you have an appointment that you cannot be late for.

You need to think about these things BEFORE you get here, not after. Too many people take the gung-ho approach of “I’ll figure it out! If I don’t go NOW, I’ll never go!” While I applaud the tenacity behind that kind of beach-storming approach, it’s not a smart way to go. Take some time, develop a plan and think it through from every angle possible. Line up a day job prior to moving here. Have at least three or four months of income saved up and in reserve upon arrival. It will go fast, trust me. You have no idea. Plan, plan, plan, plan and plan some more. Don’t be stupid. Take care of yourself first. You want to make this move ONE time and one time only. If you have the talent, it will be the most important and strategic move of your life. Don’t blow it by being overanxious. This isn’t American Idol, where “there will always be next year”. There is no next year. You’ve got one shot—do it right and make it count.

Worst Advice #2: PICK YOUR MEDIUM: FILM OR TV, BUT NOT BOTH.

It used to be that it was smarter to pick your focus and run with it. TV or film, but not both. Times have drastically changed, however and virtually every film composer who is still working has had to learn to diversify out of necessity. Most working composers are involved in a combination of film, television, video games, concert works and custom library production. If you ever hear the words, “You shouldn’t do both, you have to pick one,” whether it be from an agent, a producer, or another composer, chances are that person came up in a different generation and may be operating in an area of the business that still honors his/her long-held relationships.  In other words, that person has been at it so long that they have a built-in clientele that rarely goes elsewhere for music, hence they are almost always working in the same medium.

In today’s market, a person who does not have their fingers in as many pies as possible is simply not thinking ahead as a businessperson. From June 2010 to June 2011, I scored three films, wrote music for eight television shows, wrote the music for a live international theatrical production and played drums on four records. I also edited SCOREcastOnline.com, started a bi-weekly newsletter for Creatives and closely maintained my social connections in the community. I do a lot. Even still, I am constantly seeking out new opportunities to do more and to keep my two companies barreling down the tracks in full creative splendor.

The myth of selecting one course of focus in the film industry is long gone. Jon Favreau used to act. Now he acts and directs. Steven Spielberg used to direct. Now he directs and produces. Hans Zimmer used to score features. Now he scores features, scores video games and develops software. It is a different world out there than it was even ten years ago. You have to get yourself positioned to handle multiple avenues of creative output if you want to survive in the new creative climate.

Worst Advice #3: GET AN AGENT.

There isn’t enough space here for me to adequately or completely explain how premature it is for you to be at all concerned about representation by an agent or a manager without first building some momentum in your career. If you are a recent transplant to LA, just take my word for it… you aren’t ready for an agent/manager. Since you haven’t done anything yet that scales to an identifiable or potential box-office success, you don’t have the kind of traction that will attract legitimate representation. Contrary to popular belief, the agent/client relationship is a two-way street: You must be valuable to them, too. Not just the other way around. The best agent/client relationships are the ones where each party serves the other.

The very phrase, “Get an agent” is misleading anyhow because that’s not the way it works. If the agent is at all legitimate, he or she will already have clients before you ever come along. In that case, “getting” them isn’t likely unless you are Trent Reznor and coming from a successful run in another part of the industry. You have to bring something to the party. They have to “get” you. A few short films and your college roommate’s senior thesis project isn’t going to cut it. An agent/manager will not care about your cousin’s indie thriller that you scored back home in Wisconsin. Why? Because they need to eat just as badly as you do. They aren’t doing this for free, anymore than you should be (more on that in a minute). If you have nothing happening that the agent/manager can leverage to bolster your career, their hands are tied. Momentum is the name of the game for an agent/manager.

Sure, they need to pull their weight and be actively putting you up for jobs, signing you for as many as they can, but that doesn’t mean you can sit idly back and drink Margarita’s by the pool. A composer gets hired, almost always, based on his or her track record with the principals in charge or because of a relationship with the music team that is already on the project. I’ve been at this awhile and I’ve hustled for each one of my own gigs, save for a small few. I didn’t have an agent until I was well into the second season of my first network television show. Up until then, I was so concerned with keeping my head above water with a weekly writing assignment that I never had time to even think about representation. I had my attorney negotiate my contracts and left it at that. My agent found me, not the other way around. Once I was “gettable” (read: valuable), agents and managers started calling.

Being concerned about getting an agent within the first year or so of landing in LA is like being worried about getting your drivers license before you are legally old enough to drive. It’s just not where you should be concentrating your efforts. Get out there and hustle for yourself. When you get a gig, write the best music of your life. That’s where your focus should be. Make yourself “gettable”. Then, the agents and the managers will find you.

Worst Advice #4: GET ALL THE LATEST GEAR.

Logic would follow that in order to make great things, you have to have the tools to be able to do it and do it in a way that the industry demands. Therefore, building your studio—having it ready to roll at a moment’s notice, with all of the top gear and software titles at your disposal—seems like a best practice in an industry that literally could come calling five minutes from now with a request that could change your life. But here is the dirty little secret: You’re going to be building your studio for the rest of your career. It is going to be something that never ends. You will always be one step behind what the developers and manufacturers are putting out there.

Waiting around to start creating and working until you have your studio in place, in just the way you’ve always wanted it, is a complete waste of time. I have a beautiful studio. I love all of the pieces that have gone into making my creative space totally work for me when I need to sit down and write, produce, record, or sketch something out. But am I completely satisfied with it? Not even close. In fact, there is a piece of software I just purchased this morning that would have been nice to have on my last project, but I was too busy and in way too deep creatively to stop and figure out how to integrate it mid-project. Having it in my arsenal would have saved me time and effort, but integrating it mid-stream would have been tempting fate, so I laid back and waited. And you know what? That isn’t a new phenomenon for me. It happens constantly and you just have to accept it and move ahead with what is in front of you to complete. After you turn in your finished mix stems, then you can tweak, tinker and toy with new goodies until the next thing is due.

My advice? Buy what is absolutely necessary to start writing music and leave it at that until you can afford to intelligently purchase more. That might mean that you buy a computer, an interface and a set of near-field monitors. It might mean that you go spend $20 on a ream of staff paper and a box of No. 2 pencils. By intelligently, I’m talking about the point at which you have enough discretionary income to make an intentional purchase that will not squeeze you financially. Remember what I said in #1: You have to always take care of yourself first. Do not put yourself in a position where you have to take another day job just to fund your studio gear habit. At that point you are a slave to your stuff, which is a horrible position to be in. Your first priority is to write. Get what is absolutely critical, buy the best you can afford at the time and start writing music.

Worst Advice #5: TAKE EVERY GIG.

If you’ve heard this once, you’ve heard it a million times…. and from probably every composer you’ve come in contact with. “Take every gig.” Take every, every, every, every gig!” “Did I mention… take EVERY gig?!”

When the “take every gig” thing was at its peak, it was actually pretty sound advice because, well… there weren’t that many gigs! If you didn’t take the one being offered you, you were essentially passing up what was probably a golden opportunity to move your career forward in a positive direction. Since the gigs that were out there were all bonafide studio pictures, the majority of them paid quite well and often led to other work for the same producers/director. But times have changed. What sometimes passes for a “gig” these days has put a blight on our craft of filmmaking and any dope with a camera and a pirated copy of Final Cut Pro can string together a “film”.  That is all complicated by the fact that there are more composers than there are “gigs”, so when a gig does comes along, it may or may not have dollars waiting on the other side of it. If it is an amateur project with no money behind it, you might refuse to work for free, but the 1,002 aspiring composers behind you who are perfectly willing to do that gig just to be “scoring something” will easily fill the void in your absence.

My take? DON’T take every gig, unless it pays you something. I’ve written about this before here, so I won’t rehash it too much, but EVERY gig should pay you SOMETHING. It doesn’t have to be cash money, because God knows unless you happened to become bosom buddies with Neal Moritz over a caramel macchiato at Starbucks yesterday afternoon, you are going to be on smaller projects until you develop into a full-fledged known quantity. So, don’t be as worried about the form of payment as much as you are about being given something of value in return for you handing over your very valuable music. Never work for free, but be creative in how you take payment. I once worked a small logo gig for a company that was launching their first production shingle. The entire conversation started out with them asking me for a favor, hat in hand. “I love you guys, but I don’t work for free,” I told them. “But we don’t have any money to spend on this,” they said. I responded, “Who said anything about money? I just won’t do it for nothing. I’m really into the gig, so let’s get creative and figure something out.”

A deal was struck and I created a nice little ten-second musical logo for their fanfare. They bought me a brand new loaded Mac Pro for my second studio room. While not as nice as cash in hand, it still equated a value of around $8,200 at the time. They put it on a credit card and took it as a tax write-off. I sold the computer and deposited $7,500 into my bank account. Everybody won.

Something happens when you are “on a gig”: You put your head down. You do the gig. If your head is down, you aren’t looking for other gigs. You are doing the gig that is in front of you, as you should be. So why would you give up other work to be on a project that is not paying you anything? That’s stupid. I think you get the point.

—–

In closing, each of these things I’ve talked about are real things you’ll hear, if you haven’t already. It’s not that people are trying to screw you—at least I personally don’t believe that it is. But you have to be smart and you have to think above the standard that you’ve probably grown accustomed to living “outside the beltway”. Your bullshit detector probably needs a little dusting off. My dad is fond of saying, “Trust everyone, but cut the cards.” In other words, do the work of researching people’s promises. Don’t get caught up in the hype of “Make Money Now!”… odds are, you won’t. In fact, try to think outside of the confines of dollars and cents, altogether. You’ll do a lot more in a far shorter amount of time if you can break free of that mentality and instead start thinking strategically and creatively. Go for win-win situations instead of settling for whatever anyone tries to sell you.

Always remember that this is YOUR business… not theirs. If your business crumbled tomorrow, who would it really affect? You, of course. Not them. They don’t have anything at stake, so it is nothing for them to simply steer you into whatever they think might help you the best. Hey… who’s to say it won’t? Maybe it will… but it is up to you to check things out, gather lots of information and make informed decisions that you can stand behind and own.

• If you don’t like movies, you’re not ready.
• If fear makes all your decisions for you, you’re not ready.
• If you can’t bring yourself to consider a location change to where the industry is, you’re not ready.
• If you dislike having to be flexible, you’re not ready.
• If you pout when people tell you “no”, you’re not ready.
• If your friends and family are the only people who have told you you should be in film music, you’re not ready.
• If you have a hard time making choices, you’re not ready.
• If you have a large Twitter following, but they’re all composers, you’re not ready.
• If you don’t know how to operate a DAW, you’re not ready.
• If you think you need an agent, you’re not ready.

If you want to be famous, you’re not ready.

• If you want to get rich, you’re not ready.
• If you’ve never A/B’d your music against professionally produced material, you’re not ready.
• If you don’t know how royalties work, you’re not ready.
• If you illegally download your music or software, you’re not ready.
• If you have never created a budget for anything in your life, you’re not ready.
• If you can’t work with a team, you’re not ready.
• If you can’t handle criticism, you’re not ready.
• If you don’t have a website, you’re not ready.

If you snap under pressure, you’re not ready.

• If people tend to accuse you of being disorganized, you’re not ready.
• If you don’t know what “counterpoint” is, you’re not ready.
• If you lack everyday common business skills (i.e. returning correspondence, being punctual, etc.), you’re not ready.
• If you get paralyzed by fear in networking situations, you’re not ready.
• If you can’t “sell an idea” to someone behind a desk, you’re not ready.
• If you never connect emotionally with fictional characters, you’re not ready.
• If you are “waiting for someone to give you your big break”, you’re not ready.
• If the acronym “IMDb” is Greek to you, you’re not ready.
• If you attend meetings in t-shirts or flip-flops, you’re not ready.
• If you don’t understand pacing, you’re not ready.

If you talk more than you listen, you’re not ready.

• If you don’t like to negotiate, you’re not ready.
• If you “only want to write the music”, you’re not ready.
• If you think loops are enough, you’re not ready.
• If you don’t care about the greater film music community, you’re not ready.
• If most of what you write is at 120 bpm and in “C”, you’re not ready.
• If you don’t have a demo reel, you’re not ready.
• If you think you are irreplaceable, you’re not ready.
• If you don’t understand the difference between the “independent system” and the “studio system”, you’re not ready.
• If you are searching for an easy way, you’re not ready.

If you think this list is unreasonable (or in any way complete)… you’re not ready.

First off, happy New Year from all of us here at SCOREcast! I truly hope that you were able to chill out a little this week, spend some quality time with people who are important to you, and steal a few quiet moments for yourself to reflect on the year that was and the year that’s headed this way in just a couple more days.

Secondly, you might notice we’ve done a little bit of year-end sprucing up around here a bit at SCOREcastOnline.com. I’ve challenged our contributor team this year to really focus on one thing with as much intent as they can: Community.

Community Chapters

Community is really the driving force behind everything that we do at SCOREcast, and it is community that will unite us across all borders and help to keep our profession of putting notes on paper thriving through the next season of filmmaking evolution. We have already begun to take some major steps to bring our global composing community together through the creation of community chapters, beginning with the recent launch of our first international

The 2010 Inaugural SCO LA Meet-Up

community chapter, SCOREcast: London. As I mentioned in my announcement of the London chapter, I’ve also started talking to potential SCO community leaders in Austin, New York, Rio, Ubeda, Moscow, and several other cities around the world. We will be announcing several more SCO communities in the next year, but if you feel that you live in an area that would benefit from organizing a local SCO chapter, I want to invite you to give us a shout and let us know.

With the professional film music community expanding exponentially every year, one of our goals at SCO is to enable the industry to grow smaller as it grows larger. Your community chapters will feature local meet-ups, organized social and professional events, and special arrangements with orchestras and scoring stages in your area. There are a lot of incredible things that we’ll be launching, so keep your eyes and ears tuned to the website for more info as we roll this out.

SCO Community Integration

Internally, we are also taking some very exciting steps to bridge the gaps between composers and post-production professionals. With Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all of the other social networking sites that are available, the community feels a little bit fractured—some people are on Twitter but not on Facebook, while others aren’t using any social networking tools at all. Wouldn’t it be nice to have all of that functionality in one place where we can all trade insider secrets and talk shop on a single organized platform? Well, we are in the final stages of tweaking a platform here on SCOREcastOnline.com that will enable us to do just that. I cannot let the cat out of the bag just yet, but I’m excited to be let a little out: I’ll be launching a very cool new project with our contributor team this year that will be unlike anything that has ever been made available for professional composers. And “professional” is the key word—it is very important to the unique mission of SCOREcast that we stay true to the fact that we are all working pros. We aren’t a fan site, a film music collector’s blog, or a forum for plug-ins and software. We may talk about those kinds of things from time to time, but there are far better sites that cater to those crowds and I highly recommend them if that’s your thing.

That being said, what we do well around here is that we cater to pros as well as emerging composers. In fact, we conducted an extensive survey this summer of our readership—many of you got the memo and participated. It turns out the the majority of people actively reading SCOREcastOnline.com and listening to the SCOREcast Podcast are working professional composers (composers that are currently scoring a feature film for release or a network television series) in London and Berlin, New York and Los Angeles. Our second largest audience are film music students. So, essentially, we have two very distinct audiences, and neither has much in common with the other, frankly. As a lot of you know, there is a vast gap between film school graduation and the real world of scoring feature films.

A Sophisticated Framework…

I’m telling you all of this because I want to prepare you for the new way that we will roll out features this year. Some of what we have coming will be of a “premium” nature, while other things we do will be as free as it has always been. Some of the stuff we launch will be by “invitation only” at first, while the majority of it will be open to all. Before you panic, I will tell you that the things that are going to cost you dough to participate in are not “seminars” at a banquet hall in Chatsworth or some clumsy “eBook” that we throw together and charge you twenty bucks for. My biggest impetus for designing SCOREcast five years ago was to try to keep anyone else from ever being taken advantage of again by any seminar, snake-oil salesman, or book that tried to sell you “the way to the top”. No… anything with a premium on it around here will be things that you would certainly have no problem paying for if your budget allows—things that are well worth your time and attention. We are not in this to make money. There is no need for that. However, as a central voice in the professional film music community, our team has access to people and places that many other resources do not, and since quality often demands a price, we’ll be paying a price to bring you those resources. In turn, we’ll cover part of those costs via premium tuition and pricing.

…For a Sophisticated Community

The reason we are looking at doing things that way is because of the sophistication of our craft and what SCO’s role in preserving that sophistication will be moving forward. Richard Bellis and I have been talking about that a lot lately, actually, and it is a very necessary shift that we all need to make in our minds. Film music is not what it used to be, and this community of people is not the comradeship it once was, either. I’m not a huge proponent of looking backward, but I think we can safely deduce that while technology has advanced us in the area of efficiency, it has also stolen from us a bit in the area of intimacy. We don’t interact with one another the way we once did, and that is a contributing factor to why the perceived value of our craft is declining over time. It is time to put the brakes to any further erosion and work together to educate the masses as to the sophistication of film composing again. It isn’t a laptop and a copy of Reason. The Teamsters get that, orchestras get that, executives even get that. Now it is time or us to get it, too.

This has just been the very tip of the iceberg. In the next several weeks, we are going to be crazy busy launching what I think is the best stack of stuff we’ve put out there yet. I want to thank EVERYONE who has worked super hard these last few weeks to put all of this together. Many of you reading this right now had a hand in the creation of some of the tools we are positioning for, and I owe you a lot for that dedication.

Here’s to 2011—the year of community!

Dearest SCOREcast Army,

The quality of film music born out of the United Kingdom is legendary and needs no introduction. With several talented orchestras and many skilled composers, the UK has become a major player in the film music industry, and a go-to destination for realizing a film score with supremely talented musicians.

Today, I’m excited to announce SCOREcast’s very first organized international chapter, SCOREcast: LONDON. Headed by London-based composer James Semple, SCOREcast: LONDON will provide a local community structure for film music professionals who are working in and around the greater London area. With a strong following already in place—thanks to Semple’s former Composium group—SCOREcast: LONDON will move ahead in 2011 with regular chapter meetings, organized events, and continued partnerships with the London Symphony Orchestra, English Session Orchestra, and a wonderful roster of studios in metropolitan London. Along side future SCOREcast chapters, SCOREcast: LONDON will also endeavor to help find strategic ways to bridge working relationships between composers worldwide.

SCOREcast is pleased to welcome all UK composers into the SCOREcast family, and we ALL are looking forward to a busy and musical 2011!

Looking toward the future of our craft,

Deane Ogden
Founder/Editor-in-chief, SCOREcastOnline.com

First of all, don’t let the headline of this post freak you out. “All Good Things Must Come to an End” refers specifically to the self-imposed hiatus that the beloved SCOREcast podcast has been on for close to a year.

Gotcha!

In addition to the recent issues we’ve had with the RSS feed of the older podcast episodes (issues that are now fixed, by the way!), I’m sure you’ve noticed that we haven’t posted a new podcast episode since me and Randy Knaub’s wrap-up of the 2010 NAMM Show back in January of this year. Many of you have written in from all over the world to ask the obvious questions: “Is it over?” “Is there ever going to be another SCOREcast podcast episode?” “Why did you stop doing the podcast?”

Well… I’m thrilled to report that we will be posting SCOREcast Episode 27 in the next few weeks, and that the podcast will resume its regular episodic schedule throughout 2011.

I know it’s been awhile, but yes… we are back, and I’m more excited than ever about what is in store for the podcast during the coming year. We’ll be shaking up the format quite a bit by adding some cool new segments including new roundtables with some of film music’s most respected composers, music editors, and directors, as well as more interviews, listener mail, and current film music industry news and commentary.

On top of all that, we also have a giant glaring question to answer: Who won our “SCOREcast Theme Contest”?

All of these things—and MORE!—will be answered and dealt with in SCOREcast Episode 27. Look for the new episode in the coming weeks!

Where Have We Been?
First of all—it’s all my fault. I made the call to put the podcast on ice back in February for a few reasons:

Reason #1: We were crispy.
It takes a lot to produce an episode of SCOREcast. When I started SCOREcast in 2006, I made it a personal rule to never allow the SCOREcast podcast or the SCOREcastOnline.com website (SCO) to eclipse any of our contributors’ careers, or mine. By January 2010, three solid years of producing the podcast had caught up with me and the rest of the team and we needed a break. Now granted, that “break” was never intended to be quite so long… but stuff happens, work takes over, people get busy, and things get put on the back burner. Bottom line is—we are back and it’s going to be a great new year with fresh energy, new features, and a few new personalities that I’m excited for you to meet and get to know.

Reason #2: We needed more help.
As a circumstance of SCOREcastOnline.com’s growing audience (we are now read by over 90,000 people every week), we needed to expand the SCO contributor team and concentrate on making sure that our infrastructure was able to withstand a continued run of the podcast show. One thing we have learned for sure is that the SCOREcast podcast remains the biggest viral gateway to SCOREcastOnline.com, therefore drilling into the website to improve some areas that we found lacking was a necessary focus over the summer. The production of the podcast would need to be temporarily suspended if we were going find the time to do that effectively.

Reason #3: We needed to find out a little more about YOU.
Podcast technology is pretty damned amazing. The fact that anyone can produce a radio show, put it online, syndicate it worldwide, and build a constituency that they wouldn’t normally have access to is downright amazing. However, the technology is still in its infancy and one of the things that is yet to be perfected is the ability to keep track of exactly who is downloading and listening to your content. Syndication is a both a blessing and a curse. Yes, your content gets dispersed all over the Internet and rebroadcast from multiple outlets, giving you access to a huge potential audience. However, that process also makes it virtually impossible for you to track your audience via any hard data.

But that’s not even the big problem. It’s even harder to track whether or not your content is even useful to your audience once they have access to it. Because of that limitation, I needed convincing that we were providing the very best content that we could for all of you. In an effort to get a grip on what you guys are after from SCOREcast, we sent out a survey to a random selection of our SCO readership last month. Based on the data we received back from the survey, I think we’ve come up with a format and feature-set that will better serve our community overall. We’re going to run with it, and it’s full steam ahead from here on!

Onward and Upward
In hindsight, I’m pleased with the results that our hiatus produced, and I think you’ll agree that whatever annoyance our absence may have caused you has well been worth it. That being said, the responsibility of producing a successful podcast show is something I definitely do not take lightly, and I have learned a ton in the four years that I’ve been doing it. As with everything here at SCOREcast, the podcast is something that we all give to in our spare time. We may occasionally go AWOL, but we will always return.

And I promise… it will never again be as long a vacation as this one was!

My sincerest thanks to each and every one of you in the SCO Army who have hung in there with us.
YOU are the true heroes of this community.

My very best,
Deane Ogden
Founder and Editor-in-Chief, SCOREcastOnline.com

Here is a simple fact: None of us are the same.

I’ll never have to worry about competing with John Williams. I know what you are thinking: “NO shit!”

No, I mean it. John Williams will never sound like I can. He’s not able. You might say, “Um, Deane, excuse me, but John Williams is arguably the single greatest composer living today. He can do anything.” To which I respond, “Yes he is… and no he cannot.”

John Williams can never be Deane Ogden, or James Newton Howard, or Alain Mayrand, or John Debney, or Brian Ralston, or Alexandre Desplat, or Sharon Farber, or Chris Young, or Adrian Ellis, or Hans Zimmer, or Brian Satterwhite, or Richard Bellis, or Tim Montijo, or Alan Silvestri. As long as he has written for the screen, as hard as he might try, as much as he may study, he’ll never get there. Our music flows from a place that John Williams could never understand or even come close to comprehending. He could not possibly get it and he never will.

Conversely, as hard as we try, as hard as we study, and as hard as we practice, we will never sound like John Williams. John Williams never has to worry you nor I. Why? Because none of us could ever fathom what John Williams had to go through to write his most recent note. We will never know what place that John Williams writes from. We don’t get him, and we never ever will.

We are all different people with different lives, different sets of experiences, born of different parents, facing radically different futures. Therefore, competition, at least in the form by which we usually refer to it, doesn’t exist.

People talk about competition all the time. I hear constantly from players how hard it is to compete with the convenience of samples (not the quality of them…. the convenience of them—I feel the letters from the AFM on their way to me already!). Of course, we all have experienced the “competition” within our own ranks—being put up against each other by our own representative agencies for projects, always with that same reassurance from them, “Hey don’t worry… this one’s got YOU written all over it!” Uh huh.

Professional golfers say often that there is no competition amongst their tribe, but rather only that which exists between each golfer and the golf course itself. To a pro golfer, the other golfer on the course is not the competitor, but the curve of a fairway or the placement of a hazard. I’ve always found that concept fascinating and I’ve often pondered how it might apply to our situation as music and film Creatives. There really is no one entity in the film music community that you need ever have to worry about competing with, save for one… your own music. Yes, the most fierce competition out there that you’ll face as a composer is the last score you wrote. Your true nemesis resides right there, in the pit of your own stomach—the drive to better yourself. To set a goal, achieve it, set a loftier goal, achieve that, and so on, and so forth. Creatives have it in their guts to up their own ante. As Creatives, we are our own fiercest competition, our own worst enemies.

Creatives are different than other people. It’s politically correct to say that we aren’t—that we are just like construction workers, attorneys, corporate buyers, or police officers—but when you get honest about it, we most certainly AREN’T like any of those people. We are a different animal. We don’t think, analyze, opine, or expend our energy the way non-creatives do. We also don’t rest, work, vacation, engage, or “unplug” the way that non-creatives do. We rarely ever stop creating, whether we are writing at our workstations or writing in our heads at the dinner table. We often get accused of not being “present” during conversations or engaged in our surroundings (sound familiar?). We daydream a lot. We also have a greater need for solitude and seclusion and often are told that we lean towards being “reclusive”. By all counts, we are simply different. And what drives us is different, also.

Creatives are driven in a way that no other human tribe is. We are driven to create, yet in that process of creating—when we are really down in it— composers in particular tend to lose track of something that is vital to long-term success: Self-Improvement. So many composers—even the A-listers who some view as “leading the pack” in terms of pushing the boundaries of the craft—rely on their same old bag of tricks, their tried-and-true methods of creating… the things that have always worked for them. The crutches. The old standards. The “reliables”.

