My Three Core Values as a Composer for Visual media

1. Contribute a ton of value

I want to offer the best collaborative experience anyone has ever had. My overarching goal as a composer is to contribute massive value to a project and its team by doing more work and giving more effort than is expected. I always try to go beyond, am always there, and am totally focused on the people I work with. Being candid, working diligently, and trusting each other are sources of excitement for me. This is how, together, we’ll push boundaries and exceed our audience’s expectations;

2. Prioritize creative leadership

I’m here to offer my unique creative vision that’s appropriate, yet fresh to a director’s vision. My biggest motivation is to create work that’s beyond what people could possibly imagine. That happens by frequently experimenting, and asking questions that truly dig into a story. I want every musical note and sound to be intentional;

3. Connect on a personal level

I get excited about great stories. Having a creative connection with the project I’m working on is super important. More importantly, I really want to connect with the storyteller behind that project. I want my passion to match theirs. I want to understand their goals and get into the heart of their project.

I want to be known as the kindest, most innovative, and most valuable creative person in the world of entertainment

I'm realizing that, often, actions actually DON'T speak louder than words.

For years, I believed that if I remained quiet in regards to the things I was doing/wanted to do, people would eventually find out.

While somewhat true, I don't believe that's enough to build the career I want.

The actions I take are usually only known by the individuals I interact with. Meanwhile, the majority of the world doesn't know that I've helped hundreds of people accomplish their (sometimes biggest) goals.

I mostly didn't share a lot of what I was doing (and still don't share the majority) because I thought it made me humble, which is a state of being that I didn't mind inhabiting.

But, historically, some of the most well-known people have been excellent self promoters.

After all, if I don't tell anybody that I want to be one of the greatest, how are they supposed to know I can help them do the things they wanna do on my journey to the top?

My work certainly speaks for itself, but now I'm looking to speak for me as a person.

I know who I am. I know I help a lot of people. The people I help know that I've helped them. I have fulfilled my modesty quota many times over, because I've overcompensated for my strong inner ambitions.

To be unassuming is to be relatively invisible—especially in the entertainment industry—and that's not the career I want.

So what do I actually wanna be? What's been on my list of goals, and the thing I've been thinking of for at least the past 7 years?

I want to be known as the kindest, most innovative, and most valuable creative person—within multiple generations—in the world of entertainment.

I want to contribute a massive amount of important art to our society

With the career I have now, the two things I prioritize more than finding a multitude of financial opportunities are:

1. Working with a handful of very creative storytellers who put out high quality work;

2. Becoming well known so I have more opportunities to meet those artists.

I've been producing music for ~11 years now, so I like the idea of gradually shifting towards taking projects on because I feel massively passionate about them, rather than to financially support any adjunct career structures.

This was never solely about money, but money does lead us to interesting places.

For my teammates at Outlier, that meant finding opportunities that helped nurture our multiple departments. Every money-making thing we've developed as an organization has been about feeding into our diverse passions.

Ultimately, I'm often overwhelmed by the feeling of wanting to contribute to our greater society with the skills I've developed as a storyteller.

This feeling is why I do things that are beyond music, like develop stories and explore the animation process.

I have so many objectives. I have so much drive to create things. At nearly 32 years old, I’m excited by the idea of using my youth to power through as many creative endeavors as I possibly can for the next 40 years.

I want to contribute a massive amount of important art to our society.

I Obsess Over The Number Of Hours I Work, And Here's Why...

I've been tracking the amount of work I do every day for the past 811 days (since late 2018). Last year I only did ~780 hours of deeply creative music work, which comes out to 2.7 hours per day for 286 days. I run a studio and have business admin work, so I’m certainly doing more than 3-ish hours of non-deep work per day. Even still, I believe those numbers to be low for what I want to do with my life.

This year, I’m hoping to get an equivalent of at least 3.5 hours per day so I can get closer to ~1000 hours/year. I recently read Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey, and it seems like, historically, many highly creative people work about 3 hours/day on their craft. I realize that this book covers tiny snapshots in people’s lives, but I don’t mind basing this on that paper-thin slice of knowledge. Ultimately, my goal is to create as many great works as I possibly can before I peace out.

In my mid 20's I started to feel like I had to make every day matter. I didn't have a near-death experience that inspired this, but I did have a realization that life is fantastically beautiful, and my time here is tragically limited (even if my generation does live 100+ years).

