A Day In The Life Of A Media Composer

Working as a composer for films, TV and games can be exhilarating, enchanting and ever changing, with long days and ever changing requirements for music. It can be the best job in the world providing opportunities to create freely and work with the best musicians, filmmakers and developers all around the world from your own studio. The feeling of sitting down to watch a show and seeing friends, family and even strangers find happiness in what you have created brings such a wonderful sense of fulfilment.

On the other hand it can be immensely isolating, high pressured, and unrelenting with deadline after deadline. Output is constantly judged and criticised, and the requirement to hit immensely high standards never eases. Combining this with the oversaturation of the market and the threat of AI it is easy to see why life as a composer is both a joy and ever unstable.

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A Standard Day

Wake up and get straight into the admin time. The day before I write out a task list for the following day and check my upcoming schedule. The morning administrative tasks I find dull so get what I need to do out of the way soon as I can. I’m not a morning person so this can be anytime between 8-9am, after I’ve wrestled my toddler into his daily routine. 

The first port of call is usually dedicated to responding to client queries, recording scheduling and outreach. I try to do this in the morning as it helps clients action anything they need throughout the day and I do this away from my scoring desk as it mentally separates the creative and administrative spaces for me. 

A quick cup of coffee is standard before launching into the first set of writing tasks for the day. Every day contains a set of tasks, whether this is a full cue, orchestrating a sketch, taking a score into a full MIDI mockup or preparing for recording.

These tasks are always pre-planned ahead of time so I know what I need to complete and how much time I have allocated to the task before the relevant deadline. This keeps me on time for hitting deadlines and ensures every element of a track is written and quality checked as I write. 

I usually have a good hour for lunch. It is important to me to give my ears a break and take a mental break. Pushing hard with writing is fine in bursts but I have found burnout is not fun. Spending a little time interacting with filmmakers and game developers in breaks is always a productive use of time whilst resting.

Sometimes this is listening to a new score or interacting with discussions in industry topics. It is a larger part of life as a composer than even some composers realise and ensures we are not solely working in isolation without context to what is happening in the industry around us. 

After lunch is also the time where I am most switched on and prepared for making important decisions, so this is the time where I prefer to schedule meetings and work on collaborative tasks such as planning deliverables or discussing contracts and deliverables. 

The large portion of the afternoon is again dedicated to writing before reviewing what has been completed and what needs to be done next. I try to limit long generative scoring sessions to a maximum of 3 hours. Everyone is different but I find beyond this what is input doesn’t meet the cut when coming to editing.

A task list is always written for the following day and I keep track of whether I am keeping to schedule, running ahead or behind. Being a little bit of a control freak usually means I track everything and organise all my files in detail.

The final task of the day is usually to check emails and correspondence again. Working in the UK with publishers in the US usually means I get mid-afternoon panic calls to turn around cues or tracks at this time. Sometimes this means a third writing block gets added to the evening or this gets scheduled on the task list for the first block/admin time in the morning.

Every day has a minimum of 1 scoring session if there are a lot of other tasks to achieve but usually 2 or 3 sessions is the norm. Output varies wildly depending on the complexity and task at hand. If I have a tight deadline the tasks get assigned in a pomodoro like schedule to ensure writing decisions get made in strict time.

Each day also has free time blocked out to be used for anything, practice, score analysis or keeping up to date with software and sample developments. The scheduled free time helps if I'm running behind on a track or have a quick turn around job that comes in. The usual request is ‘We’ve got a gig come in for tomorrow and need ‘x’ music writing! This has become frequent enough that I’ve set aside time for this!

This is by no means carved in stone for every single day, there is plenty of flexibility and days leading up to submission of tracks or scores for recording sessions can be whole days of checking parts bar by bar… but this is the usual framework without the frills of networking and attending events.

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