It gets worse as you move up the ladder. I recently sat with an A-list composer friend of mine and we talked about the differences between the terraces of the film composing career. We talked about the contrasts of handling 1-2 million dollar studio budgets versus 30-90k indie budgets, managing a team of 25 versus an army of One, and working with our agencies as opposed to negotiating our own deals. But when we started talking creativity, I ask him what the major differences were that he saw between his A-list position and when he first started out as an indie film guy. Here’s what he said:

“Deane, when you have done this as long as I’ve been fortunate to, you develop a sound. And that sound is what you then become known for. Once you have your sound, in a strange way, it’s over for you creatively. That’s all they want. That sound. You don’t get to experiment, they don’t want you to try anything new. They just want the sound. Then it is up to you. You have to then figure out a way to manipulate that sound—the sound that is YOU—so that it evolves and changes, yet to them, it is still that sound. But to you, it becomes something else. Something different every time. And it’s always got to be better than the last time, because if it’s not, then what’s the point for you? If you aren’t doing better work each and every time you score a picture, you are cheating yourself and at that point it really is just a service job. It’s heartless, then. No life. I’m not saying that’s easy, Deane. Getting to the point of besting yourself each time out is a hard thing to do, and most composers haven’t figured out how to do it. But it is possible if you work at it. But that’s the rub—it takes a lot of patience and a lot of hard work.”

The Passion to Be You

Finding your own voice—or as my friend put it… “the sound”—can be daunting at best and impossible at worst. What IS your sound? Is it something you can just conjure up, or must it come to you organically, born out of “doing” film music for long periods of time? Who knows. It’s probably different for everybody. But certainly, the commonality exists that you must be conscious of it before you set out to be original. In doing so, however, be careful not to set out to be different from everyone else. If you do, you’ll be looking at others more than you should be. When you focus too much on outside factors, you begin to lose track of what you are trying to accomplish in your own craft.

Exerting effort to be better than the next person will get you nowhere. Well… that’s not entirely true… it will get you somewhere, but somewhere is a place that you won’t like very much. Better to concentrate instead on besting yourself. You’ll never be better than John Williams at what he does. Williams is the best Williams there is. You’ll never do Tom Newman better than Tom Newman does Tom Newman. I’m not talking about not having to “live up” to the temp, or having to create something with the same vibe as what the director has been infatuated with since the beginning of post. In fact, I believe that “temp love” is less about the music and more about the feeling of the scene. (There has never been a situation in my own career when I wasn’t able to talk the director off the steep cliff of “recreating the temp”. It’s easy to do if you can articulate how the music is not really the issue—the scene is.)

What am I suggesting? Am I saying that competition isn’t productive? Of course not. What I’m saying is that competing against yourself—allowing your own brand of greatness to slowly unfold—is better than buzzing harder to keep up with the swarm.

Allow your music to do the talking.

I just had dinner with a close friend of mine who is afraid that he is being blacklisted in Hollywood. This guy is ultra-successful—I’m talking mega successes down the pike, spanning 25+ years kicking all kinds of ass doing what he does in the film industry. He has been someone who has been a mentor to me and countless others, and you would know him by name if I was to mention it here.

His fear stems from that pesky old notion that “you are only as good as your last project”, the last few of which have left him pretty bruised. Adjective phrases like “washed-up” and “past his prime” have been hurled his way in recent months. People have begun to doubt his effectiveness at what he does, and the phone’s not ringing like it used to because of it.

Now, I’ve learned a few lessons in the years that I’ve been a film composer. In fact, if you would have told me back when I started that this path would be one of constant education and re-education, I never would have believed you. It has certainly been one hell of a ride. However, one of the biggest lessons has come to me, not through my work as a composer, but through founding and running SCOREcast for these last four years, and it was confirmed by my friend as he told me of his plight tonight at dinner. That lesson is the one about the people who want to tear you down—the nay-sayers. The haters. The negativity mongers. The ones that want you to succeed so that they can rip you apart, stomp on your face, and then pick you up and hug you like it was all a big misunderstanding. Like you “misinterpreted” their meaning; that they were simply trying to help you out and give you some constructive criticism because they “like you” and they “just want you to be happy.”

The lesson for me is that there are actually two lessons: The one that matters, and the one that doesn’t. To me, criticism comes in two forms: the kind that is true, and the kind that, for any number of reasons, is not. The catch is that it is up to you to define which is more accurate for any given situation. Since nobody could ever know every tiny detail that has gone into your decision-making process, only YOU know whether what people are saying about your performance is actually accurate or not. Separating the wheat from the chaff is solely your responsibility, and separate it you must.

The Wheat
True criticism often comes after an obvious failure on your part to do your level best. Has there ever been a time when you “phoned it in?” (Don’t answer that—none of us really want to know!) I’ll admit that I have. I can remember back to times in life when I didn’t do my best, and then, as I sat back to bask in the relief that I was finally finished, a black cloud of despair settled over me and changed that relief to disappointment and regret.

It takes great courage and honesty to face facts when you’ve knowingly and intentionally not given your best effort. We’ve all done it, and it’s one the worst feelings in the world. I don’t care how much you hate the project you are working on, the organization you are involved with, the board you are serving, or the relationship you committed yourself to, not putting forth your best in any area of your life will result in utter unhappiness for you, and painful criticism from others. It is in this case that the criticism is completely true, however, as it is almost certainly just a mirror of what you already know about yourself. You let yourself down. Everyone else is simply noticing.

This one is the afore mentioned lesson that matters. You might want to take this criticism into consideration, especially if it is from someone who’s been around awhile. These are the times where you want to call up your mentor, ask some really tough questions, and hope that they’ll be perfectly honest with you. You need this. You need to hear what your decision to lay down and take it easy has cost you in the game. This is a place that doesn’t feel good, and it’s a lesson you don’t want to repeat again, but now is the time to learn from your mistake in every way you can, and healthy criticism from trusted sources can be the best thing for you in situations like that.

The Chaff
On the other hand, your critics will always—ALWAYS—be louder than your fans. I think it is just a characteristic of human nature. However, this phenomenon, while not always inaccurate, is deceiving much of the time. It certainly cannot be true that there are more people in the world that hate your guts than, 1) think that you are a swell person, or 2) have relatively neutral feelings about you at all, or 3) simply don’t know who the hell you are, don’t care, and won’t ever. Let’s face it: It’s a numbers game. You are probably more liked than you are hated.

The problem here is that even though the amount of people who love you most likely outnumbers the amount of people who hate you, the haters are more apt to shout about their hate than the lovers are to shout about their love. This, of course, creates a false-positive that you and what you produce are irrelevant to the industry or that you or your work are worthless in the grand scheme of things.

This is the time where you really have to soul-search and ask yourself, “Is there any truth to this at all? Is there anything I can honestly point to that would warrant such harsh criticism… or is it a simple case of jealousy, revenge, or good-old-fashioned spite?”

This is the kind of criticism that most of us have no use for. And why should we? It is almost always rooted in personal opinion (which is always subjective) and it usually comes from a place that isn’t very genuine. This kind of criticism often stems from the darkly ulterior motives of the critic and can usually be traced back to something inside of them rather than something inside of you.

The Reality
I’m not going to insult you by being Johnny Goodtimes and blowing kisses at you from high atop my perch on Mount Sunshine: Whether you’ve screwed something up miserably or not, criticism is surely headed your way soon. Count on it. It’s just what people do. But it’s what you do with the criticism that will determine how rocky your next few moments will be. If you did the deed, then own it. No spin, no bullshit, no excuses. If the criticism is unwarranted, however, then just keep on keeping on and work hard to best your own effort the next time around. What’s that other pesky old notion? Ah, yes… Living well is the best revenge!

Today’s composer has to be someone who can balance writing a perfect score with both the business and logistical sides of the gig. We have to manage studios, accounts, relationships, finances, and the myriad other details that enable us to do what we do. The key to it is creating the perfect environment that will help you be as effective as possible in doing so.

I don’t know about you, but I HATE clutter. I heard once that “You cannot be creative and tidy at the same time,” and while that might be true for some people, for me it just doesn’t work. I need a clean space every morning to get started in, even if I’m smack in the middle of a project or a cue. Similarly, I cannot stand to leave my studio in disarray when I leave it at night. It makes me feel as though I haven’t gotten anything done, even if I’ve hit my minute goal for the day. If things are out of order, I don’t feel accomplished. I don’t get there every single day, but I certainly try to, otherwise the next day begins off-kilter.

To achieve this, I’ve developed what I feel is an efficient system for staying organized and keeping things humming. My criteria for this system is that it must be:

1. Easy to use
2. Self-organizing, and
3. Available at all times

These days, aside from sketching out cues, not much goes down on paper, and what does (receipts, incoming invoices, etc.) gets scanned and filed onto an external hard drive every month. To handle everything else, though, I’ve relied heavily on some really useful digital tools to help keep my studio neat and free of clutter. Each of these tools are completely free and easy to use. Additionally, all of them are software-based and can be cloud-contained with a little jerry-rigging on your part.

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NOTATIONAL VELOCITY (Platform: Mac; $/free)
(http://notational.net/)

I get a lot of ideas. Musical ideas, SCOREcast ideas, ideas for my team, business ideas, and ideas for things that need attention from the other roles in my life. I need somewhere to organize and index all of those ideas. Back in the day, I carried around a Mead Composition Book to keep all of these ideas in, with dates in the margins to index the pertinent info for later retrieval. However, now I’ve discovered a great digital tool called Notational Velocity. Notational Velocity is a killer application for the Mac that lets you easily enter notes in a self-organizing way where the concept of “searching” is not a function of the program, but its entire interface. You can store anything in Notational Velocity from a text snippet to any file type that you have stored on your computer. I write all of my SCOREcast posts in Notational Velocity and I am writing my book in it as well. I also write down thoughts as they come to me, reminders

Deane's Notational Velocity interface

about events, and details about meetings I take. Notational Velocity organizes each of these “notes” in an alphabetized database that is stored within the application.

For you iPhone and iPad users, Notational Velocity syncs seamlessly with another free application called SimpleNote. SimpleNote is a small footprint iPhone/iPad app that does the exact same thing Notational Velocity does, in almost exactly the same way. The cool thing is that these two independent companies have decided to work together to make the mobile experience easy for those of us that want to keep our note database with us at all times. SimpleNote is also free, and only requires that you  register a free account in order to allow it to sync with Notational Velocity over the cloud.

The best thing about Notational Velocity is that it is fast and easy to bring up, whether you are on your computer or your iPhone/iPad. Both Notational Velocity and SimpleNote sync upon shutdown, and the sync is instantaneous, so you never have to worry about things being mirrored on either platform. With both of these free (!) apps active in your workflow, your notes are always with you when you need them. You’ll never lose an idea again!

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GOOGLE DOCS (Platform: agnostic; $/free)
(https://docs.google.com)

I love Google. I think they are one of the only companies that are really working hard, daily, to make the enterprise user as happy as possible. My only gripe is that Google and Apple can’t get along and play in the same sandbox; MobileMe is cool, but it doesn’t come close to doing what GoogleDocs can do… for free. Fact is, if you want to get the paper part of your business online, GoogleDocs is the way to do it.

"The Musicave" GoogleDocs menu

GoogleDocs is an online suite of word processing and spreadsheet applications that is accessible by simply registering for a free Google ID. If you use Gmail (which I also highly recommend—you can easily funnel all of your POP 3 email accounts through Google’s Gmail interface), then you are already there.

I’ve pretty much put everything on GoogleDocs: all of my accounts receivable/payable, all HR resources for leading my staff (personnel documents, tax forms, NDAs), intern to-do lists, and critical business documents (studio inventory, software serial numbers, orchestra rosters, etc.). You can see by the graphic to the right that I have a lot of things shared with my interns and my assistant. In the GoogleDocs menu, you can choose to share any file with anyone, whether they have a Google account ID or not. In addition, the newest version of GoogleDocs allows you to also upload and store other file types for storage such as .PDFs, Apple Pages documents, graphics files (JPEG, GIF, PNG, and TIF), and Word and Excel formatted documents. My employee handbook that I go over with everyone who joins my team at the Musicave is formatted in a PDF and stored in my “Staff” folder in GoogleDocs. My “Staff” folder, as well as several other folders, allow me to keep things tidy within the menu, and I can easily share entire folders of documents with anyone I wish. I can also color-code folders and files/documents to help distinguish which groups of people I’ve shared certain items with.

In theory, you could put your whole scoring workflow online with GoogleDocs. If I sound a little bit ridiculous about this service, it’s because it has essentially changed the way I do everything at the Musicave. It makes group collaboration a snap, and keeps everyone on my team in sync with where we are at any given moment.

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CUE TRACKER (Platform: Mac; $/free)
(http://www.cuetracker.com/)

I’ve written about a few programs that I’ve used to keep track of scoring workflow before. However, that was back when I was just getting out of the habit of using an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of everything as I scored, and things have progressed a little since then.

Cue Log manager and Cue Chronicle are still very relevant programs to use for keeping your scoring crew in sync (and I highly recommend you checking out BOTH), but there is now another alternative that I’ve recently come across called Cue Tracker, written and programmed by a cat named Sean Dougall who has assisted for some of the best composers in the business. Cue Tracker is awesomely simple and refreshingly easy to use. It is Mac only (sorry, PC peeps!), and I will say that it is a little more useful than Cue Log Manager but a little easier to comprehend than Cue Chronicle—it kind of falls squarely in the middle of the two as a nice middle-of-the-road alternative.

One of the coolest things about Cue Tracker is that you can easily customize the way in which each person on your team can view information. In addition to that, Cue Tracker has several routine templates built-in that can be turned into viewable screensets. You can choose everything from spotting notes, cue status reports, take logs, mix logs, cue sheets, and many, many more. It is a snap to print out any of these screensets as reports or save them as PDFs, HTML markup snippets, or simple RTF documents. The screensets are a cool function because very often I don’t need my music editor seeing all of my notes back and forth to my orchestrators or the orchestrators’ notes to the copyists. By customizing those screensets, you are able to provide each person with only the info they need in order to do their jobs.

The only drawback to Cue Tracker is that it is the one tool on this list that does not natively support real-time syncing. Dougall says that he is working on “server-sync” as an upcoming feature in a future release, but he’s been saying that for a little while now. However, if you are a Dropbox user, you can just as easily drop the application’s “Content” folder (right click on the app in your Finder) into Dropbox and use that file to sync with every other person that you need to have access to the central project file. Incidentally, this method also works with Cue Log Manager, so if you need to sync with someone else you can do it pretty seamlessly this way.
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Here’s the deal: I’ve auditioned and then ditched a lot of tools to get to the simple and effective ones I’ve landed on here. These might not be for everybody, and yet you might figure out a way to use them better than I have. Whatever the case, I’d love to hear YOUR recommendations for things that would either better these or ways that they can be used in better fashion to get us all up and running effectively and organizationally.

I had a conversation recently with a fellow film composer about “creative burnout”. This person isn’t feeling it anymore. He told me that the years of rejection and rewrites have eroded his ambition and he just doesn’t find it exhilarating the way he once did. I listened as he told me about gigs come and gone and what he loved about them versus the gigs of late and what he loathed about those. He talked about how things have changed in film music; how he felt it is no longer financially possible to record a decent orchestra, convince a director to go with a melody over a drone, or make it through an entire film without competing with needle drops for a money-grabbing soundtrack release. To be honest, his long tale of discontent made me very sad and a little uncomfortable. It was a dreary story.

“Basically,” he summarized, “I’m tired of eating, sleeping, breathing, and living film music only to have to ‘write down’ and pander to the new philosophy of how Hollywood churns out movies.”

A fair sentiment. I mean, I think we’ve all felt that way at one time or another. I tried to encourage him as much as possible, but to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t much help. His mind was made up. He was done. We ended there and went our separate ways with a promise to get together in a few months for lunch.

But, the last comment he made—the one about eating, sleeping, breathing, and living film music—something about that statement really bothered me. I thought about weeks after, constantly. How could you ever feel that way about something you love so much? What would have to happen in order for you to become so fed up with a passion that you were willing to never do it again? Worse yet: What would have to happen to ME to get to that place?

I had a thought about it a few days ago: Maybe my friend is being shortsighted and placing undue blame on things that don’t warrant it. Maybe his problem is not with the decline of finances in music budgets or his perceived lack of film music savvy among directors and producers. What if his issues are systemic of the fact that he literally eats, sleeps, breathes, and lives film music… 24-hours a day? If he is that consumed by the DOING of film music, how could he expect any other result BUT career burnout? Thinking about that for a few minutes led me to a conclusion I’d like to share with you here:

My thought: Instead of eating, sleeping, breathing, and living film music, why not eat, sleep, breathe, and live….
and THEN write film music?

Saying this will probably get me in trouble with my manager (who rides my ass like Zorro to “write, write, write!”), but if all you do is write—to the exclusion of everything else in your life—then your music is going to be void of any real meaning or context. Your life IS your music. In fact, what goes into making YOU is as vital as every other piece of your film music education, and perhaps more important altogether. It is the essence of who you are as a Creative. If you don’t refuel regularly, you WILL burn out. It is not a question of if, but a question of when. It is inevitable.

In thinking about this concept of eating, sleeping, breathing, and living—all four of them mandatory for human sustenance—let’s look at each one individually and try to determine exactly how crucial a role they play in our lives as Creatives.

EAT

The human body needs to be fed. It just does. You cannot get away from that. Even in a vegetative state, your body needs to be constantly revitalized with nutrients. In turn, those nutrients balance the metabolism and create healthful stability. But it all starts with the action of eating, whether voluntary or forced.

Question: How do you feed your creativity? How do you insure that your creativity is continually being provided with a nutritious, balanced diet? When was the last time you just ingested some music? When did you last devour an opera, consume a well-crafted pop tune, or gorge on a brilliant film score? In order to put out, you have to put in. Much like your body needs to consume fuel in order to continue operating every day, your musical metabolism also needs to be fed and maintained regularly. Many of us are educated musicians, but our formal training most likely fell off shortly after graduation, and what ever methods we’ve employed in our “continued education” have been only those borne out of the jobs we’ve managed to wrangle. If you are a film composer that is hired again and again for the same types of things (which many are), the importance of a regular refresh is even more important.

I have always been a voracious student of music, and it has served me well. There is an old adage: If you stop learning, you stop leading.” Thanks to the investment of my parents in my musical upbringing, I developed early on the discipline in my life that I refer to as critical listening. When I’m not crunching a deadline, I spend a solid hour every morning just critically listening to the music of others. Sometimes it is something new I’ve discovered, other times it is an old favorite. Whatever the case, I listen… but even more, I consciously choose to mentally notice. I don’t do this during any other activity. For example, I never do this while I’m cleaning the studio, cutting demos, or writing emails. I sit in a specific chair, in a specific place on my property, at a specific time every morning, and I just listen. It is my way of keeping the fuel tank full at all times, so that when I am called upon to spill out my most creative musical effort, there is plenty to go around.

Since we can only compose what we can think to compose, replenishing your creative reserve tank is not an option. I wrote about this in a little more depth a while back. Keeping current with musical trends and keeping your creative cabinets well stocked is vital to staving off burnout. If you constantly give and give and give and give, you’ll run out of steam sooner or later. Try to find a way to put back what you take out… and try to do this on a daily basis if you can.

SLEEP

Current scientific sleep studies reveal that most people get less than six hours of sleep per night. To a composer, that almost sounds like a luxury! Dig a little deeper and you’ll discover a more interesting component of the same study: People with careers in functional fields require less sleep than people with careers in creative fields. Counting money as a banker for eight hours a day requires a completely different skill-set than twelve hours of painting a picture will. However, painting a picture is a lot less mechanical of a task, and therefore, requires a little bit more fluidity of motion, process organization, emotion, and planning. In other words, Creatives need more sleep than Tradesmen do.

Years ago, I began getting extremely tired during the day while I was writing music. I would get a full night’s sleep, but then during the day it was as if I hadn’t slept at all. It started with just chronic yawning, which I didn’t think anything of—but then it developed into me literally not being able to keep my eyes open at 2pm on a sunny afternoon. Something was definitely wrong. I saw a fatigue specialist who determined that I had developed obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). OSA is condition by which your breathing airflow is actually cut-off while you sleep, resulting in numerous “wake-ups” throughout the night. Mine got to be so bad that I eventually went into the hospital for a sleep study where they hooked me up to all kinds of diodes and monitored me sleeping for a full two nights. What they found was unbelievable: The first night, I woke up 284 times in a 7-hour cycle. The second night was worse: I woke up 582 in an 8-hour cycle. Something needed to be done, so I underwent some treatments, and now I sleep like a dead guy every night.

These days, my sleep pattern is probably better than yours is—and you might be 22 years old and in perfect health! Regardless, I still need to get a full night’s sleep or I start running the risk of being slow during the day and generally off my game. It is a proven fact that not getting enough sleep can lead to bouts of depression, lack of stamina during the work day, self-doubt and drops in self-esteem, and sharp overall decreases in productivity. Lack of sleep will also make you irritable, short-tempered, given to fits of spontaneous anger and outbursts. As you might imagine, these are not the kinds of qualities that the people who are making composer decisions in the major motion picture studios are going to want to contend with.

Over the years of doing this gig, I’ve heard lots of people say a lot of different things in regards to what the right time to work on music is. Some say that they are better in the morning, while others swear by the quiet hours between 1am and 7am. We’ve all heard people say “I can’t get up in the morning. I’m just not a morning person.” Scientifically speaking, however, I’m not convinced that “can’t” is a reality. If you are the kind of composer who always says, “I’m just better at night!”, then I call bullshit. Listen, if there was an 8.5 earthquake in your city, we all know your ass would be up and at ‘em like Private Pyle in “Full Metal Jacket”! Getting up in the morning or going to bed at a decent time at night are simply two disciplines that are not unlike any other discipline you have surely made time for in your busy, busy life.

Here’s another interesting thing to consider: Most sleep specialists and biochemical scientists agree that no matter what time you go to bed, if you are asleep between the hours of 11pm and 2am, you have rested as much as your body needs for a full 10-hour day following that sleep cycle. There is something about the planet’s biorhythms during that particular time of night that lends  to solid rest. You could get up at 3am, and within minutes, be working just like you would be had you slept eight hours from 1am on. Sound too crazy to be true? Try it. DVR that Jimmy Fallon episode and go to bed. Try it for a week and see if you don’t come back to your writing refreshed and re-energized after a week.

BREATH

Another curse of being a Creative is that much of what you stress out about is brought on by panic. If you’ve been at this awhile, you’ve by now realized that as a person who earns their bread by “making stuff”, it is pretty much feast or famine in regards to resources. Everything hinges on where that next gig is coming from, and sometimes that can be an awfully stressful position to be in. To avoid burning out from lack of work (which might be the most common form of burn-out there is), it is critical that you learn to ebb and flow with the ever-changing tides of the film business. Panic will get you nowhere fast. In fact, if you avoid dealing with your lack of coping skills in regards to not keeping busy, eventually you’ll just up and quit. I cannot tell you how many people I know that have thrown in the towel because they couldn’t stand the heat of an unknown future.

In the film industry especially, nothing—NOTHING—is ever certain, and even after you’ve signed on the dotted line the possibility of being edged out by some random act of nepotism is stock-in-trade in Hollywood. When these types of things happen, your initial reaction will usually be to either get very angry or panic and start freaking out after the reality of not feeding your family for the next however-many-months sets in. Or… BOTH.

The best advice I’ve ever received about getting bad news or finding out that things aren’t going to work out as well as you might have counted on… is to take a breath and relax for a minute. If you can, it is even better to sleep on it. “Things are always better the next day,” my dad used to say. And that’s true. Stepping away from the drama and realizing that you are going to live to die another day is probably the best way to deal with immediate stress. Not to be preachy, but alcohol, drugs, and other substances are not the way to take the edge off of anxiety. They might work in the interim, but that’s it. It will run out fast, and then… there you are. Creatives have no room in their lives for false emotional boosters or suppressants. It’s just not how we are built. Your mind is the single most important emotional regulator available to you. And it’s free! Use it to your advantage and allow it to sooth and calm you during stressful moments.

LIVE

Lastly, doing nothing but outputting just takes a serious toll over time. You have to find a way to generate as much input into your life as you produce output, if not more.

In today’s creative climate of pressure and immediacy (filmmaker Robert Rodriguez refers to it as “creation at the speed of thought”), there isn’t much time for what those of us in the Millennial Generation would term as “restful minutes” (thank you, Stephen Covey!). There is no such thing as a “power nap” anymore. People don’t soak in the tub to take the edge off. Walking around the block to get the creative juices flowing fast again is unheard of in most Creative’s schedules. Why? Because we lack margin in our lives to the point that we simply don’t have the time it would take to do any of those things. Facebook, Twitter, and texting now occupy the emotional bandwidth formerly used to “unwind” and the business climate demands that we be on a greenlight schedule 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Not a good recipe for longevity!

Rest

Speaking of technology, when was the last time you read a book? Not an “eBook”… I mean one with paper and a hardback cover? A recent poll discovered that 9 out of 10 people do 100% of their reading online. That’s cool for the environment, but not so great for the brain. You might say, “Well, now that I have my iPad, it has become a much more organic experience.” To which I would say, “Maybe a little.” Even still, there is great divide between reading at a book’s pace, and reading at an iPad’s pace. You see, the very idea of an iPad is “convenience”. Printed books are not, by today’s standards, in any way convenient. Shopping is not convenient either, hence the rise in Internet commerce in the last five years.

Understand, I’m not advocating against the Internet or iPads. I use them every day myself. But I also understand the difference in the quality of life that balancing technology will bring. The contrast between reading a printed book in a hammock versus reading an iPad book on the subway. HUGE difference in takeaway velocity. Or the wonder of getting outside and being around people at the supermarket versus buying groceries online because it’s convenient and “cool” to do so.