Since then, I've never been able to shake that feeling of "do it now, or you won't get to do everything you wanna do." That's what has made me truly enjoy every part of my life. It's also what drives me to help other people do what they wanna do as well. There is no greater joy.

For my friends and colleagues (and literal strangers sometimes), this is why you've seen me obsess over your projects, and why I, a musician, enjoy spending hours figuring out how to make "that one character" in draft 2 of your script become more compelling.

I'm just trying to do as much as I can. I'm trying to release all of my creativity out into the world as intensely and consistently as possible. The human experience is too great and too wonderfully varied to not share with each other. That's the root of my creative obsession.

Something about myself that sounds totally made up, but is 100% true...

In my early 20's, I learned a trick that could get me into exclusive clubs, private events, restricted areas, film premieres, and private tours of places that would usually cost a lot of money to get into.

I used this trick to get invited to watch Maroon 5 at a private event on an island. Another time, I had an opportunity to watch Bruno Mars (truly an amazing performer) AND The Black Keys up close and on the same night.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, so I would always get invited to wine country too. The amount of cheese and wine I experienced was mind blowing. The wineries would always gift their wines before I left.

I was also able to experience foods cooked by some of the top chefs in the world.

Another time, I was invited to go to the exclusive cast and crew premiere of PIXAR's Monster University over at the Bill Graham Theater in San Francisco. I was right there with the animators and actors.

Don't even get me started about the baseball games at Giants stadium! Those were kinda nuts, but I did go a few times before declining their invitations. The coolest part was being able to walk on the field.

One of my favorite places and earliest memories of when I first learned this trick is when I was invited to tour the entirety of the Exploratorium while it was completely empty of guests. I spent hours walking around, playing with stuff, and eating the different foods at the excellent restaurant they have right on the water of the San Francisco Bay.

Another place worth mentioning was when I had dinner at a United States Aircraft Carrier. That was insane. I did that on a few different occasions.

I've bumped shoulders with a lot of highly influential people, including Adam Savage (one of the Mythbusters) Charles Schwab (literally THE man himself), and Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter (I was there the very night Twitter went public on the stock market—seriously huge party). I even went to some of these people's houses!

Everything I've just written is 100% true. I've actually done all of those things. My 20's were VERY eventful. Believe it or not, all of this happened within only a couple of years.

You wanna know what the trick is?

Being desperately poor.

That's right. Scoring short films while working on my music career was not cool enough to get invited to these events. 🙄

But you know what was cool enough to get invited?

Taking a part time job as an EVENT STAFFER.

I was "bumping shoulders" with highly influential people because it was crowded while I was PASSING OUT HORS D'OEUVRES.

I got private tours of exhibits and museums because I had to get there early to SET UP FOR THE EVENT.

I went to the premiere of a PIXAR film because I was hired to POINT PEOPLE TOWARDS THE BATHROOM.

It wasn't always glamorous, but it was seriously one of the coolest jobs I've ever had. It’s pretty incredible what we can do when we’re hungry for something. I think I’ll always be a little hungry for something.

Who is Shang-Chi: A story about the first time I shared my music ideas with Marvel Studios

I've been holding onto this story for a long time. But, for every Lunar New Year that passes by since I made this, I think about my hunger to get this out into the world. Not predominantly because I want to share the music or my ideas—that material has already made its way to the appropriate people. More so because it contains a story that's personal to who I am.

Also, I've done a handful of these "audio journals" and they feel very representative of how I see myself and my career. I love telling stories—not limited to just music—in hopes that it might change the way people see the world around them.

In September of 2019, largely motivated by my friend and collaborator, Simu Liu (who landed the titular role of Shang-Chi), I sent my music ideas for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings to the people at Marvel Studios. You can hear the music here, but now I'd like to share one of my favorite parts about that presentation...

This is my Audio Journal for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

Lastly, I know the inevitable question is "So, what happened after you sent it?"

Well, let's just save that story for another time.

Happy new year, friends and fam.

Here's the result of my John Williams/Star Wars exercise...

I spent exactly 125.50 hours on this. That is, learning John Williams stylings and writing Star Wars music for this project.

This really pushed the limits of my skills as a composer. It was an exploration of a style that I personally didn't have any experience writing. Seeing my music work within the Star Wars universe for the first time is VERY rewarding.

