Three Honest Truths — Reflections From Composing 500+ Tracks

Photo by Dawid Zawiła on Unsplash

For anyone who has read any prior posts of mine, a trend can be observed that it’s half introspection, half analysis, and ALL waffle. So please forgive this particularly introspective and indulgent look into a topic dear to me. Me.

Few would be surprised to learn that since 2004 I have logged and tracked every music composition I ever made. Having recently surpassed 500 compositions I thought it would be interesting to dive into some of the data and see if anything insightful could be gleaned from the analysis.

But before all that, a little background on my journey as a video game composer which will hopefully contextualise some of the data here. As well as let me take a little trip down memory lane.

My journey (so far) as an Indie Game Composer

I started out in earnest — and indeed remained for many years — as a hobbyist Composer. My first taste of collaborating with others was as a teenager — not in a band — but as a Composer for an indie game project with friends. The project never came to fruition but it gave me a glimpse of something that has stayed with me for nearing two decades; the feeling of collaborating with a small group of people who are striving to achieve a shared and ambitious creative vision in the form of a video game.

This remained a spare time evenings-and-weekends endeavor for me for many years. Whilst I was fortunate enough to have piano lessons (and go through the grade exams) in my younger years, and was able to study for a Music GCSE and Music Technology A-Level, I never attended a music school or formally studied anything audio related beyond that, or indeed ever worked in a traditional studio system in an audio related role. I opted instead for an Accounting & Finance degree, and a career in Finance and Data Analytics.

It wasn’t until 2013 that I decided to invest more time and effort into writing music for games. In the years that followed, opportunities and interests grew into making indie games alongside my brother, scoring (and filming!) self-produced short films and event videography, securing client work, expanding into sound design, and making friends with folks with similar interests to me by collaborating on projects together.

I’m currently working part-time in Finance and Data Analytics, part time as a Freelance Composer and Sound Designer, and part time as an Indie Developer with my brother. It’s context switching galore, but I’m genuinely thrilled to be in the privileged, challenging, and utterly generalist position that I am in.

So why am I saying all this? I want to drive home that I have absolutely no idea whether any of this is a typical journey for people in game audio or whether a typical journey even exists. I have no real clue as to whether or not 500 compositions is a lot given the years, or whether I’ve gone about any of this the “right” way. Maybe it depends how you look at it.

I haven’t followed a path where my experience has stemmed from an intentional expansion of skills sourced from a formal curriculum or a traditional studio system.

My music has often been made at times when discipline (thankfully) triumphed over motivation. I’ve gone against almost all sound advice to focus on a single discipline and instead have said yes to almost every passing, exciting, exhausting music related opportunity that has come my way. And I’ve done it in tandem with a career in a different sector entirely.

Being completely honest, I was a little insecure about that. At best it’s a confusing LinkedIn profile, and at worst you’re not given the time of day by anyone as a legitimate Composer who cares about their craft.

But over the years I’ve always tried to take something useful away from each experience (good or bad), learn a little bit about a broad range of topics, work collaboratively with a diverse range of people and solve problems in creative ways. In fact, I have written some thoughts about the value of transferable skills here.

Overall, I have found that this approach has made me the generalist, curiosity-laden, classically-fascinated, synth-loving, sound-making, data-wrangling, code-tweaking, spreadsheet-adoring, pun-wielding, walking identity crisis that I am today. And I’m finally at a place where I am at peace with that.

The data I’ve collected

Here’s a little bit about the data I’ve been collecting on my compositions.

Firstly, what does a single composition represent? It’s basically a piece of music. This ranges from a short stinger/bumper of just a few seconds, to a larger more sprawling track that lasts a few minutes.

I’ve not separately included the constituent parts of a given piece of music (with games being an interactive media, music can be implemented in all sorts of ways in-game, including dynamically assembled horizontally and/or vertically etc). So if a piece contained lots of constituent parts, that’s still one composition in this context.

Secondly, I’d also note that I’ve haven’t documented every single musical sketch I’ve ever made. More often than not items making it onto the list were progressed and iterated upon enough that they felt like a cohesive track.