Communication

Here’s another example: Communication. Most people in my life would rather text me than talk to me. I hate that. You know why? Because there are little to no consequences when you “text” someone. It’s safe. You don’t have to see the distasteful look on my face when I don’t agree with what they are texting me. Texting is low-risk. Texting doesn’t cost you anything. There is zero social output, so there is zero social input. It’s boring, detached, and easy to ignore.

Perhaps the bigger problem is that texting is also easy to screw up. It is by far easier to miscommunicate in a text than if you and I are standing next to each other, or even talking to one another over a phone line.

There are essentially three parts to communicating effectively:

1. Words—What you say is important and carries the overall meaning of what you are trying to convey through your communication.
2. Tone of Voice—The way you say something is as important as what you are saying, isn’t it? How many times have you received a text message from someone where you weren’t sure if they were pissed off or joking? Most times, if you could hear the tone of their voice, it would remove all doubt.
3. Body Language—Same idea as “tone of voice”. Someone saying, “Wow, you look nice!” with a smile on their face is completely different from them saying, “Wow, you look nice!” with one eyebrow raised and pursed lips. One communicates a genuine compliment of your tastes. (“Damn, she/he looks great in that!”) The other, a mockery of your wardrobe choice. (“What the hell was she/he thinking wearing THAT?”)

Yet, we communicate like this all of the time, and it leads to a disconnect with people and to a lack of fundamental interactive communication skills. Hearing someone’s voice or seeing someone’s face is a joyous luxury that we are dangerously close to losing in our culture of convenience. It is the experience of being with someone and really spending the time that is fading away. Many of us have had the experience of working with filmmakers from a remote location. Or maybe you’ve recorded an orchestral ensemble in Prague or Moscow and have had to communicate with the conductor over an ISDN line from your studio. If you have, then you know that, while it is wonderful that the technology enables you to do that, a lot gets lost in digital translation. Communicating, which should be effortless and simple, gets complicated and difficult when you are not IN THE ROOM with the people you are working with.

Returning to our context, learning the art of human-to-human communication will do wonders for your nerves.

Interaction

Ever wonder why most agents and execs dread sitting in a meeting with a composer? Bingo! Composers sit… in a room… with no people… 10-18 hours a day. After awhile of living within that kind of a vacuum, your sphere of influence is greatly inhibited and your studio becomes a bubble that regulates what you can know, learn, and understand.

I saw this concept in action recently as I sat down to talk with a young man fresh out of college and eager to get started in the world of film composing. He told me that he had just come from three solid months of having his nose in the books, closing out his time at music school, with Facebook serving as his only connection to the outside world, and an occasional one at that. As we talked about the business and his hopes and dreams as a composer, he asked me all kinds of questions about the future of the industry. While making a point, I casually mentioned the current effort on behalf of composers to unionize with the Teamsters. His eyes glazed over. Because he’d had little to no interaction with actual carbon-based lifeforms for twelve weeks, he had no idea that there was even an effort underway to unionize. He was clueless.

I also had an intern once who couldn’t offer an opinion to save his life. ANYONE could asked this guy for his opinion and he could not string a two-sentence answer together if his life depended on it. After awhile of trying to get him to not be so anxious around others, it became clear that he was a long way from overcoming his problem: Fear of others. He was, essentially, an isolationist. Even though he was a quick on his feet in the studio and seemed do well around me and the rest of our team, being put on the spot and expected to perform was like garlic to a vampire to this poor kid. Instead of giving up on him by relegating him to title of “Dry Cleaning Picker-Upper”, my solution was to take him everywhere with me until being in groups of people became second nature to him. And I did. I took him to meetings, I took him to lunches, I took him to mix stages. I took him anywhere that I felt would put him in a position to give an occasional opinion. Even when there was no opportunity for him to do that, I tried to fabricate an oppotunity that would force him to voice an opinion. My job as his mentor that summer, as I saw it, was less about film music and more about how to interact with other humans. To this day, he would tell you that his time spent at Deane Ogden Music forced him to “learn how to communicate with others.” I’m proud of that, and I think it has given him a better shot at the prize, whatever road he chooses to follow in life.

Interaction with others is a crucial implement in the toolbox of a film composer. Without it you honestly don’t stand a chance because the cornerstone of our business—what makes it hum—is personal relationships. Without the skills necessary to build personal relationships, a composer will never get through a first meeting, a director will never make it through pre-production with a producing team, and an agent/manager will never get you a gig. Period.

In order to build those relationships, you have to get out there. You have to LIVE. Not in a cocoon, not in a bubble, not in your studio. OUT. In the world. Where the action is happening. Don’t be fooled by those who try to convince you that you can do everything now in front of a monitor. They are only saying that so that you’ll spend all your time in front of a monitor… while they are out there making things happen!

Burnproof

I’ve said all of this to get at this point: If you don’t take the time to have a life, there will be no life in your writing, and therefore, no life in your career. You WILL burn out, no question. Creatives who do nothing but sit at their computers and play with software, broken up by the occasional Facebook status update, cannot be that interesting, and therefore, their output won’t be either. No studio film music executive will tolerate a 30-minute meeting where the composer sits there and stares at the floor the entire time. By the same token, no director worth his or her salt will accept shallow-sounding music that comes from a composer with little or no life experience.

Bottom line: When it’s business time, it’s business time. When it’s not business time, redeem that time with restoration and recovery for both yourself AND the people in your life that are close to you, be it your family, your friends, whatever. When I come off a project, I’m creatively drained. I am doing myself, my future employers, and my family a disservice if I don’t take some time to re-energize.

Consuming new music is important for creative longevity, getting enough sleep is vital to good health, and taking a non-dramatic approach to stress will keep you in this for the long haul. None of these things are a waste of time for a Creative. In fact, any time “lost” from doing them is not really time “lost” but time invested, and it’s worth it. You have to be able to really live in order to be able to really write. It is these seemingly little things that add up in the long run and will contribute to your overall health as a Creative professional. And listen… The way I’ve outlined incorporating some of these things into your life might not be the most useful to you, but the principles apply down the line, no matter what your situation is. What is important is that you have as much input as you do output. It is all about safeguarding yourself from creative burnout.

What do you do to “re-energize” your creativity and keep from burning out?

[slidingnote title="Series Parts"]

• Caveats of Convenience: Part I

[/slidingnote]

While we often love to talk about what we do right most of the time, these few posts speak instead to some things that I’ve observed film composers doing wrong lately. Of course, that statement in and of itself is highly subjective, but I think there are some habits that are starting to trend that, while possibly not evident right away, will prove down the line to be detrimental to doing business as a film composer in our continually evolving market. I see this list of choices as “temptations of convenience”, and this series might also be called “The Seduction of the Easy Way Out”. In this economy and composing climate, I see a lot of composers taking these routes and while none of them are necessarily “bad”, I’ll try to make the case as to why I believe most of them should be avoided.

Caveat #2: Fame

I was at my manager’s birthday party a few weeks ago and was asked by someone who read my first installment in this series, “Why did you say, ‘You’ll never become famous being a film composer?’ That’s not true. There are several people who have become famous composing for films.” This person went on to cite several people who we might all agree could be considered famous in our field: John WIlliams, Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, and more recently—Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard.

While I would agree that each of those people—and more—are quite famous within the circles of film music, I would not be too quick to say that they are famous as we would define fame within our society’s immediate cultural definition of the term. For example, ask a person “Who is Michael Jackson?” and nine times out of ten you’ll hear, “He was the King of Pop.” Ask the same ten people “Who is John Williams?” and I’m not sure nine of them—or even five of them—would have any answer at the ready. A few may know, while others may only know if you hum a few bars of the “Star Wars” theme or the “Raiders March”, but the majority would have no clue. This is not to say that Williams isn’t every bit as influential on the modern landscape of American music. He most certainly has been. But with all due respect to “the Maestro”, the truth is that Michael Jackson and John Williams are worlds apart in the “fame” department.

In fact, the more I think about this question posed to me by this gentleman at the party, the more I stand behind my statement. First and foremost, “fame”, as defined by Webster’s, is “the state or quality of being widely honored and acclaimed.” I think we can all agree that by this definition, we as film composers—should we ever attain any great heights of fame and fortune—would be in the minority on this one. Michael Jackson; Michael Jordan; Michael Douglas… hell, Michael LOHAN (ugh!)—I hate to burst any bubbles, but film composers don’t even register as a blip on the radar screen of that kind of fame.

Secondly, I believe that if the impetus behind your drive to score films is fame, you are missing the point entirely. Maybe I should have said, “If you want to be famous, don’t be a composer.” Maybe that would have made the difference for my friend? I don’t know. What I do know is that although John Williams ended up being famous doing what he did, I’d bet money he never intended to write music for the purpose of “getting famous”. And that’s where I hope people are not headed as they choose to embark on their odyssey in film music. Like anything you put your hand to in life, you have to do it for the love of it, or you are doing it in vain. Period.

The Difference Between Fame and Greatness
I’ve made it a priority in my career to mentor a certain number of film music students during each cycle of work here at the Musicave. One recent student kept using the word “famous” every time we would talk about his career goals in our times together. I once asked him at what level a composer would need to be at in order to be free to pick and choose projects as they saw fit. “After you are famous,” he answered, “then you can do whatever you want. Until you get famous, you have to take anything you can get to build your career.” His choice to constantly use that word… “famous”… it grated on me like fingernails on a chalkboard. I finally confronted him about it. Susie and I took him to dinner and I told him, “Dude, we need to talk about something you have been saying that’s been nagging at me for a few days. This ‘getting famous’ thing of yours… first of all, you are dreaming. That’s Number 1. Number 2, it’s just the wrong motivation for wanting to be in film music. No director gives a damn about your desire to ‘be famous’… they want to know if you love the story enough to give it your all… FOR THE FILM. It’s never about YOU. It’s always about the project.”

As we talked, the real problem came out. This poor kid has been told all his life that he’ll “never do anything great“. He’s been put down, stomped on, made to feel inferior, and basically just had every ounce of esteem kicked out of him by the very people who should have been supporting him the most. It became clear to me that this young man equated “fame” with “greatness”. In his mind, the best way to show those unbelieving people in his life that he was worth believing in was to become “famous” doing what they told him he could never and would never do well. Once I helped him identify the real problem, we were then able to have an important conversation about the vast difference between being great and being famous. For him, the delineation of those two ideas was a paradigm shift that he really needed to have if he was to ever stand a chance at this career. Maybe even at life in general.

The sad truth is that many of our graduating film music students are just like this young man once was. They do not understand the difference between being great and being famous. And how could they? Our culture glorifies fame, but places very little value on greatness. They’ve confused the two, thus sending young people on a wild goose chase to find this brass ring of “fame”. Think about this: How many people in your life were extremely popular (famous) but just really not that great of a person? See what I mean? It is a pathetic trend in our society that needs to seriously level off should we hope to extend any nobility to the next generation of film music innovators, or our children in general. There is an entire legion of aspiring composers entering the fold who simply want to be famous or make lots of money. There really are. If you don’t believe me, spend some time on the campus at some of our finer music schools. I have, and I’ve seen it with my own eyes and heard with my own ears. Ambition, to these misguided young minds, is simply a commodity to be bought and sold like stocks or widgets. It is something attainable by having as many Twitter followers as Justin Beiber or by having 30 or 40 comments on your Facebook statuses. These kids have seen too many episodes of “Entourage”—they’ve convinced themselves that the way to the top of the film music heap is by becoming the compositional version of “Vinnie Chase”. All they need is their “Ari” to help them get there.

Fame is not Enough
I wish I could stand in front of every film music student enrolled today and tell them that the desire for fame is not a valid reason for doing ANYTHING. To truly get all you can get out of something—in our case, film music—you must simply be in love with the mere act of doing it. Nothing more. I’m not even talking “results”, yet… I’m just talking about the action of it. It’s the action that must consume you. Writing film music must be critical to your very existence. You should love it so much that you go to sleep thinking about how you really should get up and do more of it, and you should be waking up in the morning already late to get back to doing it. The very process must be your only motivation, your every reason, and your insatiable drive for needing to do it some more. It has to be that one thing that you do, that were you ever not able to do it anymore, you would honestly cease to be complete in some unexplainable way—a vital component to your human contentment would be absent… and that vast expanse would not be a void that could be filled with dollars, fame, notoriety, or accolades. It would be a “music-shaped hole” that only writing music could fill again.

Fame doesn’t do any of that. Fame is a state of being, not a state of process or an action. Fame is not a choice. Fame is something that happens to you, not something you make happen. Fame relies on luck and chance, while greatness relies on consistency of character. Serenity, contentment, balance, and harmony—these are the motivating mechanisms that propel people toward greatness. In this light then, fame, it seems, is simply not enough.

“How much money will I make as a film composer?”

That’s the six million dollar question, isn’t it? I get this question from aspiring composers more than any other, and I never know what to say. As much as I try to come up with a cool, suave answer to their query, all I can usually muster is something like “Whatever you can!”

Lame and disappointing? Yes. Honest and truthful? Absolutely.

The bigger question — and the one I want to tackle here — is “How much money do live players eat up during a film score’s production and how do you plan for the bloodshed?” The answer to that questions is… “I wish there was an answer.” The fact is that it really depends on a load of different variables, but I’ll try to define some of them here for you to help get you thinking about how you should budget your up-fronts to “pay” for your score.

But first, let’s start with some customary “assumptions”:

I’m assuming that:

1) You prefer quality. I’m not a believer in skimping or cutting corners. Every score I have ever written has contained live elements of some sort. Whether I was able to hire Richie Sambora to play guitar for me on a TV show or if I record timpani in my studio on my own, the fact is that I made a deal with myself early on that I would go live whenever I possibly could. A live performance, even if it isn’t the best live performance, still does miracles for a recorded score that samples simply cannot achieve. I would be willing to pay for union musicians to come in and perform on my work for a couple of reasons. First, LA players are simply the best in the world. They make everything sound better. I like having my toes in the player pool around LA because then when I get to hire a full ensemble, pending availability, I’m more likely to get who I want because of our relationship and work history together.

2) Your score will accommodate live players. If the score to your project calls for a band consisting of piano, synth pads, mouth percussion, and Indonesian finger cymbals (I once scored a short film with this line-up, believe it or not!), then you are probably not going to need any live players. Piano samples are good enough nowadays that you can get away with Synthogy Ivory or NI Akoustik Piano or something. Anything to keep from spending that $500 to get the ol’ Blüthner tuned up, right? It is really the scores that require orchestral instrumentation of some sort that we are referring to here.

3) You have some budget. You cannot start with zero. I mean, technically you can, but it’s not going to be fun for you. To make money, you need to spend some money. Your score will not sound very good if you have no money to put into it. I say this for two reasons, the first one being somewhat obvious, and the second… not so much. First, no money into a score means that the score will be all sampled (Refer to point number 1 above!). Secondly, no money into a score means no money out of a score for you, and how much do you think *that* scenario is going to motivate you to do your best work? The principals withholding budget from their composer is both a sign of bad planning on their part as well as an assumption of lesser value on your product and its ability to service their film. Not a good combo. Try and get your director or producer to find you some money. Anything. Anything that will give you some kind of reward for scoring this thing. If they can pay you in widgets, then take the widgets and sell them for some money to hire live players.

The Package Deal
Back in the good old days, composers were given a creative fee to write the score and then the studio paid for the rest of the expenses. Studios had musicians on staff that were just there all day and if you needed them, you ran out to the stage and recorded something really quick. If not, they all just sat there all day hoping you came out to visit. Obviously, this became very silly very quickly, and with emerging technology and the composer’s ability to synthesize a majority of the score at home, “the package deal” became popular.

A package deal is when the production gives you a set amount of money from the overall budget and you are then responsible to hire all of the people necessary to bring the score in on-time and on budget, while hopefully maintaining a decent creative fee out of whatever is left after everything is paid for. As you can imagine, it can be tough, if not impossible, to keep any of this money, depending on what the producers “say” they want out of the score. If they give you 12k as your music budget, and they want “live orchestra”, good luck. You might be able to augment your samples with a smattering of live players, but there will not be anything left after you are done to feed your family with. You either need to negotiate a higher package, have something else going on while you score that film that will supplement your income, or leave the deal on the table and walk away. Those are you options.

The Music Budget
So, let’s assume that you have some money to play with and that you are excited to get started scoring this new film that you’ve just been assigned. 
Let’s also say that this film is at the very bottom of what most independent (and by “independent”, I mean truly independent … of a studio, that is) films are budgeting for music these days: $34,000. That is actually where you should be if you are hired onto a low-end indie feature. In fact, if you get *this* much, pat yourself on the back. You are lucky. It should be higher, but it rarely is.

If you’re not used to working with a budget of this magnitude before, it looks like a ton of dough at first glance. But in this gig, things add up and it starts to get complicated quickly. Ready to see where it all goes, and how fast? Grab your tissue box… Let’s do this!

In a typical “package deal” scoring agreement, the composer would get paid in thirds — one-third of the total budget upon attachment to the project, one-third upon commencement of scoring, and the final third upon delivery. This will work fine with our budget since by the time we are ready to record any orchestra, we’ll already have been paid twice, to the tune of $17k. If we stay disciplined and stick to our Hard Expenses budget of $15,900, we’ll have $1,100 left over to apply to the rest of our expenses later on. Then if we come in at least under budget with our Soft Expenses, we’ll make a nice little $14,955 when all is said and done. Additionally, if we can somehow trim a bit out of our Soft Expenses, then we can probably get that number up to around $16k. That’s not a horrible profit on a film that budgeted 34k to begin with. It’s not a ton of dough, but for an entry level indie flick, it’s a nice shot in the arm to start out your career.

Hard Expenses
For the sake of our discussion here, I’m going to refer to the things that are absolutely non-negotiable — in other words, “you NEED them” — as hard expenses. These would be expenses such as musicians, a place to record them (scoring stage or recording studio), an engineer to run those sessions for you, a contractor to get you the players, etc. If you are in a time crunch and/or you cannot do it all yourself, you can also toss an orchestrator into the mix along with an assistant to help you carve audio stems when you get down to delivery time and things start to get tense.

Musicians
Using the example of some of the films I’ve scored with budgets like these, I’m going to say that a 20-piece union string section is going to run you about 10k for a single three hour session. These figures change any time the union renegotiates its contract with producers, so you’ll always want to call the union before you start your budget to get the most accurate numbers… but for now, you can see from our mock budget that the orchestra will be our biggest expense, and for good reason. We are not going to skimp on our players. These players are the saving grace of your sound and they are going to basically dress up a lot of what would otherwise be lacking because of our small budget. I’ve used players on short film budgets that were a fraction of what this one is, and the scores sound like something out of a major studio tent-pole film, so… our musicians get top dollar. No arguments.

Now, you *can* get a better rate if you were to consider recording in another part of the world like eastern Europe or even Russia, but I would use the word “better” very carefully here. “Better” doesn’t necessarily always mean “better sounding”. I’ve recorded in places where you are wise to schedule all of the tough cues toward the start of the day or you run the risk of musicians heading to the pub at lunch and coming back tipsy. Not a great deal for your afternoon sessions! You also have to account for the fact that if you are recording here in town, you are getting up everyday from your place across town and maybe driving 30 minutes to record. Translation: No Overhead. If you are oversees, you have to pay hotel expenses, airfare (roundtrip to Bratislava is running around $1,300 right now), food, and customary travel expenses. That being said, it pays to research the crap out of your “oversees” session possibilities before you take the leap. People don’t realize it, but over the last ten years or so the American Federation of Musicians (or “AFM”, the musicians’ union) has made it as easy as ever to record an orchestra in LA or New York, having created a new fee schedule that will accommodate virtually any film production no matter how big or small the music budget. They even have a “demo scale” which is just what it sounds like: a reduced scale for those times that you’d like to have a live orchestra on your… wait for it… DEMO. Wouldn’t *that* be kick ass?

For a group of more than 35 players, union rates are currently hovering around $262 per player/per session. If you require fewer players, the rates go up from there. Don’t forget that you’ll need to pay your contractor (also known sometimes as an “orchestra manager”), which is the person that puts your orchestra together for you. They make double scale, which is simply twice the standard musicians’ rate of pay. So in our case, since we are using only 20 players, our player rate will be about $300 per player/session. Then, you add the contractor to that at double scale, which is $600, bringing you to a total player cost of $6,600. Sweet! We budgeted 10k for players, so this means we are already way under budget, right? Well… not so fast.

Doubling
You are having one of your violinists and one of your cellists play solos on two of your cues. You are also asking one of your players to “double” on another instrument. Doubling usually applies mainly to woodwind or brass players (a flutist also playing piccolo, or a trumpet player also playing flugelhorn). Piano players aren’t considered doublists if you also need them on celesta. Whatever the case, musicians aren’t going to double for free. For these special skills, they receive additional pay.

Cartage
We also have two (2) double basses in our line-up. That means that we also will be taking care of their cartage fees. “Cartage” is the cost of getting a larger, less manageable instrument to and from the recording venue. Cartage fees always apply to double bass, tuba, cello, percussion (tympani, bass drum, vibes, tubular chimes, etc.), baritone sax, bass sax, contra-bass clarinet, contra bassoon, accordion, baritone horn, and contra bass trombone. AFM says that cartage on one single double bass is about $12 per session, but in LA, cartage fees are often billed at a higher rate than AFM projections, so we’ll add in $200 for today’s bassists. I’m not a union percussionist, but as a drummer I’m well aware of the costs of shipping gear. It’s not easy, and the employer is almost always responsible for it… most certainly so when it is a union gig.

As you can see, it starts adding up fast, and when all is said and done, we are looking at about $10,000 to get everybody paid and taken care of for a standard 3-hour session. You also need to take into account that this number is ONLY for a single 3-hour session. At 45 minutes of recording time per hour (AFM regulations give musicians a 15-minute break every hour), you are only talking about 15 minutes or so of finished music if you record at a rate of 5 minutes per hour (fairly standard for an LA orchestra). In a hybrid-score situation, this might be just what you need. If your score is wholly orchestral, however, you’ll obviously need a lot more time. Translation: You’re gonna need more money.

There are so many factors that go into accounting your budget for players. How much music do you need to record? How many players will record it? Are there any doubles? Are there any soloists? Does the *whole* band need to be there for all of the sessions, or can you record with everyone for the bigger cues and then start cutting players as you scale down the score to the more intimate cues? How much cartage is involved? Be smart. Use the schedule to your advantage. Don’t be stupid about what you can and cannot get away with using samples — if you can record it, then record it! Don’t be afraid to ask questions… there aren’t any dumb questions, and if there are… JUST BE WILLING TO LOOK DUMB! Who gives a crap! You won’t give one either after you are hit with your first meal penalty because you didn’t ask questions! Use your people… your concertmaster, your union rep. Talk to your players… go out on the floor and shake hands with them. Be genuine and thank them for playing and being who they are. Use your contractor… your contractor can either be your best friend or your worst nightmare. They are there to help you, but ultimately, their job is to protect those union musicians. They have the power to shut down your session if you are abusing musicians by not following the rules.

The bottom line with players is this: Everybody is working for the good of the product. You call the shots, but you have to follow the rules and treat people as they deserve to be treated. Do it right, and live session players will make your little 34k score sound like a 100k score. I’m not lying.

Recording Venue
The next expenditure that we’ll need to shell out some good money for is the venue in which we’ll record the score. Under normal circumstances (read: a larger budget), we would contact a stage here in town like Warners, Fox, or Sony (Eastwood Scoring Stage, Newman Scoring Stage, or the Barbara Streisand Scoring Stage, respectively) to record our full-sized orchestra. But since we are working with a smaller group this time out — 20 string players, to be exact — we’ll save some money here and record in one of the many excellent recording studios here in Los Angeles that are known for getting a solid sound with a smaller ensemble. Rooms like Westlake Audio’s Studio “D”, Capitol “A”, Henson’s big room, or Glenwood Place in Burbank are all perfect for this size of group, and they are also all known for getting a great string sound. For three-hour sessions, you can expect to pay between $800 on the low end to approximately $1,500 or even $2,000 on the high end for one of these rooms. Scoring stages are considerably more, but again, you won’t need one unless you are scoring a studio feature with a large music budget which will require a 50+ piece orchestra. If you are, then that discussion is beyond the scope of this article. We’ll save that one for next time!

We are going to go with a place that quoted $1,200 for a 3-hour session. With that fee of $1,200, you’ll get a lot of stuff. First, and most obviously, the room—complete with all of the booth gear, the big recording console, and the lounge facilities of the studio. The studio’s piano is going to cost extra, but since we are using the Ivory plug-in, we won’t be needing that, so money saved there. For our rental of the studio, we also get use of all of the studio’s microphones, although your engineer will most likely bring their own tried and tested set-up. Just let them, believe me. They know what they are doing.

The Engineer
Speaking of which, almost always you’ll want to differ to your engineer as to which room you should use in the first place. Nobody knows the attributes and nuances of stages and rooms better than your recording engineer. In fact, that is part of the reputation of a great recordist: Their ears are tuned to the point that they understand and are aware of the places to get the best recordings, given the specifics of your project.

The engineer might be the single most important piece of the puzzle to getting a great film score sound, so bargain-shopping for one is not something I would recommend doing. Expect to pay between $800 to $2000 per three-hour session for a great engineer. This might seem like a lot of money, but I assure you, they earn every penny. You won’t know this until your first time out with a good engineer, but they are working far beyond that three hours of recording time. They arrive to your session hours ahead of even you (sometimes even the day before) to set-up microphones and place music stands and seats, insuring that you have plenty of separation between instrument groups. Many times, the engineer will work with an assistant (usually the salaried assistant at the studio you are recording at), and will put this person to work running cable and positioning microphone stands. The fee for the engineering assistant is often included in the studio rental fee. If it isn’t, ask if the studio is willing to roll the assistant’s fee into the cost of the rental. Most places will.

