Professional music school

[telecode]

One important thing you need to learn is music is not just a sequence of notes & words, set to a rhythm. It's actually magic. :p

...

yeah, screw that. who needs magic when you got bootayy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRS_PpOrUZ4

[meldavid]

The OP wants to compose for videogames. If all he wants to score for are GTA & NBA games then booteh is all you need. Bootay! BOOTEH!

[telecode]

The OP wants to compose for videogames. If all he wants to score for are GTA & NBA games then booteh is all you need. Bootay! BOOTEH!

Just a word of warning to those wanna be game and film sound designers. The labor market is very project oriented. I work in IT and work on services. I attended a presentation on how a production company makes those high grossing Lego movies and the project process of it . So basically, animators and sound designers are employed as temps. They get on boarded for a few months and then off boarded as their services aren't needed. (I work in IT systems implementation end that handles the onboarding and off boarding)

In case you don't know what on boarding is. It's basically the process of how temporary non full time employees are added and removed from the systems and their access to systems and servers. Basically, those guys and gals are not full time and don't get to sit around browsing the web and getting paid when there is no work to done. They are employed on a project by project basis. I.e. On an animated film who's project might be 3 or 4 years , they are employed about 3 or 4 months towards the very end of the project. Stuff to consider as you embark of you careers . Those creative companies run a very lean and agile compared to big dinosaur corporations.

[Aloysius]

''Professional'' music school? Try McDonald's.

[Passing Bye]

Everything that is famous and well recognized is pricey, also online schools have no actual weight in real world, nobody cares for any of their certificates, maybe you will feel better about yourself to have that in your resume, if you really want any kind of connections after paying good chunk for education, there's SAE Academy and the likes, rich kids and famous lecturers, make friends with someone there.

Today you work if you know people, than if you have anything to be noticed for, passion is needed drive, but it's nothing without connections and hard work, you not being musician or engineer is limiting enough, it's cruel world out there, hard working musicians and engineers with decades of experience and full blown studios are desperate for work, more desperate they are, less work for you, because they can do everything you can and more.

Competition is strong and every day there is one new guy wanting to make a living from this art and 3 more that are doing it for far too long and now want to make some money too, I'm not trying to discourage you, but just put you in reality, it will take so many blood, sweat and tears even if you become established, as newbie, you are nowhere on map, people will have second taught to have you working for free, serious people that pay serious money, so you will probably end up doing a lot off free beats for local rappers and releases for some irrelevant labels that earn you peanuts.

Lay off all this making money with music and actually use that passion to drive you trough your journey of becoming an artist, musician or engineer, than when you actually have something to offer, than revisit this whole making money aspect and don't expect much, that way you have a chance to not fall apart and make it trough, now is just cart before the horse pretty much, making money comes after everything and it's frustrating as any other job out there, good luck.

[Distorted Horizon]

I would like to make this passion a real job!

At least don't ask an opinion from my girlfriend. I'm only few years older than you and she said that I'm too old to become anything anymore.

What a lovely person..

[Distorted Horizon]

it's cruel world out there

Everything he said.

[thecontrolcentre]

I'am italian, 29 years old, I have always been passionate about music, and I would like to make this passion a real job!

Thank you all!

What musical experience do you have? Do you play any instruments? What sort of music do you make/want to make?

No i don't play instrument, and i'have never studied music in my life
But i have a great passoin!

Get some skills. Learn to play something. I have a passion for my football club, but I'm not expecting to make a career from it as I cant play.

I started my first band when I was your age, after 3 years learning to play guitar & teaching myself to write my own songs. Passion is not enough without ability and dedication imho.

[meldavid]

Checkout the game Stardew Valley. Just one guy developed that. He coded it himself, and produced the music for it. Admittedly the game is a Harvest Moon rip off, but he souped it up some! If you can do something like that guy you will begin to get noticed. Don't need to develop a Call of Duty or Skyrim calibre game.

[telecode]

I would like to make this passion a real job!

At least don't ask an opinion from my girlfriend. I'm only few years older than you and she said that I'm too old to become anything anymore.

What a lovely person..

Well, you know what they say, the women in our lives are there to keep us grounded in reality.

How many people do you know who have gotten into a brand new cool band made up of old geezers you never heard of in your life before?

[mgw38]

There is this theory that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice in order to become an expert regardless of what the area is. I am managing an academic department that houses one of the leading game design programs in the US and from my observations this 10,000 hour number seems about right. After about 5 years of intense training, most of our students get to the point where they can do serious stuff at a professional level. If they are very talented they might be faster, but in general 4-5 years of full time dedication is about what the average student needs.

So, you need not only passion, you also need a serious amount of dedication. Talent is a good thing to have but it is actually not that critically necessary (unless you want to become the next Jimi Hendrix, of course). For being able to produce high end professional quality work, the main thing is being able to follow through over many years of trying and not minding the continuous disappointments along the way.

