Wow, where to start with the past three weeks. Perhaps the most awesome thing that happened was we had the one and only Garry Schyman come to our Music For Games class to talk about his music for Bioshock! This is one of my favorite things about this program, we get these incredibly personal, unique experiences from professionals that some of us have been fans of for ages! I was so excited to finally learn something about using aleatoric techniques in game music and from someone so skilled at it!

The man, himself! Garry Schyman!

Speaking of games, I’ve been hired to work on a student game project! The pitch I sent off impressed everyone on the audio team! Which means I get to score a game in a style that I’m incredibly comfortable in. It also means that my workload just got a TON heavier. We were just given our final project for the semester, which is scoring gameplay of the game Journey, that will be recorded by a live ensemble that we’ll conduct in December! I’m nearly done with the mock-up. I can’t wait to hear what it’ll sound like with the live players!

While everyone’s incredibly busy, it’s still important to take breaks!

So while I’m working on the two game projects, we’ve also been tasked with working in two-composer teams in Scoring with Reza Safinia! The film we’re working on is a Kung-Fu film, and it needs some of the most over-the-top intense music that we can write. I’ve partnered with my friend Andrew Byars to tackle this behemoth, and on Thursday we’ll get to see the fruits of our labors! It’s so interesting working as a team, because you both have so much experience and skill to bring to the table that the other doesn’t necessarily have. Thankfully, we work really well together and have written some awesome thematic material already. I’ve been taking care of the percussion-heavy action scenes, which requires precise timing so the music feels properly paced, and interesting enough writing so your percussion doesn’t become boring after ten seconds. Andrew’s been doing the main titles and the end of the fight scene, which require a little more finesse compositionally. You need to be aware of dramatic changes in that case, but it’s totally up to you how you hit them.

Truthfully, I needed to pull one heck of an all-nighter last night in order to get my work done for this week. I had a bit of a storage crisis, and my computer only had 84 megabytes of space on it. I ended up having to spend Monday and Tuesday re-organizing all of my sample libraries, and getting unnecessary data off of the main hard drive. I’m happy that it’s all sorted out, but this was definitely a lesson in keeping an eye on how much stuff you have stored on your main computer. Learn from my mistakes and keep your HD clear! You never know when you’ll be swamped with work to do, and the last thing you want to end up doing is using valuable work hours to move some files around. Like our lab instructor Dan said: “In reality, you might as well be getting a Master’s in data management.”

My Master’s in data management at work!

That’s all for now! I’ll see you guys next time!