One last thing about engineers: When you find a great engineer that you work well with, stick with them. Bring them with you on all of your jobs. Repeated work with that person will lead to the two of you being able to finish each others’ musical sentences, and that is a luxury when things are tense in the control booth that you’ll appreciate down the road. For years, Tom Geron was my engineer. Lately, as Tom has taken on more and more work as an engineer for pop radio studio sessions, I’ve used other engineers, like Michael Arvold. On my orchestral sessions for “The Way Home”, we had a ProTools melt-down that seemed at first to be pretty monumental. As I sat there hyper-ventilating, Michael was able to fix the problem in a few minutes, saving us from wasting precious time and money with all the musicians staring at us through the glass. These are the times when history with a solid engineer is priceless.

Orchestrator
I’ll be brief with this one, and I’ll abstain from starting a flame war as to whether or not orchestrators are important to the process. For the purposes of our example here, I budgeted one in at $900. Orchestrators typically work on a “page rate” — a certain amount of dollars for one page of orchestrated score. A common misconception among newer composers is that orchestrators and copyists are one-in-the-same. They are not. An orchestrator *can* also copy if that is the arrangement, but they are not automatically expected to do so. Copying is normally considered a separate line item from orchestration.

Most composers are used to paying orchestrators ±$90 per page of finished score. This is a general guideline, however, as I’ve paid less than that and more at times, depending on who the orchestrator was and what the demand was for that orchestrator’s particular brand of orchestration. You can see how this will add up when you consider that a page of score is typically four measures long for a full group of players. However, for our little 20-piece string section, we can probably have the orchestrator get most of it on two or three pages for each instrument group. This however, has little or no bearing on how much they will charge. Just because they can squeeze everything on one page doesn’t mean their page rate now goes down (another common misconception). Communication here is key, so be clear and get all of the facts when you hire your orchestrator. They will save your ass in most cases, so paying them what they are worth is something that you just need to be damned happy about.

Conductor
I’m going to assume, since this is a little string date, that you are going to conduct your string players yourself. You may choose not to do this, either because your director will be there and you are nervous leaving them alone in the booth, or because you simply aren’t an experienced conductor. Either is fine and you shouldn’t be ashamed of those reasons for staying in the booth and hiring this role out to someone who can handle it for you. On the other hand, I heartily recommend you conducting your scores at least every once in a while. It is good practice, and it also just makes for a different kind of session. There is nothing quite like conducting players to a piece of music you have written. Often, you can evoke more emotion out of a group that you are conducting yourself, simply because the players see and feel your emotion behind your own music.

Many orchestrators also conduct. SCOREcast’s Brian Satterwhite recently orchestrated on a score that I wrote. As our recording dates approached, it became clear that I needed Brian to also conduct so that I could stay focused on the sound of the score with my director and manage the sessions from within the booth.

Soft Expenses
Our “soft expenses” are going to be things that would be great to have, but are not absolutely necessary. I usually try and include these things when I budget out a job, but that’s just me. You can do what you want… I’ve just found that putting these things in the budget allows me to keep everything related to the project in my business accounting and separate from my personal accounting. With this method, I keep the little things that add up over time from going on a personal credit card for convenience sake. It’s not so convenient on April 15th when my accountant shows me that I accidentally paid for my team’s plane tickets to the premiere in San Francisco with my personal Visa card!

Studio Upgrades
I’ve included this here to illustrate a point more than anything: If I had a nickel for all of the times I’ve been told by an aspiring composer, “As soon as I get my first payment from them, I’m going to upgrade my studio so I’m ready to roll!”… well… I’d be a very rich man. “Getting your first gig” is NOT the time to make sure you are technologically ready to start scoring films. You need to have that all ironed out ahead of time. Here’s why: If you are prepared for this gig, and you have done your homework early instead of waiting until you have the gig to do it, this entire category of expenses becomes pure profit. Said another way… That’s cold hard cash straight into your bank account! It’s a harsh awakening to start out a project having to hand over a major portion of your potential profits to a place like Guitar Center. Blech! That’s a soul-sucking event if there ever was one! Tackle the due diligence of getting your rig up to snuff before you sign a project. Trust me… you’d rather hit the ground running with a rig that works than have your head in manuals for the first two weeks of your scoring schedule.

Filmmaker Meetings/Meals/Gas/Auto
I know what you are thinking… “Deane… seriously? Really?”. Yes. I. Do. I ABSOLUTELY figure in my meetings at Starbucks or dinner with my clients, as well as the automotive expenses to make them all happen. Why not? If not for those meetings, I would be totally satisfied to eat at home with my family like any other night of my life. This is a necessary expense that I incur in order to take care of my clients, so yes… I take it out of the budget.

Studio Lease/Power/Materials
These three things are expenditures that I will incur to keep the lights on in my studio while I work on this project. All three come right out of the budget. Some of the best advice I have ever heard was from my high school economics teacher, Ron Sather. He said, “Your family budget should never absorb any of your business budget liabilities.” If you have your studio in your home, I hope to all that’s holy that you are taking a tax deduction on the square footage of your studio space. The IRS allows for that and you should be taking advantage. Additionally, do not put your power, space, and materials expenses (CD cases, printer paper, pens/pencils, ink, USB cables, etc.) on the shoulders of your family or personal budget. Everything should be kept separate so that at tax time you are able to get the maximum deduction, saving you boatloads of dough.

Takeaways
I hope this has been helpful. I know it is sort of hard to envision a fake budget when there really is no hard data to go on, but I’m sure you get my point. If there is anything that I think is an important takeaway from what I’ve presented here, it’s this: The reward of scoring films is mostly an emotional/spiritual/psychological one. Sometimes, there is not much money in the craft and if you really boil down the expenses, it can be a bit disconcerting. But remember: Even the top 12 guys that are scoring 80% of the tent-pole studio features in Hollywood right now… when you add up their expenditures and their work hours, their ROI is not what you might think it is. Jerry Goldsmith once said, “If you don’t like it for the love of it, you’ll hate it for the hurt of it.”

If it is true that financial pressure is the #1 cause of broken families in America, you can only imagine what it can do to you as a businessperson. Get yourself together and do some hardcore, pencil-sharpening work on your budget outlines for your projects before you turn them in. It is so worth all of the footwork, and this gig will be a hell of a lot more profitable for you if you do.

What Do You Think?
I realize that I left out a TON of information in this article, and honestly, this topic is ginormous—I could talk about it with you for three days and we still wouldn’t cover it all. I’m committed to being on the COMMENTS this week like never before to answer any questions anyone might have about budgets… and here is my pledge: NOTHING IS OFF LIMITS. Ask away. If I can’t give you an answer, I’ll find someone who can. Let’s talk about this budgeting thing and see if we can’t wrap our heads around it a little bit more together!

I’m going to stray from the recent focus on “Working as a Team” and devote a few posts to some of the things I’ve observed film composers doing wrong lately. Of course, that statement in and of itself is highly subjective, but I think there are some habits that are starting to trend that, while possibly not evident right away, will prove down the line to be detrimental to doing business as a film composer in our continually evolving market.

I’m not talking about poor business acumen: not returning phone calls, showing up late, under-delivering or running over-budget. To be honest, if you are doing any of those things you are already dead in the water! Instead, what I’ll be referring to are things that July’s theme of “Marketing and Branding” got me thinking about, and I’ll split them up into a series of posts I’m going to call “Caveats of Convenient Film Composing”. I see this list of choices as “temptations of convenience”. This series might also be called “The Seduction of The Easy Way Out”. In this economy and composing climate, I see a lot of composers taking these routes. While none of them are necessarily “bad”, I’ll try to make the case as to why I believe most of them should be avoided.

Caveat #1: Catering To The Crowd

We’ve said this before at SCOREcast (and I’m sure you’ve it heard elsewhere, too): you aren’t going to get rich being a film composer. Moreover, you certainly aren’t going to get “noticed” or get famous being one… save for the film music lovers in the world. And there are enough of them to make you think you might!

In fact, I am hearing more film scores come out that sound like they were written with film music fans in mind from the start. I’m not talking about CD soundtrack albums—those *should* be sequences for a good listen. I’m referring to the actual music in the film. As film music becomes more and more popular (the result of increased academic attention on film scoring combined with the glut of composers trying to fight their way onto the playing field) we are seeing the value of film music being placed more on the “soundtrack release”, and the hopeful (if not fruitless) rewards reaped thereof rather than the accomplishment of a score being perfectly tailored to the action onscreen.

Likewise, social media has introduced new frontiers never before discovered in how film music people are connected around the world. New film music festivals such as the incredible Ubeda International Music Festival, SXSW, and even the Soundtrack Film Music Festival raise awareness of our craft in a way that was never really possible before the level of connection that social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and MySpace provide. However, that connection of convenience comes with a small price tag: composers writing for the “admission” into those events instead of writing the best score they can for the film. I was asked to be a guest adjudicator at a festival last year where one of the awards given out was a “Hardest Working Composer” award of sorts, and the criteria by which it was awarded was based on how many scores that composer had produced in a single year. I didn’t vote for the person who ultimately won the award, and I won’t mention how utterly wrong many of this person’s scores were for the films in which they “accompanied”. The award was obviously given for sheer “output” rather than any strict adherence to quality, function, or craft standards.

As a result, we might be hearing more and more music that sounds unoriginal and unfinished. John Debney recently invited some lively discussion by posing the question, “Why do so many scores sound absolutely the same these days?” Of the 128 respondents, most blamed the studios/producers for the lack of originality in film scoring today. I believe, however, that the studios want just as much to hear something creatively original as those of us doing the composing long to bring it to them. These days, composers are considering more than simply servicing the film when they write their scores, and it might be showing.

Danny Elfman has been criticized over the years of turning out scores that do not necessarily provide for a great listening experience independent of the film they were scored for. To that I say, “Perfect!” Do you think Mr. Elfman gives a hoot about whether or not his music works outside of the picture? I assure you, he doesn’t. And you shouldn’t either. No accolades, awards, reviews, or journalistic opinions could ever substitute for a well-written score tailor-made for the story by which it intends to serve.  To be a “good” composer (I’m not even talking great here… just good) you must come to the realization that you are there to do one single thing: service the film. That’s it. If you are aiming for any more than that in your duties then you are not fulfilling your duties at all. In fact, you are wasting your client’s, the studio’s, and your team’s valuable time. You are hunting for something more than what the job entails… you are hunting for a trophy. At that point, not only are you out of the flow of creativity, but you are also self-servingly seeking to gain something without truly putting your heart and soul into the work required to attain it.

My challenge? THROW yourself into your next project with reckless abandon. Don’t settle. Write music that you never knew was in you. Do not take your job lightly. Do not cut corners or take shortcuts. Do not rely on old, tired, and familiar devices, progressions, melodies, or motifs. In short, don’t make it easy on yourself. Challenge yourself to write bigger, better, and smarter. Orchestrate from a passionate place, not from an educational one. Voice your music with a new clarity and not with the palette you voiced from the last time or two. Do something different. If your principals are not sold on it, get off your ass and sell them on it! Convince them that this is the way to go if you know in your heart that it is what is best for the film. Instead of writing like it is the first score you’ll ever be recognized for, write as if it is the last score you’ll ever write. Everything else will take care of itself.

Thoughts? Hit me up in the COMMENTS!

If you are anything like I am, you have many different ways in which you create. I think it is safe to say that we are all musically creative. We write, arrange, sketch, play, edit, perform, design, distort, and produce audio for various formats and productions. In my own career, however, I also like to work on my website, which I take care of myself. I love to take certain segments of our podcasts and edit/tweak them as a temporary (and I let me stress the word temporary!) tangent from my current scoring assignment. Though I am in no way, shape, or form a graphic designer, I have a fairly evolved sense of design aesthetic, and I very much enjoyed creating my own logo for my company. I design and create my own demo materials, promotional literature, and to a more limited degree, I like opening up Photoshop and seeing what trouble I can get into with my photos and graphics. To me, each one of these things is another creative outlet, and all of them allow me to divert my creative attention, albeit momentarily, to things other than film scoring. After all, you need an ear break every once in awhile, right?

I once heard a speaker talk about our “Creative Gas Tank.” As he put it, our creative gas tank is the level of output we are able to handle as creative individuals. Just like an automobile, we have a creative reserve to draw from that is only so deep. Once that reserve is tapped, we must refill somehow in order to continue our creative flow. Like the car you drive, if your tank is empty, it is only a matter of miles/feet/inches before you break down on the side of the road.

Obviously, you need to “refuel” when necessary, and there are as many ways to do that as there are to empty the tank. I take a lot of walks around the neighborhood of my studio. Even a little bit of simple physical activity is enough to grease my creative wheels and get me back to creating on all cylinders. Time spent with my family is often my #1 choice for getting recharged. It is very easy for me to “forget” about work when I am with them, and yet when it’s time to get back to it, I never feel more refreshed and energized than I do when I’ve just spent time with them. Other times, working on a completely unrelated creative task (like the ones mentioned above) will replenish whatever creative capital I’ve spent.

For you, refueling might look a bit different. Like me, it could be time away from the project spent either with some other creative task or out with your family taking a break from all things creative. For others of you, it might be working on a piece of music that is wholly different from the current assignment, maybe a pop tune or an arrangement of your latest concert piece.

What things refill your creative tank? What actions can you specifically point to that have given you the freedom to then come back to your assignment armed with a fresh perspective and ready to jump back in where you left off?

Hit the COMMENTS!

Welcome to the new and improved SCOREcastOnline.com!

Our inaugural year has been a total blast! I knew that if we could do something to more carefully connect our professional film music community, amazing things would happen. What I didn’t count on was this community getting behind SCOREcast in the way that it has. Kudos to each and every one of you for building this community and really making this professional film music family an amazing group to be a part of. This website is for YOU!

Our first year online has been spent on Google’s awesome Blogger platform. However, with the expanding number of community-members posting relevant commentary and rich content, our daily readership is reaching into the 40,000′s, and we needed to make a change… badly.

We are now self-hosting the site on our own servers and have migrated to the more robust WordPress platform. For the last six days, my amazingly talented assistant, Duncan Kirk Bohannon, has been hand-coding this new version of the SCO experience, and I think you are going to love it!

Some of the enhancements include:

• Increased Content Organization — Now you can search for articles in several of the most relevant categories we could think of (and actually… we are still thinking and wondering exactly what the 8 most relevant categories would be to pro film music makers, so if you have any suggestions, hit us up on the Contact page).
• Better Post Tags — We’ve whittled down the tags on the site to make it easier for you to cruise around and view the content you really want to view. You can also view the entire tag list in the “Tags” section to the right and read a stream of content on *that* particular topic all on one page.
• Video and Audio Content — For a long time, we’ve needed the ability to not only post audio in our RSS site feed for you, but video as well. Now we can, and we plan to take extreme advantage of it!
• Easy Article Submissions — One of the best moves we made all year was inviting several of professional film music’s most exciting people to join our contributing editor team. But to truly have an all-encompassing community forum, the entire community needs to have a voice. We’ve now included article submission uploads on the Contact page, and if you have an idea for a SCOREcast article… we’d LOVE to hear it!
• Social Network Sharing —As we all scramble to embrace the social networking technology that is making all of this possible, we thought it might be beneficial to include as many of the popular social networks in our sharing scheme as possible. In only one-click, you can now post your favorite SCOREcast content from any page to Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Google Bookmarks, MySpace, Technorati, StumbleUpon, and a whole bunch of other networking sites. Spread the word!!

Podcasts
Of course, with a major move like this, we are still working out a few bugs. On the new Podcast page, you can listen the last dozen podcast episodes in a slick new pop-out player that resides next to that episode’s corresponding shownotes. We are still working to get the podcast player that you are used to up on the front page, and it might take a few cracks at it until we figure out the best solution for that. Believe me, we are as anxious as you are to get Episode 27 on the air… give us a little more time, and we’ll deliver (famous last words of a film composer!).

Comments
Also, most of your previous comments are showing up in all posts,while others still have yet to migrate over. Still yet, for a few posts, we were simply unable to hang onto *all* of the comments. With a move like this, we basically jumped through three hoops that make for a big combined “no no” when you are designing a website transition: hosting jumps, domain transfers, and platform switching. We did all three simultaneously, and the casualty of war was a few comments here and there. You can still COMMENT in the same way you always have—log in or create a Disqus account by simply leaving your first comment after any post—but some of your previous posts will take a little more monkeying on our end to get back in the system.

All-in-all, there are over 200 enhancements that have gone into this new version of SCO. I wish I could list them all here… but, frankly, I don’t know what 199 of them mean! (“I’m a film composer, Jim… not a web designer!”)

What I *do* know is that with this new upgrade, SCO is now poised to keep bringing you the quality content I believe we’ve come to be known by, for the next several years, as well as expanding that content to include new and developing ways to communicate with YOU—our over 40,000 daily online readers. In the coming weeks, you’ll witness even more opportunities for interaction with your professional film music family at SCO, and we are excited to see what happens with it all. For now, cruise around, kick the tires a bit, and hit us back with any features you’d like to see in the future.

This is YOUR community… Build it, challenge it, question it, ponder it, lead it, love it, live it!

_________________________________

SCOREcast founder DEANE OGDEN is an award-winning composer who has written the music to over twenty feature films including THE SENSEI, DREAMS ON SPEC, THE WAY HOME, and THE EVOLUTION OF DAD. Also very active in music for television, Deane wrote the orchestral themes for Michael Phelps’ record-breaking gold medal run during the 2008 OLYMPIC GAMES, which was the most-viewed event in American television history. Deane is also a top-call session drummer, and has recorded and performed with artists like TINA TURNER, JOSS STONE, SEAL, and RIHANNA. You can find links to his bio and other sites here.

Normally, Lee Sanders would occupy this space with a few thoughts to get your noggin’ spinning about the way you conduct yourself in this business of film music. He’ll be back next week to challenge you with an all new Weekend Provocation.

Right now, though, I have a HUGE announcement to make…

Last year, over Memorial Day weekend, we launched SCOREcastOnline.com. The idea for a SCOREcast website seemed like the obvious move in the natural progression from the SCOREcast podcast episodes, and felt like a necessary step toward our goal of bringing the professional film music community closer.

At the time of the launch, we weren’t sure if an SCO site would be a raging success, or go over like a lead balloon. I’m happy to report that because of your loyalty as subscribers, the word of mouth that makes our industry the great harbor that it is, and quality, consistent content from the best people working in film music, you have grown this website community to over 40,000 hits… PER DAY.

And this weekend, we’ll be upping the ante again.

We are moving the site to a new host and making a significant site modification to SCO on Saturday night. If you visit SCO between 4pm (PST) Saturday and Sunday evening, you might find it to be “down for maintenance” or, in the case of whatever browser you might be using, you’ll encounter a “this site cannot be found” error message.

Don’t worry—we are simply uploading the new website and we will be back with a vengeance on Monday morning, bright and early.

I can’t spill too many beans here (you’ll be pleasantly surprised Monday morning, I’m certain of it!), but this simple yet significant “next-level” modification to the way we do chicken around here will set SCO up for the next several years of growth, killer written content, audio and video (!) podcast episodes, and many more exciting features that we wouldn’t be able to offer you if we were to simply stay put and maintain the status quo.

But then again… we aren’t really the type to do *that* anyway!

Thank you—from the bottom of my heart—for making SCO such a runaway success. If we can do this in one year, imagine what we can do in two!

All my best,
Deane Ogden
Founder, SCOREcastOnline.com

My goal in starting this website and podcast has always been to make our professional film music community “smaller” as we naturally grow “larger”. Over the past year, our website has undergone many alterations and we’ve experimented with various ways to communicate and interact as a community. Some of these methods have worked and some of them have needed further tweaking, but we’ve always strived to make SCO the very best experience it can be. To commemorate our anniversary, we will be launching even more new features at SCOREcastOnline.com in the coming weeks that will make the site even more robust as we seek to better serve this community.

One of the things that I believe differentiates SCO from the rest of the pack is that we are all working professionals—none of us are offerring knowledge or putting something out there for public consumption that isn’t a tried and true method, technique, philosophy, or question in our own daily working film music routine. It annoys me to no end to encounter people who really have no idea what it is like being a working professional in this business, yet they either want to tell you all about how to do it or they have an opinion that they feel is relevant— never mind the fact that they haven’t written a note or edited or mixed music for the last fifteen years. How can this person *truly* know what it is like NOW in the film music business, other than to simply speculate on something they know very little about? (And for the record, I’m NOT talking to those of you who are just coming up in the biz—”Looking for” work and “talking about” work are two different things. To me, one is of merit. The other? Not so much.)

Which leads me to a potential discussion with you: GOING PRO. What does that mean? What is the difference between being a professional film composer, music editor, orchestrator—what have you—and being an amateur hobbyist?

Understand this difference: I’m NOT asking, “How does a person make the leap from being an amateur to being a professional?” Or even, “How do you break into the working community?” Instead, I’m seeking to illustrate and highlight the differences in the two species—because a working film composer and a film composer who isn’t working are two VERY different animals… and the reasons why, at least to me, are extremely telling and very educational for all of us at every stage of the career.

Like many of my working colleagues who’ve had any amount of success at this gig, I’ve lectured in plenty of film music classes at the university level. After years and years of doing so and talking with hundreds—if not thousands—of students, my spirit of discernment operates at a fairly high level: I’m able to tell which students have the chutzpah and internal drive to eventually find their way into the professional ranks and which ones do not.

I have a lot to say on this topic, and I’ll spread it out over the rest of May in various articles I’ll write, but in the meantime, and to get the party started, here are two immediate thoughts that come to mind that I feel are relevant to all of us:

Personal Responsibility
Everyone screws up. On almost every project I’ve ever worked on, somebody somewhere has messed something up. Sometimes the mistake is small and it goes unnoticed and gets swept under the rug, and sometimes it’s a Category 5 disaster that cannot be ignored and the entire scoring team, from the studio executives on down, hears about the blunder. Usually, with some quick thinking and a little magic dust, it is fixable. Sometimes it costs the person their job.

No matter what, and in every case, a professional takes the responsibility for everything they do, good or bad, pretty or ugly. There is no pointing fingers, no whining about how someone else is to blame. If you did it, you own it.

As a film music pro, there is no surer way to kill your career than passing the responsibility buck. I used to compose music for NBC’s “The Apprentice”, and “The Celebrity Apprentice” is still a huge guilty pleasure in my home for both me and my family (I finally got them hooked!). One thing that has always fascinated me about that show is how well the teams work together and have each other’s backs. That is… UNTIL they get to the Boardroom, where they, without fail, start throwing each other under the bus in an effort to stay on one more week. While I understand that this is part of the dynamic that makes a show like this work, it still blows my mind how far people are willing to go to cast blame on others for what are so obviously their own poor decisions. Many times, Trump sees right through this kind of crap and yells, “You’re Fired!”

What’s worse? These are all people who are working professionals! Truthfully, I’ve lost much respect for many “celebrities” that I once held in high regard by watching them sell their teammates out to stay alive one more week. This isn’t an indictment on Reality TV. It is an indictment on not taking Personal Responsibility For Your Own Actions. You have to own your own shit. If you did it, face it and be a professional about it. Own up to it, fix it quick, and move on with getting your job done.

Everybody makes mistakes, but one of the things that differentiates a professional from an amateur is the ability to own up, apologize appropriately, and make things right.

Acting vs. Reacting
This is another personal core value of mine, and it’s a doozy.

Are you the kind of person who waits? Waits for someone to call, waits until April 15th to file taxes, waits to have the tough conversation, waits to deal with broken gear, waits to put processes and people in place until “I absolutely need to”, waits to demo for a project until it shows up on IMDb, waits, waits, waits, waits, waits?????

If yes, then you’ve got a problem. Mark my words: You are going to have a hard time in the film music business.

Again, a delineation: I’m not talking about “timing”. Appropriate Timing is an art unto itself that I will discuss later this month as we dive deeper into Professionalism. No, I’m referring to “putting things off”. Procrastinating.

I like to do the opposite. I act NOW. If I hear about a project in it’s early stages of pre-production and I want it—I jump on it TODAY. Not tomorrow, not Friday… TODAY. If I learn of a potential scheduling conflict that is headed my way, I handle it this very second. I do not… wait.

I pay estimated quarterly taxes. I don’t wait for April 15th to do all of that work. I pay business expenses at the beginning of the month instead of at the end. I deal with staffing issues when they happen, not after they unfold. I take my team out for regular play dates instead of waiting until they are dragging ass and need a jolt of emergency R&R.

I diagnose computers or take them to the “doctor” at the first sign of trouble rather than waiting for them to go belly-up two days before a deadline.

I initiate conversations with producers and directors and I do not wait for them to seek me out by word of mouth. I make it a point to network, socialize, and mingle. I work to meet and befriend at least one new person in my life every single day.

I return all of my calls and emails once in the morning and once before I go home for the day. I follow up with all of my team members on each project by sending something nice (when appropriate) or telling them in person how much I appreciate them.

All of these things are in an effort to work ahead of schedule. Ultimately, it all becomes important on the day that a big project hits my studio, along with the realization that if these things aren’t already done, they won’t get done for the next 4-6 weeks. At that point, it’s too late—I’m committed. The work now dictates how I can spend my time, and no matter what, I have to maintain focus to meet my project’s deadline. This means that many of these aforementioned tasks must fall by the wayside in order to meet that commitment, and so I must operated in my “downtime” with a bias toward working ahead of schedule.

Most people I have encountered that are only sort of poking around with the idea of making a career out of composing act exactly counter to the way I just described. They toy around with these things. But professionals don’t. And if you want to ascend to the next terrace in your career, you can’t either.

I had an instructor once who used to tell us that the best way to get to the next level in anything in life—sports, music, business, relationships, fitness… whatever—is to “start living and acting on that level”. How true this is.

Where are you headed and what do you need to change in order to get there?

I await your comments below.

And the Oscar goes to….

Michael Giacchino for “UP!”.

Even though Jennifer Lopez and Sam Worthington butchered his name many times during their presentation for “Best Original Score” at the Academy Awards on Sunday night, there was no denying who won the award once Michael Giacchino got up and took the statue in his hands. With a simple speech about how kids who have dreams of entering into the entertainment industry should never listen to those who say it is “a waste of time”, Giacchino accepted his award with grace and respect, and then went and sat back down in his seat for the rest of the show.

