Every ending is a beginning, they say, and I’m looking forward to what comes next! It was Jeff Grace’s last week with us as our composer-in-residence as we finished up scoring In a Valley of Violence. Looking back on the first few weeks, I’ve learned quite a bit about scoring in general from working on this Western. In the past, I’ve been very nervous about putting obvious rhythmic music in my cues, but I’ve recently begun to understand how important it is to use rhythm to move scenes along. This became very important at points in the film when we had to tie together a 4-6 minute scene using just music.

Jeff has been the most thorough and detailed person we’ve worked with so far! He’s been taking his his time to show us how he writes and what his workflow looks like while composing!  All in all, working with Jeff was nothing short of enlightening! As far as the future looks, we have our first class with our next Composer-in-Residence, Reza Safinia this Thursday!

Here’s (most of) our class with Jeff Grace on his last day!

In more exciting news, our Music for Games class received some documents from game developers at Columbia who need composers for their projects! I ended up pitching for a post-apocalyptic first-person shooter that wanted music that is “fast and overtly violent.” I ended up writing two 30-second spec pieces that are in the style of Mick Gordon’s score for DOOM (2016). We’ll be hearing back from the game developers very soon, so I’m hoping I get this gig!

One of the cooler things we’ve done in the past few weeks is score gameplay to fighting games. I chose Mortal Kombat because writing violent music is way too much fun!

There’s one more little development. I’ve started building a slave PC! This is something my workflow has needed for a while now, but my current laptop cant handle the size of the projects I need it to run anymore. This is so exciting, since I’ll be able to host all of my software instruments on the PC, which means that I can use my laptop to focus on running the session, so my projects can be as big as they need to be!

That’s all for now, there’s still more work to be done before the week is out!