So with that being said, for each entry that I tracked, I’ve specified the following:

• Track name
• Project name (that the track was for).
• The type of project that it is (which I group into “Video Game”, “Game Jam”, “Films”, “Personal” or “Other”).
• Month and Year of composition
• The track length
• The fate of that project. This is either:
  a) “Released” — released for the project it was intended for.
  b) “Upcoming” — in an upcoming project.
  c) “Reused” — initially in cancelled/rejected projects but I reused them for other things. I wrote a little bit about some of these here.
  d) “Unused — Project Cancelled” — the project ended up being cancelled and music left unused.
  e) “Unused — Rejected” — music that was not used in the projects they were intended for and left unused. Either I rejected it or the client did.

Here are three reflections I’ve made based upon my analysis.

1. I’ve said yes to almost everything

At time of writing, I have catalogued 508 tracks across 91 projects, totalling just over 18 hours of music. This is from:

• 287 video game tracks across 26 projects (ranging from single tracks for pitches, all the way through to full Original Soundtracks). Of these projects, I also designed sound effects for 8 of them.
• 49 film related tracks across 24 projects. This is for things like short films (many of which are self-produced with friends so are technically also ‘personal’!), wedding videography scores, and TV idents (short musical identifiers).
• 15 tracks from 8 Game Jam projects (mostly Ludum Dare)
• 77 tracks from 10 personal projects (this is usually music written when I’m experimenting with new software, techniques or styles).
• 67 tracks from 23 ‘Other’ projects — this is anything that doesn’t fit into the above. Interestingly (to me at least!), many of these were podcast intro themes.

Since 2013, on average I’ve completed 3.6 tracks a month. That’s roughly every 9 days or so. Which makes sense, given up until fairly recently I’ve been pursuing this in the evenings (and not every single evening, life has happened too!).

Interestingly, when I look at the 3 month rolling average since 2004, not only can I see the average rate increasing (given I’ve continued to work on various projects and possibly gotten a little more expedient over time), but I can also see just how volatile my output has been in terms of track count — definite peaks and troughs.

3m Rolling Average of Track Compositions since 2004

This is not some attempt to brag at the multitude of projects I’ve worked on over the years, if anything it’s more of a reflection on the opposite.

As mentioned above, I very rarely, if ever, said no to an opportunity. Even if that meant composing into the early hours for tight deadlines alongside other work. And towards the beginning of this journey, I suspect that wasn’t the worst decision I could have made — I was building a portfolio from the ground up, I was finding what genres and games I enjoy writing music for, and crucially I was (and still continue to) learn techniques to help improve my composition skills, whether it’s harmonisation, orchestration/arranging, synthesis, production/mixing or anything else. Getting to do all that alongside a real-life project with others was, and still remains, incredible for my personal development.

However, I do think there comes a point where I need to take a step back, evaluate what I want to strategically pursue, and target those opportunities with intentionality in mind. And of course, with enough open-mindedness to acknowledge that all kinds of opportunities come from all kinds of places and offer all kinds of value. That could be creative freedom, alignment with my own development goals, financial benefits, or a combination of those things.

Saying yes to something is implicitly saying no to something else. That ‘no’ could be to another opportunity that I may find more fulfilling or strategically aligned with my goals, or to more free time to relax, or simply to more time for developing my skills in specific areas.

2. I am in little control as to how much of this is heard

This point of needing intentionality in what I pursue creatively especially hits home for me when you profile the data by the fate of these compositions:

Summary of Compositions ‘Fate’ — by Track Count.

Summary of Compositions ‘Fate’ — by Hours.

• 51% of my lifetime video game compositions were not used in released projects that they were made for. 40 tracks were reused (generally into stock music sites) with their project having been cancelled, 86 tracks were on projects that were cancelled and music left unused, and 16 tracks were made and left unused where I simply went in a different direction with a different piece.
• The majority of the “Unused — Project Cancelled” video game number above is largely driven by three projects. The remainder are across a number of projects, many of which some musical ideas were formed but the project cancelled before the main body of music was in full swing.
• At time of writing, 22% of my lifetime compositions are in video games that were released.

What do I glean from this? Just that it’s interesting to me that someone who set out to be a video game composer has a little over 1 in 5 compositions in a released video game. This may be the fact that I have predominantly worked in the indie space, it may be the projects that I have pursued, or it may be entirely usual. I have no idea.