With a contentious race in many categories, including Best Original Score, it didn’t take long before I was seeing people on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and Tumblr light into Giacchino, assessing his win as a “fraud”, a “mistake”, a “travesty”, “non-deserving”, and even “political” (Political? WTF? Really?) Since the awards broadcast, I’ve even received several emails from people in our community asking me what I thought of “someone like Giacchino winning the award up against Horner and Hans”.

“Someone like Giacchino?” What does that even mean?

More after the jump….

Over the last 24 hours, the vitriolic criticism of Giacchino’s win is, frankly, astounding — things I’m ashamed to even mention here… so I won’t. Suffice it to say that some of the things I’ve read are some of the most ridiculous arguments against anyone winning any award at any ceremony for anything they’ve ever accomplished. It’s just been plain stupid.

Before I continue, I want to make it clear: I do not know Michael Giacchino. I’ve never met the man. I do know many people on his team, and have worked with people who also have worked with him, but I do not know him personally. I will say that in the years I’ve been working and living in Los Angeles as a film composer, I’ve never heard a sideways word about Giacchino. That aside, however, what cannot be argued is that Giacchino is one of the busiest composers in the business, and in this industry, you don’t get to keep coming to the sleepovers if you continually poop the bed. So I have to wonder what the motivation is to cut this guy down. I don’t get it.

But it doesn’t matter whether I know Mr. Giacchino or not. The things I’ve read over the last twenty-four hours have surprised even this composer, who thought that he’d seen it all and heard it all. To be sure, cutting down others isn’t unheard of in this town, especially considering that a high level of competition is one of the main cords that binds our little community together and makes it so interesting. Competition, as we talked about last month here at SCOREcast, comes with the territory of being in business for one’s self, no matter what the profession.

But who are the people chattering in the dark about Giacchino, only 24 hours after his Oscar victory?

Composers.

Giacchino’s own community of colleagues are the ones doing the cutting. It’s not some Nicolas Chartier-conspiracy that is to blame for this. It’s his own community.

And it extends beyond Michael Giacchino. In fact, here at SCOREcast, we’ve seen all kinds of listeners and readers write in with negative accusations and heated and highly-charged opinions about the alleged detriment of Hans Zimmer’s influence in the community, as well as allegations of him being someone who doesn’t do what he proclaims he does — and I’ve never understood it. Is it jealousy? Envy? Anger? What?

Year after year, month after month, day after day, I hear composers in this industry talk about how “the studios are the enemy, our craft is under-appreciated, our budgets are laughable, and there is no work out there for anyone. But I would propose this, instead:

It’s not the studios’ fault, or the economy, or the projects and budgets shrinking that has led to the composing community being the red-headed step-child of the filmmaking process. It’s the composers. It is our fault. We do it to ourselves.

Is it any wonder that this community is trying to argue the need for a union predicated largely on that fact that undercutting each other for gigs has become a way of life? Is that the fault of the studios? Of course not. So in other words, we need a union to protect us from… us. Nice.

There are many things wrong with the system, but therefore, since the system is run by people, the people need to change before the system will change. Reform happens when people get sick and tired of being sick and tired and mobilize to change themselves and the things they can control. Reform doesn’t happen when people mobilize to change things that are beyond of their control.

So, with that, allow me to speak directly to you:

COMPOSERS
Stop your bitching. You think Hans deserved the award over Giacchino? Marco? Desplat? Horner? Perhaps so. But they didn’t get it. For whatever reason (and I have my own, but again, they don’t matter!) the Academy found them all wanting and deemed Giacchino’s score the best work of 2009. Do you really have nothing better to do than to sit around for 24 hours and make case after case as to why you believe Michael doesn’t deserve this honor? As if you know anything about playing at that level yet? How about a few positive strokes to a fellow colleague for winning something that only five people, out of hundreds of thousands, were in the running for? I mean, I know the Oscars can be political… but really? Giacchino? I never saw any lobbying on his part for the award. Not once. No ads, no commercials. I spend a fair amount of time on the Disney lot. There was nobody standing outside of the music department handing out “UP!” CDs with “For Your Consideration” embossed across them (I know they exist, but you know what I mean!). No giant billboards with Giacchino’s name and likeness sprawled out for us all to see.

C’mon. Examine what it is in you that feels the need to cut someone down every time they accomplish something you do not. This extends to losing gigs to other composers, losing awards to other composers, having the fame and fortune (huh?) of other composers, and having the nice studio that another composer might have. So… you haven’t made it to their level yet. So what. Go write something that is worthy of an accolade. Go orchestrate one of your cues in a manner that is worth us all listening to. Hone your skills. Get better. WRITE BETTER MUSIC and get competitive *that* way. Updating your status on Facebook to reflect your disgust for what someone else has beat you to is not only childish and stupid but also petty and ugly. My SCOREcast cohort Lee Sanders and I compete with each other ALL THE TIME, yet I consider Lee one of my best friends and I cannot imagine him not in my life.

Stop whining about what you are NOT getting and start working toward what you CAN get. Nobody is going to feel bad that you think your music is better than someone else’s and why couldn’t a producer just give you a chance — no one is going to give you a chance until you learn to shut your negative mouth… and take some chances. If you don’t risk yourself a bit, who would ever bother risking themselves for you?

REPRESENTATIVES
Start being genuine. Quit pitting composers against other composers in your same stable (I know you’ll never do this, but we all have always wondered how you can possibly look us in the eye with a straight face after doing so…. so what the hell. I’m putting it out there.)

Bet on us like we bet on you. Work a little harder toward at least making us feel like we are the only client you have. I know some of you do that now, and kudos to those of you who operate in that way — I am one of the lucky clients of someone whom I never have to worry about in that regard. But for others of you, your clients will be the first to tell you that you make them feel small, worthless, insignificant, and unimportant. Stop texting and taking calls while we are trying to talk business with you. Rid yourself of the phrase, “I’m sorry… I have to take this!” when you are in our presence. Whomever it is, I’m sure they can wait 30 minutes until we are done talking. Try and remember the details of things we tell you we are interested in pursuing. Write it down somewhere or something. Buy some Sticky Notes. Get an iPhone.

Focus more on career development than on agency development. Let the success of your clients be the catalyst by which word of mouth champions your brand. You promote us, and we’ll promote you. It’s pretty simple. Of all of the people in this industry, you have the greatest vantage point as to the path a career should go (and is capable of going). Share your reality with us. Wake us up. Guide us. Help us. Direct us. Shape and mold us. We’ll listen — we respect you. If we didn’t, we probably wouldn’t be working with you anyway — it’s not like we can give up hunting down our own gigs just because we have representation. That’s not a slam, it’s just the way this business works. We are a team, and if the whole team hunts, the whole team eats. Teach us how to be better hunters. We want to make you rich.

IN CLOSING…
When I started SCOREcast in 2006, my aim was to bring our community closer together — for us to grow smaller as we grow larger. A little of that has happened and it makes me very happy. But the reality of the situation is that no podcast, website, technology, organization, procedure, or process can really do what needs to be done to make that fully happen. Only the people can. Only we can, as people. Composers and their teams have to start supporting each other and learning how to be positive and encouraging, rather than negative and destructive towards one another.

I am not advocating us turning a blind eye to the very real issues that plague our profession, but rather than instead of shaking our heads and complaining about them, we instead take some action and take an active role in the process of correcting them. It is so easy to sit on the sidelines and “armchair-quarterback” as the game is played on the field by others.

Start being a lightning rod of good in this community. I challenge you to that. We need that from you. Stop posturing on your Facebook pages and your Twitter accounts against those that have worked hard to get where they are. I don’t care what you think of Hans Zimmer. Have you met him? Have you sat and talked with him? Maybe you could learn a lot from someone in his position. Better yet, maybe you could learn something from him as a person. As a human being. Forget his music. What kind of wisdom could he impart to you as someone who has worked himself to the top of the heap and doesn’t look to be going anywhere soon? Michael Giacchino, in the grand scheme of things, is a relative newcomer to the game. He is one of the first of the “new generation” of film composers to start winning Academy Awards. He’s only a few years older than I am. That’s inspiring to me — it affirms that this generation’s time is now. We are on the right track, making great choices, and moving in the right direction.

Use these guys as inspiration instead of vilifying them and crucifying them with your opinions. They are working hard at their craft and working towards the same goals that you are. Believe me. They’ve been where you are and they’ve seen a way to rise to the next level. Don’t buy into the old story that it’s “all about luck”. It’s not. It’s about a lot of things — relationships, hard work, persistence, tutelage, experience, and making mistakes… just to name a few.

COMMENTS are open below. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this position, positive or negative…. I don’t mind changing your mind in front of everyone here.

________________________________________

SCOREcast founder DEANE OGDEN is an award-winning composer who has written the music to over twenty feature films including THE SENSEI, DREAMS ON SPEC, IN THE EYES OF A KILLER, and THE WAY HOME. Also very active in music for television, Deane wrote the orchestral themes for Michael Phelps’ record-breaking gold medal run during the 2008 OLYMPIC GAMES, which was the most-viewed event in American television history. Deane is a top-call session drummer, and has recorded and performed with artists like TINA TURNER, CHRIS CORNELL, SEAL, and RIHANNA. You can find his SCOREcast bio (and links to his other sites) here.

I cherish “verbal economy”. Getting to the bottom of something — to the core level of it — while utilizing the smallest amount of verbiage possible is something that I am profoundly fascinated with. It drives me crazy when someone is trying to make a point, and instead of stating the main crux of their position, they wax on with twenty minutes of preamble.

So, I’ll try my damnedest to make this intro quick and to the point.

I am supposed to talk to you today about “competition”, but I don’t want to, so I’m not going to. Instead, let’s talk about what the very core of the word “competition” boils down to: winning and losing. And there’s a lot to talk about.

Here’s the deal: Right this very second, as you sit wherever you are and read this post, one of two things is taking place in your life. You are either winning the game of being a successful working film composer, or you are losing it. It really IS that simple.

It is easy to lose at this gig. It doesn’t take much. If you are haughty enough to think you can simply make it on talent alone, you are losing already. Mark my words: Your disciplines, not your ability to put dots on a page, will be what determine whether you win or lose in this crowded film composing landscape. If you have the wherewithal to really dig into what makes a winner and what it takes to win consistently… you are well on your way to making a serious run at this thing.

If you know me personally or have spent any amount of time reading what I write here at SCO, you already know that I personally do not subscribe much to the “luck” speech you hear from most successful film composers. Sure, fortune plays a part, but I rather believe that it is a steady stream of hard-carved winning disciplines that moves a person closer to the place where fortune can smile upon them. To me, winning is not about being the best at the moment. Winning is about being the best over time.

Think about it this way: NBA legend Michael Jordan is a winner. But to Jordan, winning is clearly a life choice. Much like putting on his pants everyday or taking a shower. You just do it, but you do it through a combined effort of several “habits” that work together to birth the perfect long-term win. Over time, we’ve all come to view Michael Jordan as someone who just simply does not lose easily. And occasionally when he does lose, he goes back to basics and gets serious about those fundamental habits that will propel him toward his next victory.

With that said, let me share several disciplines that I consistently examine and re-examine of myself in order to insure that I am winning, and not losing, at this incredibly competitive game we call “Composing for Film and Television”.

DISCIPLINE #1: PURPOSE
What is it that you like doing? If you don’t like it, get out of it, because you’ll be lousy at it. You don’t have to stay with a job for the rest of your life, because if you don’t like it you’ll never be successful in it. — Lee Iacocca

The day that you even have a fleeting thought that you aren’t having fun composing anymore is the day it’s time to get out.

For several of us, composing for film and TV is non-negotiable. We HAVE to do it. It is, as they say, in our blood. I am a musician at heart, but I do not get the sense of fulfillment by playing drums, piano, or violin the way that I do when I write music to picture. There is nothing that makes me feel quite like the act of writing score does. It is not something I can explain; it is not something I can define. It simply “is so”.

You might be passionate about other things in life that bring you joy in a way that scoring films cannot. If so, please take my word for it: You need to quit pursuing film music as a possible career choice. Game over. You’ve lost already. I don’t say this out of anything other than the fact that everyone should be happy and fulfilled in life, and believe me, doing something you are not 1000% charged up about won’t ever bring you that joy and fulfillment you are looking for. In fact it will create the opposite, with a little “wasted time” added in for good measure.

It is with this kind of supreme confidence that I start every day of my life. I was MEANT FOR THIS. There is nothing else BUT this. No matter how hard it gets, how crowded the market gets, how poor the economy gets, how miserable the industry becomes… no matter. I am here, I am a film composer… I WILL achieve and I WILL be victorious. I have no “Plan B”. I have no safety net. I have no choice. THIS is my career purpose.

Another part of this has to do with the strength of your “drive”. I know a person who wants to break into the entertainment industry, but at every opportunity, at every turn, he excuses himself from meeting socially with directors, producers, and executives, always with the reason of being “too tired from work”. Guess what? That’s a losing mentality, and it’s guys like me who cannot wait for people like him to say things like that so that I can come in, full of purpose, ideas, and solutions, and save the day.

The bottom line is you either mean to be here, or you don’t. There is no middle ground. There can’t be. It’s too competitive. There are winners and losers in this, and winners are here out of necessity. Losers are here temporarily.

DISCIPLINE #2: ORIGINALITY
I am not looking like Armani today and somebody else tomorrow. I look like Ralph Lauren. And my goal is to constantly move in fashion and move in style without giving up what I am. — Ralph Lauren

Nobody is looking for a clone of a new fad. They might think that will work, but if a person is presented with two choices, one being a carbon copy of the latest and greatest and the second a fresh, powerful, revolutionary idea, they will always choose the latter. This is a tested principle that has held true throughout the history of the world.

People desire to be first.

This goes for studio executives, also. I know you’ve heard the horror stories of composers being “forced” to rewrite the temp. But consider the possibility of a studio exec, under pressure from stockholders to keep things riding high, realizing half way through the scoring dates that their composer simply is not in the creative space to deliver a fresh idea like they hoped he would. Imagine the internal feeling of compromise that must be reached for a studio boss to come to the place of allowing that composer, because of basic financial and schedule economics, to just do what they “know will work”, and call it good.

This is NOT the fault of the studio executive. Sorry. You don’t get off that easy. No. This is the fault of the composer. It is OUR job to bring a fresh musical voice to every production. It is OUR job to create something, through the careful balance of tradition and forethought, that will support the picture in way that has never been heard before.

When you shortcut your creativity in the interest of time, finances, or for any other reason, you lose.
DISCIPLINE #3: ORGANIZATION
The object of this competition is not to be mean to the losers but to find a winner. The process makes you mean because you get frustrated. Kids turn up unrehearsed, wearing the wrong clothes, singing out of tune and you can either say, “Good job” and patronize them or tell them the truth, and sometimes the truth is perceived as mean. — Simon Cowell

Our industry is complex. As a film composer, the deck is already stacked against you from the moment your feet hit your bedroom floor everyday. Why then, would you ever poke the bear by not doing things that are elementary to the success of any business venture? I’m talking about things like not having materials ready; not remembering names; not researching meeting participants, etc.

All of these things are things that I have nailed down when I go into a meeting. I operate under the assumption that I’m up against the most rehearsed, prepared, organized person out there. THAT “superhuman” is my #1 threat. I will know every name associated with the project, every movie that each producer has worked on, each composer that the director has used before, the styles of the films that these people have completed in the past, and what kinds of stories this team likes to tell. Am I surprised every so often with something I didn’t anticipate? Of course. But I am so prepared that you’d never know it.

Imagine trying to beat The Terminator in a fist fight. No matter what you do, you are screwed, because through repetition and carefully calculated methodology, he is simply engineered to be better, stronger, and able to take more abuse than you ever could.

That is who you are up against. I hope you are ready.

DISCIPLINE #4: DECISIVENESS
Remember, a real decision is measured by the fact that you’ve taken new action. If there’s no action, you haven’t truly decided. — Anthony Robbins

If SCOREcast’s Lee Sanders has said it once, he’s said it a million times: We are hired for our opinions. And he’s right. Nobody cares about your music if you, as the composer, do not have a statement about why you did it that way. Sitting quietly in the corner, afraid to utter a word or join in the conversation is a career killer, and you really need to get over it.

In this town, people who are decision makers for THEIR companies have no time or tolerance for whiny little kiss-asses who are afraid to make a move one way or another for fear of screwing up. Even if it’s the wrong one, people would rather you just move at all.

I have zero trouble making large, key, career decisions. In fact, I have an easier time making a decision that will effect a multi-million dollar budget than I do deciding what shirt I am going to wear each morning. Your directors and producers are going to be counting on your ability to make key decisions under pressure. Work now to develop the habit of deciding. Do not allow the paranoia of making a mistake keep you from making decisions.

Also, make decisions quickly. Not hastily, but quickly. There is a difference. I don’t rush decisions — I think things through completely. Sometimes you have to “hurry up” and decide, but usually, there is zero need to do that. In fact, in most cases, the need for a rushed decision is merely poor planning on someone else’s part cloaked in urgency. Don’t fall prey to that. Car salesmen hate me with a passion because I don’t buy into their “the sky is falling unless you buy today” rhetoric. At the same time, I never over-analyze anything to the point of indecision. Operating like that cripples your ability to complete tasks. Being afraid of making the wrong decision can cripple your ability to be a leader in your field.

Which brings me to my next point…

DISCIPLINE #5: LEADERSHIP
Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish. — Sam Walton

If you still think this is a solo career, you have been living in a very dark cave and it’s time to move. If there ever was an example of a career where strong leadership skills are becoming more and more crucial, it is that of the film and television composer.

However, it has always been taught that leadership is only an attribute of those who are at the top of the power pyramid. I would argue, instead, that a more modern paradigm of leadership could be a phenomenon that is so far-reaching that it also brings along those who are in higher positions of power than that of whom is doing the leading. I’ve been involved in countless organizations where the person who was elected the leader is obviously not the person who is in charge. In fact, sometimes, it is hard to know who to follow because on one side of the room you have the person who is the “designated” leader, but over here you have someone else whom everyone seems to want to follow. And of course, the person everyone is following IS the true leader.

I say all of this to say that if your leadership skills are strong, it is possible to lead in such a manner that those who are in positions of power way out of your paygrade will follow you also. Good leadership is a party people want to attend. It got our current President elected, and it is the reason why Donald Trump is where he is today. You might not agree with Obama’s politics, and you might think Trump needs to “fire” his hairdresser, but you cannot deny either man’s ability to get people charged up about something, so much so that they execute at an optimum level.

Leadership contains several key disciplines in and of itself. One of those disciplines is the ability to share credit, which is where I believe most composers start losing integrity. A lot of composers don’t like to share. And why should they? It’s hard out here for a pimp! We work long hours, for mediocre pay, with no guarantee of future gainful employment. We should get credit for every ounce of sweat equity that goes into our music, right?

But, we also know (and have discussed earlier) that film music has become a team sport, of sorts. No longer, except in the rare indie occurrence, does there still exist the film schedule that allows one enough time to go it alone. There are no Lone Rangers in film scoring. In all likeliness, you’ll have a team of people behind you that are pulling their weight in an effort that you might actually make that deadline on time and under budget. That team is brilliant, and more times than not, they’ll save your proverbial ass. You owe them more than just a paycheck. You owe them gratitude, you owe them public recognition for a job well done. Ultimately, you owe them a better gig somewhere else when the time is right.

Being a leader is about empowering others for THEIR sake, not yours. It is a selfless way of life. It is a giving, not a taking. Consequently, you may feel you are not in a place to lead just yet. I disagree. Leading isn’t circumstantial. It is elective. You either are leading, or you are following. Again, make up your mind which way you want to go, and go there. Just don’t expect people to follow you anywhere if you aren’t leading them somewhere.

Leadership is something that you might have to learn as time goes by. Some people are born with inherent leadership qualities, while others become time-tested leaders over a long period of years. Whatever the case, leadership always stars with one thing: Superior attitude.

DISCIPLINE #6: ATTITUDE
It is your attitude, not your aptitude, that determines your altitude. — Zig Ziglar

Your attitude is probably the most important distinguishing weapon in your competitive arsenal. It is the indicator by which you either decide to keep circling the track, or pull over for a pit stop of reassessment. I don’t want to give you the impression that I am some Superman who never gets discouraged and always has a smile on my face. That isn’t the case. Like everyone, I have my times in the desert and I go to THAT place of feeling like nothing is going right. But… it doesn’t last long.

My closest friends have heard me say “I took a dark day, but I’m back now!”, meaning that I allowed a single day to cry over my misfortunes, but keeping Discipline #1 in mind —  this is what I do, no matter what — it is a new day and I’m ready to climb back up on the horse again.

You cannot let obstacles and the trials of the world keep you down for more than a few hours. Yes — take time to realize the situation and personalize whatever lesson you need to learn out of it, but then… move on. In this particular case, all of the familiar cliches apply: There’s no use crying over spilled milk; It’s all water under the bridge; What done is done… blah, blah, blah.

When you get knocked down, catch your breath, sleep on it, wake up, and start kicking ass again. And hey, if you don’t know where to start, find the nearest ass and start kicking! It’s not rocket science. There is always something to do. Better yet, if you are out of it from a knock down, write some music. If you are truly pursuing this career (there we are back to that Discipline #1 again!), then there is no better way to get back into a solid routine then to write.

It is only when you give permission to outside influences to hinder your goals that you begin to believe that you are not going to be able to continue. It is all about what you give way to. Part of me maintaining a winning attitude is surrounding myself with others winners. Aside from family, I have two sets of people in my life: Friends and pals. Pals are people that I know, maybe I see them from time to time around town at functions, in social situations.

Friends, though… those are the people in my inner circle. The people that I believe in and they believe in me. The Friends circle is a limited crew – Lee Sanders is one of those people. So is my manager and SCO’s David Fluhr. All of them winners. People who are making things happen and do not allow their lives to fall as it might. I’ve been careful to cultivate this group and to not allow those that do not belong into the fold. And let me be clear — it’s not that I don’t spend time with people outside of that circle — I do. But I also have a select group of people that I consider my “Board of Directors” — the people that I know I could trust with my life — and they are the ones that I spend the majority of my time with. In these people, I see traits and characteristics that I long to improve upon in my own life, and by watching and learning from them, I can gain insights into how I might go about that.

Using these folks’ attitudes and opinions toward my own tough issues is what helps me keep my attitude in check. All of these people also strive to keep their attitudes positive, and believe me…. misery loves company! If you surround yourself with other positive attitudes, yours will stay high for longer periods of time, too.

DISCIPLINE #7: ADAPTABILITY
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. — Charles Darwin

I’ve officially grown tired of hearing about “how much better things were thirty years ago”.

Who cares? I couldn’t tell ya. But I can and will tell you who doesn’t give a damn: Directors and producers. You know… the ones who sign the checks!

As composers, by now we are all very aware of how easy it has become for almost anybody to acquire some gear and create a film score that is good enough by today’s standards. All it takes is a little bit of musical knowledge, a sliver of filmic understanding, a hard drive of loops, and a laptop, and you can basically fashion one together. It might not be great and it might not win any awards, but it will work in a lot of the stuff that’s going to DVD today.

That, my friends, is the state of our industry. There is nothing to be done that will change that. In fact, it will get worse with time. As with all things in a technological field (which, by the way, film music has fallen under ever since the very first day that someone decided to mechanically sync it to film), the process by which film music is created will continue to be dumbed down, based on the understanding of traditional practices.

I believe it is important to stop here and note that I didn’t say that “film music” will be dumbed down. Only the manner by which we create it.

This means that unless you are willing to embrace where film music creation might be headed, you are going to experience a slow and irrelevant extinction, just like celluloid and magnetic tape is experiencing right now. It is those who embrace the future of film music creation that will ultimately make it through to the next round of film music success. You can long for the old “Golden Days” of film scoring all you want, but they are NEVER coming back. It doesn’t matter what we do — stronger education, less composers in the field, better rates, smarter royalty collection systems — none of these things will ever stop the inevitable force of progress that essentially is eroding the way this gig used to get done.

You need to decide right here and now if you are going to be a forward-thinker… or a nostalgic crybaby. One will get you to the next level and one won’t. If you take a look at most people who live winning lives, you’ll notice that they embrace change, in all parts of life. It doesn’t matter if it is at home, work, the gym, the finances, the power structure, government… whatever. The point is that things are always in constant flux… if you don’t flex with them, you will eventually become obsolete and be left behind.

Composers are no different. For us, all it takes is a look around at the composers who were able to make the leap from analog to digital. There are a number of composers who were simply unable or unwilling to adapt to the newer methods of digital recording from about 1984 to 1993, and consequently, they are either no longer scoring the modern motion picture or their creative output over the last decade has significantly tapered as a result.

If you are a “wisher”, figure out why. And then stop it. You cannot maneuver forward while constantly looking backward. Glance toward the past every now and again to avoid repeating mistakes, but keep your eyes trained on the road ahead. Technology, techniques, methods, and the competition will always move forward — with or without you. The choice is yours.

DISCIPLINE #8: LEGACY
If your actions create a legacy that inspires others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, then, you are an excellent leader. — Dolly Parton

My former assistant, SCO’s Jai Meghan, has worked with some of the best composers in Hollywood. When he came to me in 2007, the first thing I asked him was “Why in the hell are you here?” He had been at Zimmer’s, worked with Graeme Revell and Harry Gregson-Williams, and learned from some of the best in this business. I couldn’t understand how he ended up on my door from all of those other places of employment. As we worked together over the two years that followed, I came to realize that although Jai had learned a lot from those guys, for him, that time was over. Now he wanted to know how Deane Ogden did it. And while I don’t believe I wield any magic wand for doing this gig, there definitely IS a method to my madness. And the method is all mine.

When I leave this planet, I want to be remembered only as a man who left film music better than I found it. If I can improve upon the craft, even in the slightest, I’ll be satisfied. I don’t mean that I’ll invent some undiscovered mode or unlock a never before heard scale or progression, but I simply mean that I want to be a composer who utilized my knowledge of film and music in a way never before imagined by anyone else.

