I Want to be a Composer

Blog

7 Jan

It’s the 7th January 2024, my name is Matt, I’m 38 years old, and I want to be a composer for video games, film, and TV.

I’ve thought a lot about how to document this journey that I’m about to embark on. I had considered setting up another YouTube channel and doing some kind of vlogging thing talking about the what, the why, and the how. But if my ultimate goal is to write music, then video editing, thumbnails, and fighting the algorithm would be one big, unhelpful distraction. I’ve done the whole YouTuber thing, and now I want to do this differently.

Last year I read Austin Kleon’s fun book ‘Show Your Work’. On my Kindle I highlighted many inspirational passages, but one stood out to me as I created this website:

Don't think of your website as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-invention machine. Online, you can become the person you really want to be. Fill your website with your work and your ideas and the stuff you care about. Over the years, you will be tempted to abandon it for the newest, shiniest social network. Don't give in. Don't let it fall into neglect. Think about it in the long term. Stick with it, maintain it, and let it change with you over time.

Austin Kleon (Show Your Work! 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered Austin Kleon)

So here we are. I’m building this website as my own little corner of the internet, absolved from algorithms and liberated from like counts.

So let’s talk about composing.

I’ve been a musician for 27 years now. I started piano at 11, eventually taking on guitar, bass, and drums. I’ve always preferred composing music to performing and once I finished school, I went to the University of Hertfordshire to study composition at undergraduate, then postgraduate level. Back then I wanted to write music for film and aside from a few short film projects in the UK, USA and Australia, nothing much else came about. Then life happened.

I never truly felt like my degrees prepared me in any way for a career in writing music, and to be brutally honest, I didn’t learn a great deal either.

Over the last 10 years though, my interest in film lessened, and my interest in video games grew. I didn’t really know that writing music for games was a thing, but it’s hard to ignore a rapidly growing market with a 2024 forecast of $282 billion dollars. I prefer games to film and TV for reasons I’ll go into another time, so this is the course I’ve set myself.

Starting in January 2024, I’m starting another Postgraduate degree. A Master of Fine Arts in Professional Composition (Video Game Composition and Orchestration) with Thinkspace Education. I’m doing this over the next four years, and here on my little corner of the internet, I’ll be posting all about my progression in this career.

Welcome.