Another factor that I started pondering as I was looking at the count of released video game music, was the extent to which the fate of the music is tied to the fate of the game it’s for.

I originally called this section “I’m not in control of my own success”, but that pre-supposes I am defining success as reaching a prolific audience and having music in a game that goes viral and sells millions. Maybe for some that is success (and I’d be lying if I said that wouldn’t be great), but I like to think I consider myself successful for finding intrinsic joy in the act of composing with people I enjoy collaborating with, all whilst being able to (eventually, albeit partly) make music for games as a sustainable living.

That being said, I am of course rooting for the projects I work on to see the light of day, because the alternative is the music not reaching its audience in the way it was intended. Or worse, no audience at all.

But ultimately this isn’t within my control. Enjoying the act of composing for games is.

3. It’s a marathon, not a sprint

No, this isn’t some agile methodology based pun.

I was curious if there was a way I could try and infer if whether over the years I’ve been contributing projects that indicate, on the surface at least, a directional growth for someone transitioning from a hobbyist to professional video game composer. So I reviewed the data specifically from 2013 onwards, reflecting when I started reaching beyond hobbyist projects.

As usual — I will caveat that this is a fairly nuanced and subjective thing that I am using data from a spreadsheet to try and analyze. It’s an inexact science and ultimately only we can say ourselves if we’re going in the direction we want to with creative endeavors. Whilst there is another relevant area that I haven’t analyzed here — remuneration (and agreement specifics) for each project — it’s a topic in and of itself for which I don’t think there is a gold standard or approach that heralds you as officially a successful professional.

That being said, there are three metrics that I have proposed here to try and proxy a sense of directional growth for myself. They are:

• Video game compositions as a proportion of total compositions. This would measure whether I’ve actually been pursuing video games specifically (which is ideally what I’ve been trying to do!)
• Average tracks composed per video game project. This can be used as a proxy for the scale of a project; i.e. more tracks per project implies a larger in scope project. Note that sometimes a project has spanned compositions from multiple years. So to trend it over time, for the purposes of this calculation I’ve considered them as separate projects (unless they are single tracks for a pitch, or projects where I finished a track or two early in the year — in these cases I have excluded them from the calculation).
• Average track length of my video compositions. The assertion here being that a longer track is indicative of a more ambitious project relative to a shorter track.

Proportion of video game music, by year of composition.

Tracks per video game project, by year of composition.

3m Rolling average of composed video game track lengths (in minutes) — by year of composition.

Looking at the data, I’m pleased to see that things are trending in the direction I would hope for. Over the last decade I can see that:

• I am writing more music.
• A greater proportion of my compositions are for video game projects.
• Those video game compositions are longer, and a higher proportion of them are on the same projects, indicating projects of an increasingly ambitious scope.

There is a poetic beauty to the topology of these metrics. They are trending upwards, but that’s only something that I’m able to observe when I stretch it out over a near ten year horizon.

They quite literally illustrate the ups and downs of composing for indie games more deftly than I could ever hope to articulate and truly bring home for me that this endeavor is a marathon and not a sprint.

Conclusion

My takeaways from this analysis have been:

• Seek opportunities with my own intentionality in mind. Saying yes to everything allowed me to experience different types of projects and develop a diverse portfolio, but continuing to say yes to everything after a certain point is implicitly saying no to something else.
• How much my music is heard is not in my control. Much of my creative work was attached to projects that were cancelled, and I also cannot control the reach or reception of the projects that actually do get released. The value for me needs to remain in the sustained, intrinsic joy of composing.
• It’s a marathon and not a sprint. This analysis the result of an accumulation of my compositions, where looking at a moment in time is not as illuminating to me as looking at the trend over a number of years.

To most other people reading this analysis and looking at these graphs, they are just wiggles on pictures. But to me they represent visceral memories and mixed emotions of triumphs, defeats, challenges, rewards, late nights, and an ever so slight melancholic annoyance at succumbing to a self-inflicted toxic side hustle culture for a lot longer than I probably should have done.

I hope this was an insightful read for anyone in a similar position, spending countless amounts of time pondering on whether they’re making the right decisions or going in the right direction with their creative pursuits. You’re not alone.

Thanks for reading!