This might be controversial to say, but I’ve never thought of the Beatles as a group that invented anything new, rather than revolutionizing something that had been around awhile. Elvis Presley didn’t come up with anything unheard of, he simply polished it up and bundled it in a form that was fresh and relevant for a generation that craved it’s own musical identity.

That’s all we can do as film composers. The greats of our craft that have gone before us have done all of the magic that can ever be done with a baton. It is now up to us — the new generation — to pick up where they left off and conceive of fresh and unexplored approaches to the traditional devices of film music.

To me, these things are what REAL competition is all about. To me, competing isn’t about who’s better or who gets the gig. It’s about what you do with the gig once you DO get it. What do you print to disk when all is said and done.

Are you a strong decision maker? Are you able to make changes on the fly? Are you a hungrier entrepreneur? Are you an empowering leader?

These are the things that will separate you from the pack. These practices will be the ones that shape your “competitive spirit” in the fight for gigs.

Stack us all up against each other, and we are pretty much musically interchangeable.

But stack us up in these areas of competitive discipline, and one of us will ultimately come out the victor.

Who’s it gonna be? Let the REAL competition begin!

_____________

SCOREcast founder DEANE OGDEN is an award-winning composer who has written the music to over twenty feature films including THE SENSEI, DREAMS ON SPEC, IN THE EYES OF A KILLER, and THE WAY HOME. Also very active in music for television, Deane wrote the orchestral themes for Michael Phelps’ record-breaking gold medal run during the 2008 OLYMPIC GAMES, which was the most-viewed event in American television history. Deane is a top-call session drummer, and has recorded and performed with artists like TINA TURNER, CHRIS CORNELL, SEAL, and RIHANNA. You can find his SCOREcast bio (and links to his other sites) here.

I have dinner every couple of months with a great group of working television composers. Part strategic network, part support group, our times together are always amazing and I’ve never not come away with either some juicy info on a cool new compositional technique or a great new way to implement some sort of hardware or software tool. Composers often get pegged for some of our antisocial behavior, but when these 20 or so composers get together, the discussion and conversation flow can be endless, and these social gatherings often drag into the wee hours of the next morning.

At the latest of these dinners this last weekend, I became engaged in a conversation about this month’s topic of “Getting the Gig”. It seems several of my composer pals are also heavy-duty SCOREcast readers and have been chomping at the bit to take me to task on some of our opined viewpoints on the subject.

As I listened intently to their complaints about the 1) over-saturated composing market, and 2) the downward spiral of the quality of film music today, I realized something about our theme of the month; Something that, quite possibly, could be a flaw in how we presented it this month; Something I never thought about, oddly, until I was sitting there listening to my composer friends struggle through what should have been a simple conversation about a very simple subject.

I realized this:

The “gigs” don’t exist.

Now, stay with me here… because, as usual, I don’t mean that in the way that everyone else likes to mean it lately. I’m still an optimist. I don’t believe that others can control my destiny, and I do not, for a single minute, believe that the world or the universe dictates what you are capable of with your skill set, your intellect, and your willingness to dig in hard and achieve. I refuse the popular notion that our industry — our craft and profession — is going to hell-in-a-handbasket, the sky is falling, and the world as we know it is coming to an end. (And dammit if Hans Zimmer and his merry band of monkeys aren’t to blame!)

So, with that… here is what I mean…

As composers, we are always searching for our next film gig. I know in my own career I get nervous as hell when I’m wrapping up a show and I don’t have the next one lined up and ready to jump right into. For me, there is no greater stress than wondering where the next thing is going to come from, and my preference is always to have “one to show and one to go”, as they say.

But honestly, “gigs”, as we’ve all come to know them, do not exist anymore.

Now, there are “gigs” as in webisodes, short films, student thesis projects, commercials, or industrials…. those types of gigs. Some of them are healthy to take on and some of them are almost a “pay-to-play” situation, in which you’ll have to decide on your own if they are healthy for you or not. But, with the rise of technology in film scoring, yes… it is easy for just about anybody to edit together a great score from loops, samples, and other digital assets that have helped to shape industry trends over the last ten years.

Any of us, if we are being honest at all, have to understand that “looped music” has become as much an aesthetic as custom score has always become over the last hundred years. Whether we like it or not, there is a certain group of filmmakers who are “just fine” with a score edited together from loops and samples, and they will take it for some or no money (if we are being real) in trade for the promise of backend money (if we are feeling lucky). That last sentence contained a lot of “ifs”, didn’t it?

“Gigs” — if we still define them as “jobs where we get to compose music the old fashioned way, and then get to realize that music through the recording of live instrumentation” — are a very rare gift only given when a certain type of filmmaker recognizes the value that such a process lends to the overall quality of their project.

Therefore, I want to inject a new phrase into the vernacular — something that is both true and accurate, and alive and well in our craft, yet, also overlooked and maybe undervalued.

The gigs don’t exist. But the people do.

There are people out there who value the hell out of a finely written and recorded original score — people that were brought up, much like you and I were, to listen for the emotions and nuances that well-crafted musical material can bring to the cinematic experience.

Instead of looking for gigs, we need to be looking for those people. We need to stop looking for gigs as “potential jobs”, and start treating people as “potential partners”.

People, in ANY arena in life, are what matter. I’ve been lucky in my career to make lifelong friends out of most of my clients. In fact, I can think of only one person that I’ve worked for that I don’t speak to regularly either through emails or by telephone — only one director that I don’t see socially at least once a year.

That is because “gigs”, in the way that we all like to think of them, are essentially worthless. But relationships… Ahhhh! They are absolutely worth every minute you spend cultivating them.

Ask Williams where he thinks he would be without Spielberg. Ottman without Singer. Burwell without Coens. Zimmer without Bruckheimer.

Relationships are key, and they should not be regarded as casual, disposable assets — especially in favor of singular “gigs”. Gigs are static events: they happen, and then they are over. But people… people are perpetual organisms, and in our case, organisms of the creative kind. What do we know of creativity? We know, because of our own composer relationship with it, that it never rests. It is a an evolving, continuously germinating, living, breathing animal that never rests and is never satisfied. People, then, are essentially a “fountain of youth” for creative flow and opportunity, whereas “gigs” are simply gotten… and subsequently, forgotten.

Before I start sounding too much like Jerry Maguire, let me present a qualifier for what I am suggesting: Should you adopt this philosophy that I am proposing, you have to do it with a genuine heart. You cannot “love people” because you “love what they might give you”. Pardon the expression, but that is a bullshit way to be. That is “false” in every sense, cheap in every way, and deceit at it’s ugliest manifestation. We’ve all experienced the feeling of only being valued because of what we can provide the other person. It is a gross feeling, and one that leaves you used and abused on a number of levels. No. It as to come from a genuine place.

Here’s the thing: If you cannot it within yourself to value those you desire to work with as people and not as objects that can provide you with sustenance, you are in the wrong place and you will never be truly successful. Mark my words. You will never attain a place of respect and honor in this small community we all work in and you will never become the composer you want to be, at the level you want to be composing at. Karma, as it is said, is a beotch!

There will be those who read this and say that, “I don’t have to like everyone I work with.” That’s right, you don’t. Even I don’t like everyone I’ve ever worked with, either. But I still value them as people who knew what they wanted, when they wanted it, and trusted ME to deliver it to them. That is a big responsibility and one that can never be taken as lightly as just saying, “Yeah… that was a pretty good gig.”

Think about the gigs you’ve enjoyed the most in your career. Were they fun because the music was easy but the people were jerks? Or were they fun because the people were a blast and the challenge was difficult? I’m betting on the latter.

Forget “gigs”. Gigs are going to be great, and gigs are going to suck. Gigs will come, and gigs will go. Gigs will work out, and entire scores will be thrown out. Such is the terrain of the composing journey. It is what it is.

The thing you DO have control over is how you seek out and treat the people that you will work with. Sometimes… and I’ve said this before… but sometimes people will place more value on how good of a hang you are than they will how great your music is. In fact, that happens a lot in this game. Learn to understand and “be” with that, rather than “being” with the thought that you “just need a good film to write for”.

What we all really need is strong cinematic partners that have the same goals and aspirations as we do. Believe me, they are out there. I have several. I love them all. I cherish them first as people, secondly as friends, thirdly as collaborators.

The gigs really don’t exist. But the people really do.

_____________
SCOREcast founder DEANE OGDEN is an award-winning composer who has written the music to over twenty feature films including THE SENSEI, DREAMS ON SPEC, IN THE EYES OF A KILLER, and THE WAY HOME. Also very active in music for television, Deane wrote the orchestral themes for Michael Phelps’ record-breaking gold medal run during the 2008 OLYMPIC GAMES, which was the most-viewed event in American television history. Deane is a top-call session drummer, and has recorded and performed with artists like TINA TURNER, CHRIS CORNELL, SEAL, and RIHANNA. You can find his SCOREcast bio (and links to his other sites) here.

Tell me if this scenario sounds familiar to you.

A filmmaker approaches you about a gig, and really wants you for the job. In your excitement, you talk through the particulars and get all of the information that you can… except for the money part. The conversation continues until, finally, there is nothing left to talk about EXCEPT for the money part, and now you are in that awkward position of doing the asking… since nobody is freely offering.

We’ve all heard the old saying in our profession, usually in the context of speaking to someone about a possible project: “Fast, cheap, or good. Pick two!”

To be honest, I’m not sure where this adage came from. The first time I remember hearing it was in high school when someone wanted to hire a friend of mine to paint their house. After they haggled back and forth for what seemed like 45 minutes, my buddy finally said, “Listen man! You can’t have everything when you don’t have any money. Fast, cheap, or good… you can only have two!”

When I was starting out on the road to composing for film, I quickly realized the value of that statement. It seemed every time I turned around, my employers wanted all THREE. Their schedule was short, their money was tight, and their expectations were high. As it turns out, “Fast, Cheap, AND Good” is an impossible impossible standard to meet. So, picking two is very important. Over the years, the philosophy behind this ideal has served me well. I’ve used it too many times to count in order to help preserve my margins and stay competitive as a composer. It has taken some time, but I’ve had to really train myself to not be afraid of the money conversation with a producer, although I try to leave such dealings to my manager as often as I can.

However, there is a time and a place for everything, and what I’m about to say might be viewed as controversial, but I believe it needs to be discussed:

Not every composer is worth paying.

What I mean by this is that a lot of people I know who are just getting started get going with the wrong idea… That simply because they have chosen composing for film and TV as a career choice, a producer should be paying them a certain rate based on the baseline value of a minute of music. Not true at all.

I’ll illustrate what I mean with a personal story.
I know a fellow who is an incredible musician and wants to be a film composer. He is a gifted pianist and has more degrees on his wall than I would know what to do with. A while back, a gig that I was working on required me bringing in some help to finish up some source material at the last minute. I called this guy to see if he would be interested in jumping onboard. The production, although not gigantic, was sizable enough that I had about $2,500 left over to spend on source music. All I needed was three minutes of techno music to use for scenes set at a rave, and licensing a few tracks wouldn’t do the job — the music had to written for the scene. My friend, who was really hustling to find some projects to get him started, was the perfect candidate for this and it would, I thought to myself, afford him a few immediate perks — a strong film credit, some quick cash, and a stepping stone into some larger projects. For someone who’d never done anything, it was the perfect opportunity. Honestly, it would have been a walk in the park for anybody.

As I approached him with the plan and laid out what I needed for the gig, I told him what the budget was. His response? “I don’t get out of bed for less than $5,000.”

After I wiped the shock off my face, I responded. “With all due respect, pal, you have never scored a single frame. What do you mean you “don’t get out of bed for less than $5,000″? Nobody’s ever asked you to GET OUT OF BED, PERIOD!”

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen a composer price themselves out of the game. You see, it’s not that this guy wasn’t able to give me music that sounded like $5,000 music. He was. His talent wasn’t the issue. His worth was the issue. The fact of the matter is that he wasn’t worth $5,000. His resume wasn’t a 5k resume. Hell… it wasn’t even a 2.5k resume — he’d never done anything! He had nothing under his belt, no prior portfolio of work by which to show me he had worth as a composer, and therefore no guarantee, based on track record, that he could do the job that someone who was truly worth $5,000 could.

In short, his worth didn’t line up with his wishes.

It is a hard truth, but you have to be a realist about where you are at in your career vs. where you want to be with it. They aren’t the same, and your perceived value as a marketable composer in the community will reflect the former, not the latter. Getting the gig is all about timing, reputation, and perceived value. It really has little to do with talent. You might not even be a great composer, but for whatever reason you have done some projects and have proven that you can get the job done. Therefore, your perceived value is higher than the guy who hasn’t.

You have to work your way up. I face it constantly at the level that I am at. I’m light years from where I was when I first started in the gig, but I’m also light years from where I want to be. While I’ll never be comfortable or content with where I am in my career, I am aware of what level I am perceived at by most producers and am working to get myself to the next terrace. Based on that rational, I don’t expect to be handed Star Wars: Episode 7 tomorrow, but I’ll treat my current gig as equal to that opportunity and knock the ever-loving hell out of it!

So… Fast, Cheap, or Good? They say to pick “two”. But I say… pick GOOD. You really might be as great as you think you are, yet you are underpaid. It’s a common tale. But your perceived value as a composer is what is keeping you from the next level, NOT the economy of film music. No excuses.

Too many composers use the economy of film music as a reason to write poorly. In fact, I personally believe that some of the confusion surrounding this proposed composers’ union in LA is born of that same attitude. Far too many composers don’t understand where they stand in the food chain (or don’t want to understand), and they think that having a union is going to help them magically transcend their perceived value. It won’t. Please hear me… I’m NOT saying that the union is a bad idea. Not at all, in fact. What I’m saying is that the idea that a union will help you get more gigs as a mediocre composer is just plain silly. You’ll simply be a composer who’s not very good in a union with composers that are. At that point, it just sucks to be you.

What’s the bottom line? Make everything you do the best you’ve done. That is the way to the top. There are no shortcuts, there are no magic spells, there are no perfect answers. The only thing you have on your side is your word, your talent, and your perceived value in the marketplace. You have absolute power over all three of those things, but the third one will take the most work. Yes, your perceived value can be bolstered by you holding hard and fast to the baseline value of your music, but don’t overestimate or naively inflate that number.

If your perceived value is “$0″ (you’ve never worked a paying gig), then you should be taking a look at every gig and working every angle. That is the minimum requirement, anymore, to getting started it in this gig. You do not have the time or luxury for delusions of grandeur. You can’t be choosy. You need to work and you need to work now.

Know where you are. Accept it, come to terms with it, do your best, and push hard for the next terrace. You never know.

Oh, and by the way… Whatever happened with my little $2,500 source music debacle? I used a friend of a friend for the gig who was excited to just be working on something that was going to be seen. We worked great together. So great in fact… that he now composes with me on a show for primetime television.

He just bought a house in Hancock Park.

You never know.

It’s no secret that 2009 was a slow year for a ton of people. Coming off the slump that the world economy has been in for the last two years, for many facets of the entertainment biz, things couldn’t get much worse. As we’ve wrapped up this last year, I have heard numerous sighs of relief, seen many puffed up cheeks of exhaustion, and felt the overwhelming dark cloud of “what now?” on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. Generally, it seems that most of us are perfectly happy to blow a kiss goodbye to the last decade and get on with this new one that, just like that, is suddenly upon us.

As we focus on this new year, and with that, the new topic here at SCO of “Getting the Gig”, I’d like to encourage you and your business by suggesting something to you that you may not appreciate. You know — one of those slightly annoying Ogden diatribes that gets under your skin, pisses you off, and just generally makes you angry that I even decided to post on SCO today to begin with. Just think of me as the one guy in your corner who won’t always tell you what you want to hear. I’ll leave that to the 1.1 million other people in Hollywood!

Someone who was a huge influence in my life was the late great Michael Kamen. I was fortunate to study under Michael for a very short time before he passed, and I learned a lot from him about this gig and how to sustain a career in it. I also learned about the importance of an encouraging word and a helpful heart – two things that Michael believed in and practiced daily.

One of Michael’s favorite things to say to any of us students was always “There’s no crying in film scoring!” This, of course, was his paraphrase of a famous line from the Penny Marshall film A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN, when Tom Hanks’ Jimmy Dugan proclaims to a sobbing female infielder, “There’s no crying in baseball!”

Michael Kamen was right. There, in fact, *is* no crying in film scoring. If you are upset about the way that your career is going, change it. Don’t pout, blame, whine, accuse, or assign the reasons for your failures to anyone or anything but yourself. You can’t. You own them all. They are yours, whether you like it or not. The trick to this gig (or any gig, for that matter) is when you get knocked off the horse, dust your ass off and get back up on it again. Keep moving ahead. Keep writing music. Don’t stop writing for a single second.

When you are not writing film music, you are not being a film composer. You are being… whatever it is that you are doing other than writing. An office assistant, , a gofer, a professional lunch eater, whatever. But you aren’t being a film composer. So stop that. If this last year felt slow and you are afraid of another slow year, get busy and make some calls. Go to some parties. Connect with some writers or directors or gaffers or location scouts or costume designers. Find out what they are working on, and find an “in”. Schedule a meeting with the principals. DO something.

2010 is not going to be the “Year of the Whiner”. It is going to be the year in which those who have their heads in the game and get their asses moving are going to be the ones getting the gigs. It’s all about “hustle”; it’s all about desire; it’s all about action. What are YOU willing to do to get on your next show? Are you willing to demo five times for FREE? You might have to. In fact, you’ll probably have to. Are you willing to fork out that extra grand you really don’t have right now so that you can have a decent string library to mock-up cues with? Better yet: Are you willing to spend the $10,000 it would take to hire an LA string section to touch up those demo cues you wrote in November?

What will you “risk” in order to “achieve” this year? What will you not do this year that you did too much of last year? What will you do more of in 2010 that you should have done more of in ’09? Time to take inventory.

Yes. Take a good, hard, honest look at how you ran your business in 2009 and ask yourself the tough questions. Were you a hustler last year, or did you rely on others to pick up the phone and call you? Did you invest in yourself at all (via gear, promotion, networking, etc.), or is the “awareness needle” at about the same hash-mark that it was this time last year for you in the film production community?

Last thing: Have you already started this new year… this new DECADE… with a negative attitude? It’s a tired adage, but it’s a true one: Attitude is everything. Maybe you should be being thankful that you are still in the game at all! This is a tough business and a difficult career choice. I’ve said it before: If you are great at something else besides scoring films, please… for the love of all that’s holy… DO THAT! This gig is not easy. I said all that to say that if you are still here after a year of trying, kudos to you. Seriously. Most people are long gone by now. You should be proud of yourself and excited to kick 2010’s ass. That’s no small feat.

We could all learn from Michael Kamen’s feelings about whining and crying in this gig. Perhaps his sentiment can be summed up by an exhortation from a character in one of his most popular films. After Robin of Locksley launches into his warrior companion Azeem for choosing to meditate instead of help his new friend defend himself from a group of menacing marauders, Azeem observes, “You whine like a mule. You are still alive!”

Be thankful, be humble, be happy. You’ll be a better composer for it. The best way to “get the gig” is to first show up. The second best way is to show up with an infectiously positive attitude.

Start this new decade off right… and get one.

Editor’s Note: In the spirit of December’s theme (Gear and Software), we asked our contributors to weigh in with their Top 3 gear finds and why they like them, and we are bringing them to you in a series that we are calling “My Perfect 3″. Here are the three that Deane Ogden chose, and a short rundown on why he picked them.

I have enjoyed reading everyone’s Top 3 gear picks so much that I almost forgot to submit my own! It’s interesting to read what people like and what they do not like, and I have been pleasantly surprised to discover that, when you read between the challenge and response codes, people’s software and hardware choices more or less line up with their specific musical focus.

My passions fall somewhere between rhythmic creation and audio manipulation. I love to bend audio to MY own will, and particularly, rhythmic audio. Being a percussionist, much of my music is powered by a thick rhythmic sauce… or sometimes, an extreme lack of one, and so the tools I seem to use most repeatedly are the ones that give me as much freedom as I can find to explore these particular attributes in the sonic palette.

#1 – A High Quality Soft-Sampler
There aren’t many tools that have been born out of the new age of digital audio that will be as much help to a film composer as a good quality software sampler. As a Logic user, I’ve always been an EXS24 guy, and I still use it a lot, but there are several soft-samplers out there that are better at the all-around task of reformatting an audio event into a recallable, triggerable one.

Native Instruments’ Kontakt is probably the most obvious and widely used soft-sampler on the planet. I use it every day in my work and it is a very powerful sampler. In fact, many complain that the feature set in Kontakt is too deep for the average user, but I would argue that such people are simply being lazy! Kontakt, while seemingly daunting, is not as tough to wrap your mind around as you might have been told it is. If you simply read through your manual once, you’ll know pretty much all there is to know about this sampler, and you’ll be taking advantage of the many Kontakt-exclusive features that this tool has to offer. Kontakt is capable of mangling audio in ways that no other sampler can. You can purchase it either as a stand-alone plugin or as part of the Native Instruments Komplete bundle, which I highly recommend also. Either way, obtaining and learning Kontakt is well worth the investment of time and finances.

KONTAKT Software Sampler
Developer: Native Instruments
Current Version: Kontakt 4
Requirements: Windows® XP (SP2, 32bit) / Vista® (32/64 Bit), Windows 7® (32/64 Bit), Pentium® or Athlon XP 1.4 GHz, 1 GB RAM
Mac OS® X 10.5 or higher, Intel® Core™ Duo 1.66 GHz, 1 GB RAM
1 GB free disk space / 48 GB for complete installation

For a Windows-only option, Vember Audio’s Shortcircuit sampler kicks all kinds of ass. My former assistant was a major fan of Shortcircuit and he was always showing off the capabilities of this freeware soft-sampler. As far as mangling audio in ways unimaginable, I’ve not seen too many tools as easy to use as this piece. A freeware plugin (!), Shortcircuit streamlines certain routine processes in such a way that will save you both time and frustration in the chair. If you are a Windows user and you are on a budget, check out Vemper’s solution with Shortcircuit. I think you will most likely become a fan!

SHORTCIRCUIT Soft Sampler
Developer: Vember Audio
Current Version: Shortcircuit 2 v0.5.1
Requirements: Windows® 2000, XP or newer. Processor with SSE-support (includes Intel Pentium 3 and newer, AMD Athlon XP and newer) Software capable of hosting VST-instruments.

#2 – Celemony Melodyne
There aren’t that many pieces of gear that I would really say have changed the way that I move my process through on a film score… except for Melodyne — and especially its newest incarnation, the Melodyne Studio Bundle. I was lucky enough to get my hands on an advanced copy of this software in late October and I’ll go on record to say that it has completely changed the game for me in regards to audio manipulation. I recently finished a score where we went in a direction that heavily relied on beat mashing and punishing industrial-sounding drums, and just smashed the hell out of each possible bit and byte using Melodyne. And it was FUN!

Basically what Celemony has done here is create the world’s first algorithm that can take a piece of polyphonic audio material, separate it out into distinguishable individual parts, and then allow you to move each part vertically (in scale) or horizontally (in time) across an axis in order to time-shift or re-tune it to your liking. Melodyne is *not* Auto-Tune 2.0! It is much, much deeper than that and carries with it major repercussions to your audio files that will leave your head spinning once you wrap your brain around what is possible with it.

This new technology comes with a price tag, however, and I don’t mean financially (it’s really not that expensive once you realize the value of what you are getting!). Now, with the ability to manipulate polyphonic audio material, the sky is the limit — you can literally do anything with any piece of audio you want… and it will be interesting to see how this technology blurs the lines of what we know as “protected audio” as it rolls out for public consumption in two weeks. That thought is a little scary, but at the same time, it was bound to happen sooner or later. As progress folds over onto itself again and again, huge leaps ahead in the audio field like Celemony’s Direct Note Access (DNA) technology will continue to force digital rights issues to “hurry up and get their act together”.

For now, however, as musicians and composers, there has never been a tool that will allow you to take your custom created audio and tweak it in as many ways as Melodyne will. There just isn’t anything remotely like it on the market. The possibilities of this tool are almost impossible to explain in the small space I have here… you have to experience it for yourself to really appreciate the impact that this software is going to have on your music and on our industry as a whole.

Melodyne Audio Editing Software
Developer: Celemony
Products: Studio Bundle: (available January 10th) MSRP: $559; Melodyne Editor: (available now) MSRP: $299
Requirements: Mac OS® Dual (Core) PowerPC G5 or Intel Dual Core processor, 2GB RAM, OS X 10.4 or later
Windows® Intel or AMD Dual Core processor, 2GB RAM, Windows XP (SP2 or SP3), Windows Vista or Windows 7, ASIO-compatible audio hardware

#3 – Good Quality Monitors
SCO contributor Les Brockmann wrote a terrific article a few weeks ago about room acoustics that I would highly recommend you all read when you get a minute. I know my fellow SCO contemporaries would all agree that your room really *is* your secret weapon in your sound. Let’s face it: we all have the same basic toys. We have virtually the same plug-ins, a DAW is a DAW is a DAW, and so in a musical sense, the differentiating factors only really remain in your mixes and in your ability to “outwrite” the next guy.

That’s why I think a good pair of high quality monitors are essential to your ability to turn out mixes that will compete on the level that Hollywood ears are tuned to. I have been in many studios that have employed “low-end” monitoring systems and have heard the mixes that have come from them, and I can tell you that there is almost always an audible difference between those and the ones that ultimately make the cut.

I look at it this way: You might be the greatest composer in the known universe, but if your mixes sound inferior to the standard, who will ever care about your writing? If you are using low-quality monitors to reference your output, in most cases, your demo is not going to make it past the receptionist.

Trust me, I’m not being an ass. I’m just speaking from experience!

