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It’s All About Timing

Stop Scoring to Picture

Mickey Mouse is Dead

Pace Yourself

Glue and Grease

De-Clutter Your Scores

P.S. Click here if you’re ready to start landing paid composing work.

✍️ Why We Over-Score

Over-scoring is one of the most common pain points for media composers.

(I’m guilty of it, too. ✋)

I find that over-scoring tends to be caused by one of two culprits (and sometimes both):

<aside> 🧠 Our Ego. When we focus on making something cool, smart, or ground-breaking, we risk doing so at the expense of making something functional. In other words, before your music can be any of the first three things, it has to actually work when you put it to picture.

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<aside> ⏰ Too Much Time. With excessive time to work on our music, we’ll often get bored of what we’ve written, so we’ll add more. And more. And more. And suddenly, our original ideas are buried beneath layers of new, mostly-unnecessary extra musical elements.

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So for most cases, focusing on serving the picture and avoiding over-baking ideas are the two best things you can do to de-clutter your music.

If you did these two things, you’ll solve 90% of your over-writing.

But you might need a little more guidance. 🆘

❌ The Five Don’ts to De-Clutter Your Music

  1. Don’t hold onto ideas that aren’t working. Get comfortable hitting delete. The longer you hold onto an idea that doesn’t work, the harder it is to let it go later.
  2. Don’t over-invest in sketches. Piano sketches will always sound empty in contrast to an orchestra. Over-sketching usually leads to overcompensation with dense voicings, counterpoints, and a lack of contrast.
  3. Don’t compose to a script. The picture you see in your head when reading a script is NOT what the director sees. Save yourself the pain of having to re-write your score by waiting until you see what the picture was intended to be (or close to it).
  4. Don’t mute dialogue/SFX. Music is only one of three primary sonic elements in media. Treat dialogue and SFX as band-mates to your music, and allow them to help you decide when to push music forward or lean it back.
  5. Don’t send your piece the same day you finish it. Give yourself at least a day to re-listen with “clear ears”. What your piece needs becomes more apparent when you take some time away from it.