SCOREcast 32: Tom Salta

Veteran video game composer Tom Salta stops by to chat with the boys about the art and business of scoring video games during SCOREcast’s 5th Anniversary episode.

SCOREcast 31: Total Request (Sorta) LIVE!

In our first Q&A episode, we open up Twitter, Facebook, and a hangout on Google+ to hear what’s on your mind about writing, producing, “politiking”, and navigating the business.

Is “Score Design” Dead?

Composers LOVE to say that they use all of their own sounds. We call B.S.!

To Be Busy or To Not Be Busy

Being busy creates demand for your work. As humans, we subconsciously see what everyone else is getting and we want that, too. Ultimately, you want to create demand for yourself and your music, and perhaps the simple act of being a busy composer, regardless of what you are busy with… will do that for you. Or will it?

Ryan Leach: Long Distance Scoring

Today’s technology has made it possible to score a project with anyone no matter where they’re located. However, long distance scoring does come with plenty of challenges.

Thoughts On Assisting Composers: Part II

Last time, in this space, I walked you through some of the scenarios I’ve seen as a composer’s assistant, and how I’ve either learned from them or eschewed them as personal practices in my own career. Let’s look at a few more, these ones having to do more with money and time. Budgeting It seems the higher up the food chain you go in the film music world, budgeting for recording sessions gets more involved and a lot harder. In fact, I would say that the more legit your recording session is, the tougher it is to pay for. An example would be a union scale production. If you are working on an independent film…

Life-Changing Charts

This is one of those months where I want to write another novel-length column (hot on the heels of last week’s Weekend Provocation, which was, how you say, loooooong). September’s theme of scheduling and budgeting is that crucial. It’s that fundamental. I’ll try to help you stay on schedule, though, by keeping my focus limited. I’m going to look at scheduling by diving into a couple of days out of my own composing life. With the help of some handy-dandy charts. What am I doing well? And, more importantly, where can I improve? First, consider the following chart: These are my actual time expenditures from last Wednesday (I kept a schedule—which accounted for about 15…

Productive Time Management

Its late on Tuesday night, and you’ve forgot to buy the groceries that day. The kitchen cupboards are bare, so there’s nothing to be cooked. Your stomach growls at you in hunger, screaming “feed me” and you reluctantly decide that Turkish Kebab place down the road is your only option at this point. You return a few minutes later with that dirty kebab, and get back to work, having just spent more on the kebab than you would have done for about 2 days worth of food. Eventually after staring at the computer screen for another 2 hours, you feel sleepy and decide to call it a night – all due to that darn kebab….

Music, Time & Money

Here’s your novel-length (but, I hope, exceedingly valuable!) provocation for the weekend… more of a self-assessment question, really: What does it cost you—in time and money—to write one minute of music? It’s an important thing to know, agreed? If, at the very least, we’re looking to break even (i.e., not have to pay for the privilege of writing music), we ought to know what kind of return we need on each minute we create. You can get as granular as you want with this, but I think starting with a broad-strokes approach is acceptable for our purposes. And it’ll give you a good sense of how to budget and schedule… making it topical for our…

James Olszewski: Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick Two

One of the common conversations around the office in my day job revolves around the phrase “Good, Fast, and Cheap: Pick Two”. This is a classic project management conundrum that plagues stakeholders in all industries. The idea behind it is: You can have a high quality product quickly, but it will be expensive. You can have a high quality product cheaply, but you won’t get it quickly. You can put out a product quickly and cheaply, at the expense of quality. Of course you have stakeholders (and in this context that would be Directors, execs, etc.) who would look at the above and say “Nonsense. Give me all three.” Even so, I’d like your tips…

Houston Haynes: Personal Scheduling In an Online, Mobile World – Chime In!

Like so many jobs in the entertainment biz, this career demands an ever-increasing level of technical savoir faire. And yet so many composers have blind spots when it comes to leveraging technology to keep their work schedule on track. We’re often housed in a facility full of computers, with a cell phone strapped to our belt and a bagged laptop under the desk. Yet we’re still surprised when a session runs long and we miss a meeting, an email goes unanswered or we lose a time window to return an important call at a respectable hour. Sometimes assistants can help avoid such pratfalls. But just like most composers can’t afford a full-time orchestrator, copyist or…

No Money, No Time

Happy weekend, everyone—and for our United States readers, Happy Labor Day. Hope you’re laboring on something inspiring and energizing. In the true spirit of WP, it’s time to take some potshots at this month’s theme. Provocation: Composers should work without schedules and/or budgets. …obvious, right? Turning the whole thing on its head and seeing what shakes out before we get too far into this month’s (sure-to-be-killer) content. Schedules and budgets are what keep us in line. They routine our work hours; they constrain our dreams of 100-piece orchestras. But maybe, just maybe, there’s something valuable in considering what might be… if we weren’t so constrained. One that strikes me straightaway is this: Filmmakers don’t care about…