When it comes to computers, my chair, and my listening environment, I will go deep out of pocket for the highest quality I can afford. My current set-up is no different. I purchased my Quested S8Rs at NAMM two years ago, and I paid $1400 each for them — not a small chunk of change by any means, especially when you are talking about a writing studio in your home. But, I believe that those three things are the lifeblood of your ability to create daily, and so you should spare no expense. I am of the mind that if you have 400 bucks to blow on monitors, do yourself a favor and get a $150 pair of Beyer Dynamic headphones… and keep saving for the monitors. In the long run, you’ll be happier, and your mixes will translate better from the Beyer Dynamics than they will from a cheap pair of monitors. True story. Try to at least position yourself past the $800 range for a pair of good quality monitors. After you get your first high paying gig, that’s when you can consider moving up from there into a more solid set-up that will carry you through the next five to ten years. But be smart NOW. Don’t blow your cash on a small set of M-Audio’s when you could save another couple of months and get something that won’t color your sound at all.

Since everyone’s ears are different, and what sounds great to me might not sound as great to you, you’ll have to do a lot of research and ask a ton of questions before you’ll be able to make a confident decision when purchasing monitors. I’ll give you some places to start, but with NAMM coming up, take a few hours and go through the different booths checking out as much as you can before you commit your hard earned dough. It is well worth the due diligence and you will pat yourself on the back for years to come by not rushing in and buying the first thing you see/hear.

If you have $600-$800 dollars to spend, consider some of the KRK monitors in that range. KRK still makes killer gear and their silk-domes are some of the best in the business. Some of the higher end Event monitors are still great, too, but stay away from their mid-range to low-end models. They tend to be “bass-heavy” and you’ll run into even more problems when you get them home and they sound “boomy” to you.

If you have $1200-$1500 to play with, check out the JBL LSR-2300′s. They tune themselves to your room, and so you’ll only have to do minimal acoustic tweaking to make them really sing. Also, Mackie HR series monitors have always been great, and many of our SCO contributors swear by them. Mackie HR824′s, in particular, are very robust and stand-up well over time. You can probably find a used set on Ebay that will still give you years of great results for under $800 a pair.

Up past that, in the $1800-$3000 range, there are several companies that are top-notch. Though I prefer Quested monitors for a variety of reasons, many manufacturers in this price range offer models that will set you up for the next ten to fifteen years if you really ask a lot of questions of the people behind them. Specifically, check out anything by Adam, Quested, and Equator Audio. Each of these brands are superb and offer a wide variety of models for as many applications as you could ever think of.

_____________
SCOREcast founder DEANE OGDEN is an award-winning composer who has written the music to over twenty feature films including THE SENSEI, DREAMS ON SPEC, IN THE EYES OF A KILLER, and THE WAY HOME. Also very active in music for television, Deane wrote the orchestral themes for Michael Phelps’ record-breaking gold medal run during the 2008 OLYMPIC GAMES, which was the most-viewed event in American television history. Deane is a top-call session drummer, and has recorded and performed with artists like TINA TURNER, CHRIS CORNELL, SEAL, and RIHANNA. You can find his SCOREcast bio (and links to his other sites) here.

Across the film music industry, the recent composer unionization effort has been at the forefront of everyone’s mind for the last few weeks. Led by film composers Bruce Broughton, James DiPasquale, Alan Elliott, and Alf Clausen, the Teamsters Local 399 has offered a hand as one of the most powerful union organizations to help unionize composers — one of the last creative groups in Hollywood to still work without a collective bargaining agreement.

Since the announcement of this effort, there have been many opinions expressed, a lot of intense debate and discussion, and a load of mixed emotions on all fronts.

I’ve mentioned before that I am yet undecided on the issue. To be honest, I’ve enjoyed the conversation and I’ve been soaking up everyone’s viewpoints on the subject. I’ve been an insatiable reader of online opinions on the union issue and have also done my own homework to be sure that when I decide which way is best for my own career, I can make an informed and thoughtful decision.

There is, however, a significant voice that is missing from the conversation — something that I’ve relied on all my life to aid me in my decision making process: The voice of leadership.

I know that in many careers, including my own, the whisper of seasoned leadership has been vital in helping to make informed decisions. Few influencers can sway a personal choice more than the experience and counsel of a seasoned veteran who has seen it all and done even more. The film music industry is chock full of veteran composers who have not only witnessed decades of change and transformation in our business (and adapted successfully to those changes), but have also been through the wars politically with directors, studios, agents, soundtrack labels, and yes… unions.

So where are they? Where are the voices of our Generals that we as the “foot soldiers” of the film music army have come to rely on for everything else that we’ve pondered career-wise — from what plug-ins to spend our money on to how to best break into the industry? Why are the “heavies” not weighing in publicly on an issue that could potentially be the most important critical argument toward the sustenance of our beloved craft to come down the pike in twenty years?

If you were in attendance at the Teamsters information meeting that took place on November 16, it was obvious that the majority of composers coming out to represent the community as a consensus were extremely young. While there were a handful of what most would call “A-List” veteran composers in the audience, most folks in the seats were either emerging or beginning composers well under the age of 40. Arguably, accessible technology combined with an over-saturation of scorable media has provided the impetus for a formerly older gentleman’s game to give way to a trade more available to younger men and women over the course of the last ten years or so.

To me, a severe irony exists in the absence so-far of vocalized opinion or comment from any recognized composer. For a group of people traditionally known to be somewhat introverted, to witness a gathering of over 450 of us in one room is a little of an accomplishment. To see five or ten of our more respected and recognized composers in attendance is also a surprise, again, given the way in which we composers don’t like to “come out of the cave”. But to some, this was important enough to attend, consequences be damned (and I’m sure there *were* some the next day!).

I’d like to hear from those people. I’d like them to speak up and address us foot soldiers, whom, make no mistake, will be the initial base on which this proposed union will be built. After all, there is much more responsibility to being a composer than simply writing great music. There is a community at stake. A community that they are not only a part of, but certainly helped build. A community of young composers that is proud of their leaders’ accomplishments, but also looks up to them for their experience, wisdom, and candor in speaking of the craft. They had me at their music, but Messrs. Broughton, Clausen, and DiPasquale have all stepped up to the plate and swung the bat to start a conversation, earning them even more respect and admiration from me. This is exactly the kind of leadership I am talking about. Now it is time for the rest of our legacy composers to step out of the shadows of Hollywood politics and shed some light on both sides of the union argument for the betterment of the community and the craft.

Here is why I believe this is necessary:

As much as the newer, younger generations of composers are gung-ho and ready to tackle the pros and cons of unionization, I am certain — as it is simply a byproduct of the human condition — that lack of experience, limited perspective, and the simple awkwardness of youth will have a negative affect on how smooth a ride this could be. I saw it at the meeting on the 16th, and we’ve all seen it in hundreds of other life experiences. For those of you that are familiar, the story of the “old bull and the young bull” comes to mind.

The harsh reality is that the majority of film composers have never worked within the motion picture studio system. The argument that studios are controlling less and less of the movie business as days go by is an argument that, factually, does not hold water, which is why you often hear veteran composers counseling beginners to “move to Los Angeles”. True, there are independent productions that have seen great success in the last fifteen years, but the majority of work in film that can sustain the career of a working film composer still originates at the Hollywood studio level. Even with the iron-clad film music education that a first rate university can provide these days, young composers are simply not adequately prepared to deal with the needs and desires of a major Hollywood studio from a business standpoint. The art of handling the nuances of multi-million dollar studio music budgets is not something that can be easily learned in a classroom setting, nor would a studio saddle a first time composer with such an unfair expectation.

I would suggest that the majority of composers in the room on November 16th haven’t the foggiest clue what a collaboration with a major studio feels, looks, or tastes like. They have never had to work up a package deal to be approved by a music department, nor have they ever encountered the prickly situation of a director requesting the production and orchestral recording of alternate cues that were not included on the package agreement to begin with. Beginning composers simply do not have the perspective necessary to see anything from the studio’s vantage point, and to put it plainly… many won’t for some time. Even the most experienced independent composers have yet to walk the tightrope of artistic integrity and serving the needs of a major studio’s budgetary guidelines and business parameters — both of which require careful attention in order to bring about a fruitful collaboration at the blockbuster level.

Anyone who now works or has worked with a studio will tell you that the unionization of composers poses far greater ramifications for both sides than it does at the independent level. At the studio level — which is where most of us would like to be, don’t forget — unionization poses a wholly different set of hurdles and obstacles, and means a lot more than just whether or not composers “get the respect” we deserve. In fact, I would bet my next royalty check that most studio-level composers didn’t attend last week’s meeting simply because it would have been a waste of their time. The fact is that the problems that haunt “A-List” composers are a far cry from the issues that haunt beginners. The day-to-day issues of studio-level composing under a composers union are those that would ripple the pond in far greater and potentially more dangerous ways than a beginning composer could ever pretend to imagine.

This is precisely why we need more recognized composers speaking out on the issue of a potential composers union. The silence of wisdom and experience serves to only make the natives more and more restless. Of course, there could be good reason for silence from A-listers, the first being the importance of maintaining alliances with the studios. Even still, there are ways to speak on this issue without jeopardizing business relationships, and it seems to me like many of those A-list composer/studio relationships are now galvanized to the point where not much damage could be done by simply sharing a healthy conversation.

I would like to openly invite any recognized composer to weigh in on the issue of unionization here at SCOREcastOnline.com. Please feel free to log into the COMMENTS below and voice your opinions, address any issues you feel are ambiguous on either side of the argument, or simply encourage the younger set out there to get more involved in the exploration of the possibilities. Just knowing that you all are engaged would help those of who want to be engaged feel a lot better about… well… engaging.

Your music has helped move us all through some of life’s most difficult challenges. That music came from your own filtered perspective on your lives and success. Now, more than ever, we need unfiltered access to that life experience to help move us through an issue that will most certainly effect all of us one way or another.

We anxiously await your response.

Last night in Burbank, approximately 435 people from the film composing community turned out for the Composers Unionization information meeting that was hosted by the Teamsters Local 399, and moderated by composers Jim DiPasquale, Bruce Broughton, Alf Clausen, and Alan Elliott. Teamsters union rep Steve Dayan was also on hand to answer questions about the proposed Teamsters/Composers relationship.

Online, in print, and in the private circles of our community, there is no shortage of opinions on this issue, and in some cases the battle lines have already been drawn. Up to now, I have personally held off on making my own ruminations public or offering my own opinions on this issue of composer unionization. In addition, the values that were the impetus for me creating SCOREcast in the first place have also motivated me to stay temporarily neutral in an effort to help to facilitate a complete and all-encompasing conversation amongst this community. I’ve tried to keep my comments as unbiased and as neutral as possible – mostly because in anticipation of last night’s meeting, we didn’t know anything about what was being proposed, but also because I simply felt I didn’t know what the right answer was.

I’m still not sure I do, and so I’m still willing to listen. However, while theoretically the idea of a composers union sounds like a swell idea — and one that is arguably long overdue — unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at things), last night I came away with more questions than answers.

ISSUE #1: The mantra of the panel, and especially that of Steve Dayan, the Teamsters representative, was that unionizing under a collective bargaining agreement was simply “The Right Thing to Do”. We heard several times that “it is not about money, it is not about prestige, it is simply the right thing to do”.

My Question: Why is it the “right thing to do”? Nobody ever followed that statement up with a hard argument as to the “righteous” need for a union. If it is the right thing to do, then why did I feel string-armed the second I walked through the door, signed -in, and was handed a “yellow” card (Teamsters representation authorization cards)? Add to that, we were all told several times during the meeting that those cards were “only to obtain information. Fill them out if you want, but you do not need to.”

ISSUE #2: The panel stated numerous times that they’ve been working on this proposal to bring to the community for four years now. They explained that they’ve had “plenty of time” to explore and analyze all options, and that the Teamsters is the clear choice in organizing composers.

My Question: Why then did the panel seem so ill-prepared for several of the attendees’ most basic questions about numbers and constituency? When asked by an “A-list” composer last night what they would define as “critical mass”, none of the panel members could answer. In fact, several of them actually looked at one another as if to say, “I was under the impression there’d be no math during this debate!” After four years of intensely scrutinizing all of the angles to composer unionization, I would have thought the questions of “How many legitimate working composers are there now?” would be a fairly simply data point to produce to the attendees.

ISSUE #3: Steve Dayan mentioned more than once that “agents, managers, and producers are against this, and will fight it with everything they have.”

My Question: Has anyone asked those people what they think? It’s too convenient to ask those people to all “leave the room”, and then talk about them as if they are the enemy. I happen to like the people I’ve enjoyed collaborations with over the years. They have become friends — friends that want to see me succeed as much they strive for success themselves. To vilify the very people responsible for giving us the majority of our work seems like getting started out on the wrong foot.

ISSUE #4: Steve Dayan also made a comment on the heels of an attendee’s (mistaken) suggestion that there weren’t “many A-list composers here”. Dayan said that the organization effort cannot start at the “top of your industry. It has to start with you guys.”

My Question: Why do the people who are trying to break into the business have to be the ones to shoulder the cost for something that the previous generation has been 100% content to abide with all these years? If unionization is “the right thing to do” (See issue #1 above), wouldn’t ANY composer — no matter what stage they are at in the game — put on the war paint, damn the torpedoes, and come out in support of such a righteous cause? We look at those men and women as our leaders — our Generals. If they don’t love the craft enough to stand for change, then as those who look up to them, why should we? (As a personal aside, it has already been reported across the internet on several sites, so I don’t mind repeating it here: Chris Young, Mike Post, Rick Marvin, Lisa Coleman, Danny Lux, Ed Sheamur, Richard Bellis, George Clinton, and several other “A-list” composers attended this meeting. I’m sure they all have a lot going on in their schedules. But they were there last night.)

ISSUE #5: The panel framed their enthusiasm for a union with the Teamsters around the fact that the Teamsters were able to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement for casting directors four years ago in Hollywood.

My Question: Why is this accepted as an “apples to apples” comparison? Wouldn’t a more appropriate comparison be “actors and composers” or “writers and composers”? The writers have a union — it’s called the WGA (which, by the way, we were told doesn’t want to deal with us composer-types!). Casting directors are responsible for “casting” a cast. Composers don’t cast anything… we GET cast. We ARE the cast. We are the musical cast of the show. So, that analogy doesn’t hold water.

ISSUE #6: While we are on the subject of casting directors, there was a gentleman that was there to speak from the perspective of the casting directors, and he had a few nice things to say. One of those things was, “All that casting directors were looking for was some recognition and medical and pension benefits.”

My Question: Really? That’s it? Okay… then maybe we ARE comparable groups of people, because since the panel made it clear that minimums are simply “a floor, and you will be able to negotiate a higher rate if you’d like”, then all that is really left IS medical, pension, and recognition by the NLRB. Sweet!

So, with that then, here is what I propose: Since I already pay dues to a great organization called “The Society of Composers and Lyricists” (which I found out last month at their membership meeting is now comprised of over 3,000 members), why doesn’t the SCL just take out a group health plan that would cover all of those people? I’m pretty certain if there had been a Blue Cross/Blue Shield rep at the meeting last night, he/she would have had to try and keep the saliva from dripping out of the corners of his/her mouth.

—-

Don’t get me wrong — last night was incredible. As someone who is in absolute love with this community, I was overjoyed, not only by the attendance of this meeting but also by all of the views expressed. I’m sure that this is only one of many conversations that will be had over the next several months — maybe even years — about this issue. My only hope is that people do not get amped up about belonging to “a cause,” but rather, with skeptical optimism, carefully weigh out the long-term pros and cons of such a major decision.

What we need more than anything, rather than jumping on a bandwagon, is a more robust discussion. I openly invite anybody on the AMCL steering committee, or any studio people (producers, directors, heads of music, etc.) to grant an interview to SCOREcast to address these issues.

As for the rest of you: SPEAK. TALK. QUESTION. COMMENT.

Here’s something I thought would be an interesting exercise for us all. It’s something that I have been asking myself lately, as I navigate through my latest score project, and it’s something that I think you have to regularly ask yourself in order to stay fresh, although we probably don’t ask it enough.

It’s a simple question. What makes you different?

Tell me the one thing that you feel you do in your music that sets you apart from everyone else in the game. Be articulate. “I’m a good orchestrator” won’t cut it, and neither will “My music is melodic”. I got news for you: So is the music of about 800,000 others that work in film and TV. (Sorry to burst that little bubble!)

Be honest, be real, and be clear.

What makes YOU different?

Parcipation is simple too.
Log into COMMENTS below. Start typing. Go.

I wanted to personally jump on here and join Lee in welcoming all of you AICNers who might be visiting SCOREcastOnline.com for the first time and tell you all how excited we are that you are here. Whether you are a film music fan or someone working or preparing to work in the film music industry, we hope that you find a wealth of helpful information to move you further along in your journey.

The entire purpose behind the SCOREcast site and podcast is to encourage and foster open discussion and helpful resources for the entire community. You can be a participant in that by utilizing the COMMENT feature at the bottom of every post published on the site, under the labels:

Again, welcome! We are so glad you are here and we look forward to talking more with you about film music! (And a MAJOR thanks to Scorekeeper for the shout out!)

Oh…. we HATE to say it! That “dirty word” in composing that we prefer to avoid, yet it comes up in conversation almost daily. Every successful composer says they will not do it, but most of them do it anyway. Most composers, working or not, condemn the idea, but there seems to be no way around it and it almost feels like a necessary evil if you want to be successful at this gig.

I recently attended a panel where a group of popular TV and film composers were assembled to talk about their work and answer questions from a hungry crowd made up mostly of new people wanting to break into the industy. The talk turned to how many shows a person could handle writing for at one time. A question from the audience came up for one of the composers who is currently writing for several successful shows in network TV.

“Do you do it all?”, the audience member asked.

“I do it all myself,” said the composer, “and it’s difficult, but I just have to discipline myself and it all works out.”

Unfortunately, I know for a fact that that was a bald-face lie. That composer does NOT do it all themselves.

They have “ghosts”.

Let me offer this honest (and quite common) scenario, and you tell me what’s right and what’s wrong:

You just landed the gig of your life — you are composing for a new show on one of the big TV networks and the show is a runaway sensation… And so are you — in fact, you’ve never seen weekly checks like this since you started composing, and your projected backend royalties in nine months are looking pretty damned amazing (You might even be able to pony up the down payment on that house you’ve had your eye on!).

All of this success has now put you on the radar of many execs, and you are getting job offers left and right. The thing is though, if you were to let the world see you sweat in your little project studio, you are barely treading water and it’s everything you can do to just keep up with the pace of the show you are on now.

At the same time, you know it’s Business Smarts 101 to “take every gig”, and just because you are now writing for a weekly smash hit, that rule doesn’t stop applying.

The choice is simple: You need a ghost if you are going to take more on. Simple as that.

But how do you feel about that concept?

Honestly? EVERYONE does it. I mean, they just do. I’m not kidding. All the big boys do it, and I just know this because I’ve hung around with many of them and they’ll just eventually tell you in secret that they couldn’t do it all if they didn’t employ a ghostwriter. Simple. Back in the day, several classical composers even had ghosts, and nobody seems to be mad at them for it, so what’s the big deal?

So here it is:
Is having a ghost a necessary evil to enjoying a long career as a composer? If so, do you tell, or is it ethical to just say you do it yourself? What about backend? Should your ghosts get theirs, or should they simply be paid as an employee and that’s that? Is there another alternative to getting all the work you can and still being able to go it alone? If so, what are some of those scenarios?

Jump in on the COMMENTS below, and let’s hear your thoughts… and, let’s be honest about it. No hurt feelings… no opinions that aren’t valid, yada, yada, yada.

It IS what it IS, and it’s something that, sooner or later, you are going to have to confront one way or another. At least, we hope so, right?

I am attending a film festival this week in LA to promote a film that I recently scored called “In the Eyes of a Killer” with my director Louis Mandylor. I have met a grip of great people at this fest and have seen many great films, all by talented filmmakers that at one time or another… needed film composers!! (Hint hint, nudge nudge, wink wink… Get out there and network!!)

In a conversation with a group of directors and producers yesterday, the talk turned to producing movies. One of them said, “Deane, why don’t you produce in addition to compose? You are a such a good producer… you should just do it as another career.”

I fumbled through some sort of answer like, “Aw shucks, guys… I just cannot think of anything I’d rather do than compose.” With a little more chiding and a little more dodging from me, they were finally satisfied and we changed the topic.

The more I thought about it throughout the day, however, the more that situation showed its true colors as a glaring example of what my dad often refers to as “good being the enemy of great”.

The truth is, I am a good producer. I have an incredibly solid sense of film and I know how to tell a story, and tell it well. I’ve been offered producer credits several times on films that I’ve been hired to score simply because I’ve talked directors, editors, and producers into doing things that they never would have done had someone like me not pitched them on it. But in the end, producing neither interests me or is what I am 100% passionate about. I am passionate about one thing, and one thing only: Scoring the film.

Here is the lesson in this for me: Being “good” at something doesn’t necessarily mean you should do it. I’m a decent orchestrator, but I would much rather hire people like Brian Satterwhite or Susie Benchasil that are “great” at it. I can sit down and copy parts for the orchestra, but my attention to detail in that department is not anywhere in the same ball-park as someone like Steven Julliani’s. I’m also quite handy with a hammer and can keep a poker face like nobody’s business, but I’m not a housing contractor or a world-championship card shark, either!

Furthermore, I feel like since I am a solid businessman (which is what it takes to be a killer producer), I’d almost be playing it safe if I was to choose that career over this one. The honest truth is that when you are passionate about something, you are willing to risk it all to make it happen, and I’m not passionate about producing. Therefore, it would be a “sleepwalking” job for me that I know I wouldn’t throw my heart and soul into on a daily basis. I would be one of those cautionary tales you here about at cocktail parties where “Yeah, Deane is a great producer, but man… the lights are on but there’s nobody home anymore.” Not good.

Yet, I see it all the time… people in careers that are unfulfilling to them, and when called on the carpet for it, the answer is one that most often has to do with security and safety. The problem is that nobody gets anywhere by playing it safe.

“Good” is safe, but “great” is fulfilling. I left a very financially safe career playing drums in the pop music world to do what I’ve always wanted to do. Now I have a great life that I wouldn’t trade for anything, and I’ve often said that I’d rather be homeless and living in a box if I still got to score films than be rich beyond belief in a job doing anything but.

So the challenge is this: If you aren’t doing what you are passionate about… why not? What’s the matter? Maybe it’s what people have told you you’re good at. Have you ever thought about that? People always seem to know what you should be doing with yourself. I hate that. It’s like “Live your own life and let me do my thing, will ya!” If you listen to what people say you ought to be when you grow up, then guess what? You’ll be old and fat and have a nice house and drive a nice car but still be miserable as hell. Any questions?

Maybe you are afraid of something. Are you scared that things might not be the way they are now… all nice and safe and secure… if you were to begin doing what you were made to do? It’s okay if you are… we have all been afraid at some point. That is a natural human response to a very realistic dilemma, and nobody can or should fault you for it. But, you have to move past it and you have to overcome that fear, otherwise it will keep you from doing what truly brings you the most joy in your life.

Now, go write some kick-ass music for something… you know… the kind only you can write!

What do you recommend to develop a passable roadmap on a compressed timeline?… I’d like to get a peek at what one of these roadmaps looks like (even if it’s just scribbles and random notes). Being the “planner” I am, I’m already thinking of some sort of template. Maybe something that takes you progressively from random notes to roadmap to spotting to cue sheet…. Does anything like that already exist?

1. You are *not* working with a music editor. A music editor, according to Fred Karlin,  is the “person responsible for all physical details regarding the syncronization of the score with the picture.” In short, this person is usually involved from the outset of post-production and may be intimately involved with placing temp music into the film, recording and notating the spotting notes at a spotting session between you and the director, and finally, placing and syncronizing the recorded, mixed, and finalized score stems into the film itself for dubbing. Many of the duties handled by an independent film composer (one who is essentially doing it *all* on his/her own) would otherwise be handled by the music editor, thus taking some of the load off the shoulders of the composer and allowing him/her to focus solely on writing and recording the score.

2. You don’t have a ton of time to write the score. It’s becoming pretty typical with any film, but almost certainly with an independent film, we as composers do not have a lot of time to do our jobs when the locked cut is finally handed over. There have even been times for me when I was already on the scoring stage on an indie film and here comes Mr. Director with a new cut that nobody but him and the editor knew about until… now.

3. You don’t have a ton of money in the music budget. Duh! Helllooooo! Money in the post-production budget for music on an independent film? What in the hell is that?

4. You have adequately immersed yourself in the material. As a competent composer, you have to develop the discipline of getting under the material so that you have a solid understanding of the story’s arc at a core level. Try for a second to understand the difference between “scoring through a film” versus simply “scoring a film”. There is a huge difference, and a lot of the difference comes from your ability to get the material into your headspace either through the script, the concept drawings or storyboards, or the locked cut. Bottom line: You must have enough of a love of the characters in your story to warrant you being trusted with them for this period of time. If you don’t care, your music will tattle on you — I promise!
   

Do you ever wonder “why” a piece of music works in a scene? Does it just bug the ever-loving crap out you, like it does me, when you play your hard work for your director only to have him or her look at you blankly and utter the words “That just doesn’t work for me”?

I hate hearing those words come out of my director’s mouth. I want him or her to be pleased on first listen. Of course, it doesn’t always work that way and it is our job as the composer to find out why it doesn’t work that way. Music is so subjective and so personal that I often wonder privately things I’d never share with anyone, like “Who beat the hell out of this director so bad as a child to make him not like this cue for this scene?”

I have traversed far and wide to search out all possible answers to the question as to why, if you line five directors up against a wall and ask them to watch a scene with music, will you get five differing answers from each. This, of course, is an unanswerable question… perhaps answered only by discovering why *you* hear music the way you hear it and particularly why certain music, to your ears, would never fit in a certain scene.

We’ve all sat and listened to film scores independent of film to hear what others are doing or to study the greats and learn from them. The problem with that — and arguably, the problem with the concept of “film music critics” — is that the purpose and function of a piece of film music is essentially null and void when divorced from picture. With that rational, the very act of listening to a piece of film detached from the picture from whence it came is only half the story. It might be a nice listening experience, but you are still only getting part of the intended result.