Thanks to my teammates Bill Snyder III and Roland Bingaman at Outlier Studios for helping me. And to director Ian Wilkins for having us on another episode of his Dark Empire series.

I spent 3.5 years writing music for NORMAN (2021) SciFi Time Travel Film

NORMAN has gone through so much through the years. More recently, it finished its run at festivals around the world, it won awards, it got acquired, and it finally got domestic distribution.

You will be able to watch Norman anywhere you can rent or buy films (like Amazon)—even at 4,000 Walmart locations:

I'm also excited that we finally get to release the soundtrack to this thing. I specifically asked Joel Guelzo, the director, to talk about the soundtrack in this video so that I could say, "I specifically asked Joel to talk about the soundtrack in this video" in this post.

And he obliged! Now you can watch the video and get a glimpse at what I did those 3.5 years.

A Few Weeks Ago, I Wrote A Piece Of Music That Made Me Feel Inadequate

The Story

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece of music that made me feel inadequate.

It was one of those moments where everything I did made me feel like I wasn't good enough at my job.

I realized that, while I was happy with my music production and composition skills (big/clear sounds, good melodies, and solid grasp on harmonies) my orchestral arranging skills were comparatively imbalanced.

For those of you that don't know what orchestration is exactly:

• Composition is creating melodies from (seemingly) thin air. Just pure musical ideas.

• Orchestration is giving those melodies (and harmonies) to different instruments in the orchestra.

If I could offer an analogy, great composition without solid orchestration is a delicious meal that's haphazardly thrown onto a plate...

It tastes pretty good, but it would have been a lot better if they'd put everything in its place. (And if you're really good at plating, then you can charge a lot of money for that meal.)

So I dug in...

I chose one of my favorite composers, Joe Hisaishi. And I went into this with the goal of recreating his piece, “The Legend of Ashitaka” from Princess Mononoke, from scratch.

My Process: Treat It Like A Workout (i.e. Don’t Cut Corners Because Every Little Bit Counts)

To extract the most out of this exercise, I listened to his piece a million times, and did a simple piano reduction by ear. I also cross-referenced a couple of fan-written scores online.

I limited the piano reduction to 4 voices (essentially, the notes that make up the melody and chords) because this is how I'd previously started my compositions.

I've enjoyed this way of working because it helps me establish a very basic structure. And it instantly allows me to see voicings "horizontally" (melodically, from left to right), in addition to "vertically" (harmonically, from top to bottom). A lot like regular sheet music does.

Once I'd finished the piano reduction, my next step was to blow it back up into all the different parts: Woodwinds, Brass, Strings, Harp, Percussion, and some Synthesizers for added color. Actually...

That's the biggest thing I got out of this—orchestration is purely about color. It's not really about size or volume—that's music production/mixing. My issue was that I had a hammer (confidence in production skills), and everything I saw (including orchestration) was a nail.

Finally, I finished orchestrating everything according to how Hisaishi did it—including playing with tempo so that I could give it more movement and life.

But I knew that wouldn't be enough for me. To truly get as much as I could out of this "workout," I added instruments to see if I could supplement without making things messy (my original problem)—and not rely on any mixing AT ALL.

In fact, I never touched a single fader on this piece, which is testament to how great all of these sample libraries are, and to how effective good orchestration can be. Good orchestration can often take the role of a good mix.

Speaking of samples, here are all...

The Sample Libraries And Tools I Used

• Spitfire Audio: Symphonic Brass and Woodwinds, and Hans Zimmer Percussion

• Cinesamples: CineBrass Core, Pro, Descant Horn, and CineHarp

• Cinematic Studio Series: Strings and Solo Strings

• 8Dio: Lacrimosa Choirs and 8diOboe

• EastWest: Symphonic Orchestra Gold Percussion

• Performance Samples: Oceania

• U-HE: Zebra

• Audio Imperia: Scenes from the Multiverse

The Results of Diving Deep

Ultimately, it took me about 55 hours of deep work across 13 days to finish this. Honestly, it made me think back on why I chose this profession...

Using every second of each hour—intentionally—was invigorating. I could feel my musical muscles grow stronger with every technical challenge I overcame. And covering Hisaishi's music allowed me to reach down into my childhood roots, which helped me remember the fundamental things I enjoy about writing music.

I already want to do it again.

Here's the result of my journey...