The other thing that has also already been mentioned is that both game design and movie industries largely operate with freelance work these days. People generally hop from project to project and traditional employment is incredibly rare. Some people like it that way, some don't. It is generally not a career you choose because of job security or money.

Fortunately almost all the critical tools are free for non commercial use. The main game engines Unity and Unreal are free, the audio middleware Wwise is free. And even though I usually don't like Reaper all that much, it provides a fairly commercial grade game audio workflow (e.g. Reaper -> Wwise -> Unity) through the Waapi Transfer extension. And Reaper is technically not free, but people tend to treat it that way.

All these tools are now user friendly to the point that any teenager with a computer in his/her bedroom can learn commercial grade game audio development for essentially next to nothing. If I would be you I would simply set myself up with the necessary (free or almost) tools, dive into the many freely available online tutorial, give it a go and see if the passion persists.

And while it is certainly always a good idea to learn an instrument if you are doing any form of audio production, it is actually not that super important if your interest is game audio (or even movie scoring).

[telecode]

Everything that is famous and well recognized is pricey, also online schools have no actual weight in real world, nobody cares for any of their certificates, maybe you will feel better about yourself to have that in your resume, if you really want any kind of connections after paying good chunk for education, there's SAE Academy and the likes, rich kids and famous lecturers, make friends with someone there.

Today you work if you know people, than if you have anything to be noticed for, passion is needed drive, but it's nothing without connections and hard work, you not being musician or engineer is limiting enough, it's cruel world out there, hard working musicians and engineers with decades of experience and full blown studios are desperate for work, more desperate they are, less work for you, because they can do everything you can and more.

Competition is strong and every day there is one new guy wanting to make a living from this art and 3 more that are doing it for far too long and now want to make some money too, I'm not trying to discourage you, but just put you in reality, it will take so many blood, sweat and tears even if you become established, as newbie, you are nowhere on map, people will have second taught to have you working for free, serious people that pay serious money, so you will probably end up doing a lot off free beats for local rappers and releases for some irrelevant labels that earn you peanuts.

Lay off all this making money with music and actually use that passion to drive you trough your journey of becoming an artist, musician or engineer, than when you actually have something to offer, than revisit this whole making money aspect and don't expect much, that way you have a chance to not fall apart and make it trough, now is just cart before the horse pretty much, making money comes after everything and it's frustrating as any other job out there, good luck.

My only comment to this is, it's good to have a new generation of creative people and young blood coming in and making new music and art.

I think creative work is a fine goal and direction if that's what a creative minded person wants to pursue, but it's always always important to keep one eye open on the real world, the bottom line is, you do need an income and you need to make money to eat food. You also need to be realistic about what the work exactly is and that type of person you are. As I stated, from my observation and experience, it's project oriented work. So you need to keep in mind that your soft skills are probably going to be as (if not more!) important than your technical skills. You need to be able to shmooze to get the next gig because you are only going to be employed for a very short time. Not everyone is a good shmoozer.

[mgw38]

Yes, soft skills are of course key in a freelance economy. No way around that.

[telecode]

There is this theory that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice in order to become an expert regardless of what the area is. I am managing an academic department that houses one of the leading game design programs in the US and from my observations this 10,000 hour number seems about right. After about 5 years of intense training, most of our students get to the point where they can do serious stuff at a professional level. If they are very talented they might be faster, but in general 4-5 years of full time dedication is about what the average student needs.

So, you need not only passion, you also need a serious amount of dedication. Talent is a good thing to have but it is actually not that critically necessary (unless you want to become the next Jimi Hendrix, of course). For being able to produce high end professional quality work, the main thing is being able to follow through over many years of trying and not minding the continuous disappointments along the way.

The other thing that has also already been mentioned is that both game design and movie industries largely operate with freelance work these days. People generally hop from project to project and traditional employment is incredibly rare. Some people like it that way, some don't. It is generally not a career you choose because of job security or money.

Fortunately almost all the critical tools are free for non commercial use. The main game engines Unity and Unreal are free, the audio middleware Wwise is free. And even though I usually don't like Reaper all that much, it provides a fairly commercial grade game audio workflow (e.g. Reaper -> Wwise -> Unity) through the Waapi Transfer extension. And Reaper is technically not free, but people tend to treat it that way.

All these tools are now user friendly to the point that any teenager with a computer in his/her bedroom can learn commercial grade game audio development for essentially next to nothing. If I would be you I would simply set myself up with the necessary (free or almost) tools, dive into the many freely available online tutorial, give it a go and see if the passion persists.

And while it is certainly always a good idea to learn an instrument if you are doing any form of audio production, it is actually not that super important if your interest is game audio (or even movie scoring).

Good post. and to add.

If I were you and your age, I would also do:
- set myself a goal and deadline -- meaning 5 years or 10 years max.
- don't get married or settle down because it will have a serious impact on your creative goals
- keep up to date on the industry .. devote as much time as possible staying on top of what is actually going on in the industry. many of is shot ourselves in the foot because we were too focused on the creative side and didn't pay attention to how the industry was changing around us

[Passing Bye]

Great stuff guys!