My girlfriend is a costume designer. Our lives are a whirlwind of film events, one after the other, hers then mine then hers then mine. Recently, for the first time, I scored a film where she was also the principle wardrobe supervisor during production. It was a great experience seeing her styling and coloring choices explode onscreen while my music passed by in the underscore. As creatives, our workflows are similar, with slight differences. When I am working on menial administrative tasks like cutting demos, returning emails, or prepping my assistant’s schedule for the next week, I listen to film scores via my iTunes library. In another part of the house is my her workspace. When she is taking care of all of the administrative duties that her business requires, she watches movies on DVD or our Apple TV… with the volume turned off.

I always found this incredibly interesting… she watches movies with no sound. Seems weird, until you remember that she’s not listening for score, FX, or dialog… she’s looking at costumes.

Her process — in its entirety, from conception of a costume to the final product being fitted on the actor — completely blows me away and fascinates me. I have taken many cues from the way she works and incorporated many of her routines into my way of working as a composer. In addition, I have taken the way that she studies film and tried to apply it to the way I study film. What has resulted is a mash-up of looking at film and music in an effort to better understand why it is that music works why it is that sometimes it doesn’t.

Here is what it looks like: From time to time — and *only* with time to burn, mind you — I’ll put on an old movie or a recent release and turn the sound completely off. Then I’ll launch my iTunes library and set the filter controls so that only MY music shows up in the browser. As the film plays, I’ll “temp” my music into the film by simply pushing “PLAY” when a scene comes up that I feel needs music. I’ll experiment — I’ll put things in that I think would fit well, or put things in that are completely from another genre just to see what works and what… um… doesn’t. (Imagine “SE7EN” with tunes from that sports comedy you just finished!)

This process teaches me a TON. Not only do I learn what not to do, but I have also learned that in film music, and filmmaking in general, there are *no* rules. Everything is on the table. Therefore, sometimes, a serious scene works better with a comedic score or a slightly quirkier feel to the music. Conversely, we’ve all seen many great film composer legends play against comedy with a serious tone in the accompanying score.

Playing around with these kinds of things really enables you to learn “privately” and make mistakes on your own dime that canand should NEVER be made on your director’s.

This is one small, and maybe silly, way to “think” about how film music works and how it won’t… but it “works for me”.

What works for you?

Periodically, I get an email or a Tweet asking me to reveal a little of my “workflow”—how I do what I do in my studio to achieve my goals. I will start by telling you that most of my smooth “workflow” as a busy composer is in place simply because I have help. Not all the time, but certainly some-of-the-time composing for picture is a team sport. I have a solid team that I work with on virtually every picture to ensure that things go smoothly and there are no surprises. I try to hire the same score recordist and mixers, the same contractors, copyists, orchestrators, and studio assistants on each project so that I do not have to train and retrain people to the way that I like to work. My people know my process and I know theirs. It’s easy, it’s functional, and we work well together, often anticipating what each other is thinking. When we’ve conquered, we also party together afterward and celebrate our victory as a team. Those are great traits for a team to possess when you need people to function cohesively on a tight deadline and look forward to the next gig on down the line.

As time as gone by and my career has grown from where it was ten years ago to where it is now, I, like many of my colleagues, have made good practice of hiring assistants to help with various tasks that will help me get done what I need to get done. There are no excuses in filmmaking… no room for getting sick or forgetting something important. I’ve always known I was cut out for this work upon realizing early on that it’s not like any other job I’d ever had: You might not get fired for coming in overbudget or late on the deadline, but you almost certainly will never work for that person again.

Assistants can make or break you, really. As I always say, use me as a shortcut – I’ve learned the hard way. You have to be careful on several fronts. The first question you have to ask yourself is “Is NOW really the right time for me to hire an assistant?” Ask yourself if you are far enough a long in your career that the everyday routine hassles of maintaining your studio gear, upgrading your computer OS’s, doing cue sheets in Excel, and the myriad other things that we have to do as composers is taking time away from the actual very necessary task of daily composing a few minutes of finished music. If the answer is an honest “YES”, then it might be time to hire an assistant.

Hiring an assistant, however, is a process that you should take careful approach to. Make sure that you take plenty of time to think through the relationship that you’ll have with your employee (or intern, as the case may be).

Most likely, your assistant will be a student who is involved in the film scoring program at a nearby university or is finishing up junior college en route to a university program. Your screening process for this person should be pretty stout, as they will have intimate knowledge of the inner-workings of your professional AND personal lives (more on this later). Make sure that they are responsible, presentable, and articulate (the “articulate” thing is a personal pet-peeve of mine and I always go out of my way to make sure I select someone who communicates well, since this business is all about communicating, whether through musical or verbal presentation).

Who assists?

Be careful whom you choose. Make sure the person is trustworthy and comes with at least a few references from people vouching for that trustworthiness. I know it sounds over the top, but it is important to really scrutinize and thoroughly evaluate the person that you are bringing in — pretend that this person is ultimately a clone of YOU. When they speak, YOU are speaking; when they do something, YOU are doing it; when they act on something, YOU are acting on it. This person has to emulate you as closely as possible and do things in a manner by which YOU would do them. And they are always, ALWAYS, representing YOU.

It is tempting, like a lot of athletes or even recording artists do, to hire someone that you have a track record of trust with such as a family member. However, when they say, “Never work with family,” they mean it, and more often than not those kinds of arrangements don’t work out in the long run. Don’t be too emotionally attached to the person who is assisting you. It shouldn’t be a close friend, another colleague, and especially not a family member. It’s just too personal that way, and since you are the “boss” and they are the “underling,” the pecking order is lined out from the get-go, often spelling trouble down the line when feelings get hurt and people feel “talked down to”. The world of composing for film is simply too fast a swim to have to worry about whether you are causing a rift in your family every time you ask your dad to bring back lunch or sort through cable!

I have been criticized a lot for repeatedly hiring assistants that are fairly young – a couple of them have even been fresh out of high school. There are several reasons why I chose these young people. The first reason is that I believe people are individuals, and though age does play heavily into the level of maturity in a person, I’m not going to rule out someone who is a superstar based solely on how long they’ve been on Earth. If I give them an assignment, can I rest assured that it will be done in a timely manner and that they will do an excellent job? The answer to that is only part of my criteria for hiring someone, but it is a huge part of it. To me, professionalism and dependability are more important than whether or not a person is in college and working out what their dissertation will be about.

The second reason I am okay with hiring young people that are in school is that I rarely need a full-time assistant. Often times, I only need someone when my workload is so huge that I simply run out of time to write two to three minutes of finished music a day and accomplish all of the necessary routine business items on my punch list. I need someone who can take care of all of that for me so that I can be left alone to simply write the score for the film — which is what I have been hired to do by the producers of every project I have ever worked on (I’ve never been hired to run to OfficeMax and get supplies, shuttle drives back and forth, or get my computer systems serviced at the Melrose Mac!). The fact that these youngsters were just starting college and could only work at my studio from 4pm until 8pm was perfect for me and allowed me an entire day of the peace and quiet I require while I’m at the writing desk. At the same time, those four to five hours of administrative tasks still were completed daily and that also allowed me to get home at a decent time and catch my breath with my family every night.

Lastly, I just like mentoring young people who have an interest in this crazy business. I often think back on the early stages of my own career and wish I had known someone who would have taken me under their wing and showed me the ropes a bit. I’ve spent so much of my time as a working composer trying to avoid reinventing the wheel, and it just would have been nice to have someone who could have shown me the path of least resistance in several areas of the learning journey. I want to be that resource for young composers coming up, and I’ve come to learn that music takes hold in most young people when they are in grade school, as it did me. Additionally, college entrants are eager to learn and haven’t yet figured out that you are supposed to act like you have it all together. They ask questions when they don’t understand something and they want to do a good job because they don’t want to let you down. It’s not about money or power or prestige for them quite yet. Instead, they are still in it for the love of the game – its about music, art, and creativity. Those are the kind of people I want on my team.

As I look foward to the next two parts of this series, I want to know what you all think. If you are a composer and you have thought before about hiring someone to help out in your studio, but you weren’t sure if you should take the plunge or not, let me know. Ask me questions, Let’s start the conversation. I have had four assistants in my career thusfar. One of them was not so great, while the other three were complete ass kickers. One was a female while the other three were guys, and interestingly enough, the female was probably the best out of all of them — my current assistant is great friends with her, and he’d be the first to tell you that.

So jump in on the Comments section below and let me hear what your concerns, observations, and questions are about hiring an assistant to accelerate and simplify your workflow. I’ll be here answering as feverishly as I can, and I’m anxious to hear what the community has to say.

As I’m sure you’ve heard, Michael Jackson died today in Los Angeles.

If film composers are musicians that put music to film, then Michael Jackson was a musician who put film to music. In addition to his obvious contributions to the world of pop music, Michael Jackson produced some of the most innovative pieces of visual imagery in the form of the world’s first long-play music videos.

As a child of the 80′s, I was fascinated to see what Michael Jackson would do next. I would just as eagerly anticipate the MTV countdown of a Michael Jackson World Premiere video as I would the next installment of the Indiana Jones series or the next Jim Cameron film. His sense of cinematic payoff was astounding, even up to his later videos of the 1990′s and on into the new millennium.

It has always been sad to me, and maybe a mark of where we’ve fallen down a bit as a people group, that we condemn those who we perceive as having done something before we are sure they did. I do not know what demons haunted Michael Jackson in his life, and for that matter, I don’t know that any did. I just know the man that brought Thriller to my turntable, Bad to my mental production thoughtscape, and Dangerous to a musically clueless generation.

That is how I will remember the man.

Most of the time when talking about the topic of “diversification” as film composers, we are referring to the skills necessary to write for a variety of different mediums, genres, or projects. I’d like to talk about diversifying in a different light – being a diverse collaborator.

Diverse collaboration to me means that in this process of filmmaking you are a solution, not a problem. It means possessing the skillset to creatively and intuitively behave your team out of the tight spots that others might have behaved your team in to. It doesn’t just mean that you can write great music for any number of situations or scenes, but also that you are solid in a room, you know how to treat people, you know your gear, and that you follow through on tasks delegated to you. In fact, your diversity as a collaborator might be one of the greatest assets you can provide a director who has hired you to score his or her film.

And it’s not always easy – diversity and flexibility as a collaborator can be tough. You have to be on your toes as much as on your guard. In the post-production process, schedules are tight and claustrophobic which tends to create tension and sometimes friction amongst those being held responsible to pull off a miracle at the eleventh hour. I have found that in times like these, when directors are almost always already on the edge of insanity, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Whatever you can do at this point insure a smoother ride for them, do that.

There are some simple work habits that have helped me collaborate well with people over the years. Each of these suggestions are basic yet important fundamentals that I’ve held fast to and tried not to deviate from. This list is itself a diverse one – some of these ideas are technical, while others are philosophical in nature. Each of them, however, has played an important role in my business, guarantying a smooth working collaboration every time.

In this, my first “Tao” column, I’ll attempt to define some of them, and then I wanna hear yours!

1. NEVER play a director a cue that you don’t really love.
   These are in no particular order, but this might be the most important one in the bunch. I’ve done it both ways in my career- I’ve submitted something I thought was absolutely perfect for the scene, and then on one particular occasion, I thought I’d be “smart” and submit two things: one that I thought was perfect, and one that I thought was lame and would most assuredly guarantee that the director choose the first one. Yep…you guessed it. The director chose the lame one, and I was forced to run with it. Now every time I hear that cue in that particular movie, I cringe. NEVER ever ever ever play the director a cue that you aren’t 200% in love with.
2. Demo in as much detail as possible.
   “The more you show, the more you’ll know.” – Christopher Young.
   Directors don’t speak “music”. It is up to you to utilize your mock-ups to determine what it is that they like about what they are hearing, as much as what they don’t like about it. Ask a lot of questions. Upon them saying, “Yeah, that just doesn’t work for me”, find out “Why”. Is it an instrument they don’t like, or an entire melody line? The former is easy to fix, the latter… not so much. More often than not, less is more in a film score so the more color you add to your mock-ups (assuming your thematic material has already been approved), the more opportunity there is to strip away layers until they finally hear what they like.
3. Save EVERY version of EVERY cue.
   I’ll never forget one time while working on a pivotal cue for an action scene, I saved what I thought was the best version of the cue that I had come up with yet. The problem was that I saved it over the top of the prior version. But that’s okay, cuz this one was better, right?! I played the cue for the director, and he confirmed what I had told myself would never happen in a million years: “Yeah that’s cool, but I liked the last one better! It had something this one doesn’t.” FRICK! Moral of the story? Save every damn thing you do. You never know what is going to catch their ear and what isn’t, even if you think you know.
4. Find out who the boss is, and deal only with them.
   Never accept a job where a committee of 10 people must approve each cue revision. You’ll end up taking a great score and turning it into a giant pile of crap trying to please a committee. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: “Approval by committee never ever works!” Find out who the decision maker is and work ONLY with them. If there is no single decision maker (Hint: its usually the director), then don’t accept the job. You’ll thank yourself for it later. That said, there are exceptions to every rule. On “The Way Home”, I had two decision makers – the director AND the producer – but they functioned as one. If one of them approved something, it was understood by all that I had my “final approval”. This worked flawlessly, and given the time pressure of our deadline, it HAD to.
5. Triple check your mixes against dialog and FX.
   You aren’t the only contractor working on the project at this stage in the game. Make sure you are communicating with all department heads, ie. mix engineer, lead foley artist, dialog editors, etc. Check your mixes against the scenes – never skip this step, even if you are in a rush. There’s nothing worse than getting to a dub and having to concede that your music be buried in the mix because it conflicts with more important elements in the film. And remember – Dialog will take priority every time. No exceptions. Never try to compete with it. You’ll simply lose that battle.
6. Give the film YOUR voice. Try to avoid trends and gimmicks.
    An original score is a huge investment in trust and belief in you by your employers. Creating a trendy/gimmicky score will result in it sounding outdated and cheap in two years. Your director/producers deserve more and have paid the price to bring you in. Don’t skimp by simply stringing something together using the latest loops and plugins that every single other composer is using. Be original and come up with something that will “brand” their movie in people’s ears and minds, and never ever be afraid to inject your personality into your scores. After all, they hired YOU for a reason.
7. Create simple motifs and themes.
   Don’t get too complex with your themes and motifs. Don’t use more than two or three themes or two or three motifs to identify those themes. Even the heaviest symphonic scores are simple in their effectiveness. John Williams is the obvious master of this tactic. Listen to how he brilliantly reuses motivic ideas throughout his entire score, never deviating far from the original theme or idea. A score that is too complex serves to do nothing but dilute the storyline and take the viewers attention off of where it should be.
8. Create “threads”.
   Building on my last point, I like to think of the score as a big quilt that wraps itself around a film. The “quilt” (score) is made up of dozens of “blocks” (cues) and each block has within it several “threads” that associate each block with the rest of the quilt. Once you have a theme that supports the film well, check to see if there’s a way to use only one line of the theme in other themes to help “thread” the score together. In your film score, there are all kinds of ways to “state a theme” without really stating it within the context of its original useage. Additionally, the “thread” can also be the use of some sort of instrument that lends identity to the score. Think of what Mark Isham did in “Crash” with a female solo voice juxtaposed against a thick liquidy wash of synthesizers. “Threads” are everything in helping to give the film a musical identity.
9. Think big.
   As an independent film composer, by the time the producers are ready for your music, there is not much room left in the budget. Yet, the everyone has met and its unanimous: Real instruments – maybe even a large orchestra “would sound amazing on this film!” Well, yes, that might be true, but the reality is that you can’t get something for nothing. Or can you? Online networking has opened up so many more possibilities that weren’t there even a year ago, and the reality is that in today’s technological age, it IS possible to get together a group of people who would love nothing more than to get their names on something that Hollywood is up to. So think big. Don’t let the “budget” paint you into a corner that really doesn’t exist. Many times I’ve recorded a decent orchestra on a shoe-string budget for a film that, in my opinion as the composer, really needed an orchestral sound. It is always worth turning over every rock and calling in every marker to get something bigger than everyone thinks is even possible when people are looking to you to deliver something amazing. So, go on, be the hero and save the day! You’ll get hired again by giving more than you are being asked to give. Everyone wants someone like that on their team.
10. Over Communicate.
    Okay… forget #1! THIS might be the most important one of the bunch! Dale Carnegie said, “The worst thing you can do in business is leave people to their own wondering.” So true. You can never communicate too much. It’s impossible. Find out how your client likes to communicate, whether by email, phone, fax, iChat, whatever… and DO IT TO DEATH! Tell them everytime you revise something, rewrite something, notice something in the picture that you didn’t notice before… anything to help them understand that you are working hard for them and doing what they’ve asked you to do (and sometimes what they HAVEN’T asked you to do!). NEVER let your creative team not hear from you in days. That’s the cardinal sin. The score is likely the first time that the creative team has let go of the project to an outside independent creative talent like yourself, and they need reassurance that you are not killing the “baby” they just spent the last two years of their life carrying.

Sometimes, part of being diverse means being flexible and ready to do whatever it takes. The job of a film composer is one of service to the director and service to the film itself. We cannot afford to be unbendable or unteachable in our careers. Being diverse in how you handle situations and flexible in how you handle stress and obstacles is vital to your success in this business. Some of it will come with time and learning the hard way, but most of it can come with common sense and solid planning.

This is my list – if you have a few of your own, I’d love to hear them!

I’ve been on my back for the last 24 hours with the flu. I don’t know how I got it, except to say that lately I’ve been running pretty hard on very little rest, and so I think it was just my turn.

When you’re sick you can’t do much, which is a real pain in the ass for guys like me who hard time sitting still for five minutes. I’m pretty sure it’s God’s way of telling me that I need to take a break. Today, I got that chance, and it provided me with an opportunity to share something with all of you that I thought was pretty cool.

In one of my many neglected industry mags that I’ve let stack up by the front door over the last several weeks, I read an interview with James Cameron about his forthcoming highly anticipated film “Avatar”. He doesn’t spill any beans about the movie for us Sci-Fi geeks that have been waiting for a good four years, but he says some pretty cool things in the interview about his film making process.

After a bunch of stuff about how Cameron got into movies, what it was like working for Roger Corman, and how he talked the studio into letting him finish “Titanic”, the interviewer asked him, “Why do you think you’ve been so lucky as a filmmaker?”

Cameron gave this as his answer:

“Luck? Look, when I was 10 years old, I knew I wanted to do this for a living. When I started in Hollywood, yes, I got some breaks, but those breaks were opportunities born out of sheer preparedness and hand-to-the-plow work ethic. I’ve had some crazy ideas, and thanks to those ideas everything I’ve ever accomplished has come about because I literally talked the decision-makers into liking my idea. Nobody has ever wanted to give me anything until I convinced them to. If you want to succeed in this industry, or any industry for that matter, you have to work like you have no other choice but to succeed. Luck has nothing to do with it.”

Some people might read Cameron’s words and dismiss them as more rhetoric from someone already accused on several occasions of being an egomaniac. But when I read this, I smiled.

He’s right. I don’t believe in the concept of a “self-made” man – everyone has had help at one point or another. However, there is a notion Cameron is speaking about here that I’ve heard before and completely agree with: Opportunities are not given, they are taken. When someone gives you a shot at something, the execution of the opportunity lives or dies with you. If you don’t have the skills to pay the bills, what good is an opportunity from someone in the first place?

The first job I had in the industry writing original music was for Monday Night Football at ABC Sports. I was scared out of my mind, and my first couple of weeks on the show consisted of days of pure joy punctuated by moments of sheer terror. In my heart I knew I could do it, but my head daily told me otherwise. I made a lot of mistakes working on that show, but I learned from them quickly. In hindsight, however, I would have made many greater mistakes had I not prepared myself for the day when someone said, “You’re up, kiddo!”

Before Monday Night Football, I had zero experience with television schedules, broadcasting formats, and delivery specifications. But what I did have were the scoring chops and production skills necessary to sustain writing 41 minutes of music every week for four months straight with no break in the schedule. Those skills did not come about through osmosis; they came about through years of musically training myself like a marathon runner so that when it came time for me to take the baton I could hit the ground running and never look back. In my experience, the anticipation of opportunity plus preparation, knowledge, and a certain amount of wild-eyed craziness was the recipe for success.

You are the only one who can guarantee your own success at this. With preparation and work ethic you will make it in this business. But it’s all on you. Luck has nothing to do with it.

PROCRASTINATION:

The issue of procrastination is a tough topic, and probably one of the top five things we music people do not like to talk about. However, if we are honest with ourselves, the question is not “Do you procrastinate?” as much as it is “How do you procrastinate?”

While most of the world would view procrastination as a negative, sometimes it can be a very useful tool to accomplish perfect work. A guest lecturer I once had at USC said that his version of procrastination was to keep his sketches from a certain orchestrator until the very night before a session. He found that the orchestrator’s initial instincts were often dead-on accurate, and over the years he’d realized that leaving the orchestrator with the music for too long would impair his otherwise perfect choices for the orchestra.

I think all too often, the world defines “procrastination” as a negative characteristic in people, which is not necessarily the correct definition of the word. Procrastination can be positive or negative. But the real meat and potatoes of this discussion comes down to one simple word: planning. Procrastination is all about planning. Procrastination can be a useful tool, but you have to plan for it.

In my career as a composer, I utilize the method of planned procrastination all of the time. There are certain things that I simply do better when under pressure, and since I know that about myself, I allow for it in the schedule. I tend to keep pretty organized during a project and have key methods for staying on-task during a harsh deadline. I carefully plot out all of the steps necessary to deliver my score on-time and on-budget, and that includes the things I know I will put off until the last minute.

Now, that doesn’t mean that things aren’t stressful during deadline week (just ask Brian Satterwhite about this, who learned of my planned procrastination on a recent project we did together!) During deadline week, there is just a perfect storm always brewing and you often become a fireman instead of a composer. You can still, however, allow in your planned schedule for these types of fires to be started as well as adequate time for them to be put out.

In our business, you are in a position to write a certain number of minutes of music per day, and falling behind on that means that you will be in big trouble down the line. EVERYTHING must be planned for in a film music schedule.

For example, many of us on the SCOREcast Core Team are passionate about mentoring others in our industry. Joe Trapanese and Lee Sanders both are involved in teaching courses on film music and music production at universities here in Los Angeles. Brian Satterwhite hosts a great radio show in Austin and promotes film music publically as a contributor to many popular online publications. For all of us, helping others is important, but it requires extreme planning. I am a very generous person by nature, but I know myself: I’ll give away the farm and not have any hens left to feed my own family with. I do not have the time, financial bandwidth, and overall resources to be generous to everyone all of the time, so I have to plan for it. I simply know to “X” out a couple of days a month where my whole day will just be spent doing nothing but helping someone else. When planning out my financial budget for each month, I know to “X” out a certain number of dollars that are just going to go to someone else who needs them worse than I do. And the list goes on and on.

So, SCOREcasters, I ask you: What do you need to plan for? Usually, it will be a weakness about you that requires extra planning for. Sometimes, it is a positive thing that you do as a person that requires the extra planning. The point is, there are only so many hours in a day, and each hour given to you is one during which you should ultimately be writing music for your deadline. Do you wait until the last minute to work on important tasks, or do the tasks which most people deem important not fall so closely to the line on your list of priorities? Do you do the hard things first and the easier things last, or vice-versa? Do you give time in your schedule for unexpected phone calls, daily office interuptions, and children blasting through your studio doors after a long school day?

Talk to me.

WELCOME TO SCOREcastOnline.com!
What’s up, everybody!

My big audacious goal was to stay up last night to watch this happen in real time, but I fell asleep like a loser and just didn’t have the stamina to hang in and watch it all unfold. p

This is a day that I’ve been waiting for for about three years – the day that SCOREcast grows up, takes the gloves off, puts its big-boy pants on and gets serious about mentoring, coaching, and helping people navigate through the jungle of the film music business.

This launch has not been without its obstacles, pratfalls, and perils – most of them technical, of course – as we’ve tried to figure out the best way to bring you all the content you want and have come to expect from the SCOREcast podcasts over the years. But the biggest challenge was not technical at all. In all honesty, my biggest fear was that some of you might be thinking what I would be thinking if I were you: “Oh great! Another film music site that is going to over-promise and under-deliver. Another site that is going to tell me how much they can help me if I sign up for their membership, download their guide, and attend their seminar.”

Well… no. Actually, not at all. When we started broadcasting podcast episodes in October of 2006, I promised myself that if we ever made it difficult for people to get into the film music world by making them jump through a bunch of hoops to get to our content, then we have failed at our objectives. I’ve said it before on the podcast, and I’ll say it again here: There has never been a better time for you to launch your career in film music, and SCOREcast is a tool for you to use to accomplish that goal. Pure and simple. No strings attached. Besides, the best things in life are still free, baby!

But in all seriousness, that IS the essence of SCOREcast: Helping you launch and maintain a healthy, lasting, and fruitful film music career. Here you will find seasoned mentors as well as people who have never written a note. Here you will find people who are interested in sharing with you the TRUTH about how they got into this business, as well as people who will share with you the TRUTH about why they never quite made it. Here you will find those who are not afraid to talk to you about what you should be doing, as well as those who will tell you what you are doing right.

We’ve all been there. Everyone started somewhere. Whether we were assistants to composers or scoring student films for pizza and beer, we’ve all been at the crossroads of not knowing where to go next to get to the next level in our careers. So, this is where all of that wondering and not knowing can change for you as you peel back the onion that is this business.

My advice? Get involved here at SCOREcastOnline.com. Login for free (!!!) and get to know some folks. There are thousands of people here that listen to our podcasts every month that are in the same boat you are in, and there are just as many that have achieved in this business what you desire to achieve in your own career. So why reinvent the wheel? Find those people – they love to talk about this stuff – and get to know them. The new way of the world is “access”. Use it that opportunity here at SCOREcastOnline.com and be enriched by it.

As SCOREcast launches into this new era, come on the ride with us. I promise it will be worth the adventure!