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Would anyone believe I've actually become a composer who's managed to grab a series of worthwhile gigs and absorbed enough commissions to kinda be sick of working on music? I know I don't. A decade and a half of putting in tens of thousands of hours behind a DAW has been yielding some returns and I've reached heights no one should take for granted. From my vantage point, I thought I would like to share some of the less-talked-about things I see from this elevation that could be useful advice to newer composers or even some older ones. In no particular order, here we go: 1. There is no recipe or gimmick for success. If there was, we'd all know it and use it by now. It's all pretty much random. All you can do is get creative with your ideas and execute them with the best audio quality you can. 2. Only upgrade your sound and studio if you can't produce quality work with what you've got anymore. You don't need 18 orchestral symphony libraries to make a quality orchestral track or soundtrack, you don't need the latest version of this or that for everything, you don't need loads of hardware just to pretend you're staying current. Master what you have before you start thinking you need to spend $$$ on more shit. 3. Synth nerds are the worst people to get hardware advice from. Sorry, but it's true. Nothing is ever as good as the best there was from the 1970s or 1980s, and therefore nothing is ever worthwhile enough. If you have your eye on a keyboard or hardware item, listen to it, think on it for a while, think on it, think on it for a long time and decide if it's really for you or not. No one else can decide that for you, you have to decide that for yourself. 4. Doing a bunch of songs at the same time and in stages is better than trying to knock out one song at a time. This is because you need a break from audio both to give your ears a rest and also to let your judgment become less biased. While doing a song, there are the stages of beginning it, working on it and finalizing it. You get into these stages naturally, and it is surprisingly easier to do these stages with multiple songs than just one. 5. To expand on #4, after a few years of experience in finishing and finalizing tracks, you start learning a skill for a music ear that can hear where your songs are supposed to go, rather than where they go now. It's almost a 6th sense in a way - you start hearing and expecting it to go this way when where you actually have it going is wrong. You can also hear what ISN'T there and what needs to be there. It's kinda freaky, really. 6. Some people try to write and arrange a track starting with the melody and designing everything around it. This is dumb. Building a song is like building a house - you start from the ground up (drums and bass), then the walls and body of the house (chords and arps and accompaniment), and then the roof (usually the melody). Doing it with the melody first is like putting the furniture in a field in a certain way and designing the house around all that. 7. Rely on as few people for your songs and projects at any given time as possible. Other people have lives and crises, too, and you would be better off doing or learning to do things you need yourself than hope their timeframes work out for you. 8. All business success requires risk to fuel it, however not all risk is the same. Being smart and meticulously deciding where your money is best to go and getting clever and resourceful with your situation could still create the concoction that provides success without putting you in danger. 9. "Value" or "reward" for your audio work is not always money. This is a VERY controversial and unpopular opinion, and there are good reasons for that, but the fact remains those who only consider value and reward to be coin or cash will find it much harder to navigate throguh business success here. 10. Even if you hate loops products, many are worth getting anyway for a variety of reasons. One of the best is that they often come with MIDI files that can be an excellent teacher for how to humanize notes in a DAW. 11. No one doing indie games has $300.00 per audio minute. Success from the indie game sector comes more by showcasing artistic achievement through its humble roots, not trying to do what AAA game studios are already doing. Know this, accept this, and use it to your advantage while builsing up a career in game audio. 12. The more artistic a person is, the less skill they have for conventional thinking ideas in audio like how business really works, humility, common sense and even at times common decency to others. This is not a guaranteed exclusion, but the "artist's brain" phenomenon really does seem to be true. 13. You can work on next to no music for years and years and suddenly be chosen for a big project seeming for no reason. Don't question it too much, just give thanks to the god or powers you believe in and do it. 14. Don't count on tempo-sync'd loops and samples to work correctly. Many do, but many also do not for whatever reasons. It's better to just get a BPM that works innately for the samples' speed you want to use. 15. Every composer, sooner or later, does work for free, undercuts a friend/competitor for a job. If they say they don't, they are most likely lying. Also, every composer eventually pirates stuff as well. 16. It doesn't matter what tricks you need to do to get a track done (just don't use illegal samples!), just get it done somehow. Arranging and recording music is supposed to be that difficult. 17. Have a Plan B and Plan C for all music you're working on, as it's incredibly easy for that music to not go used or be cout out somewhere else. 18. Don't worry if you use a loop or phrase or sound that's been used ad nauseum or something. It turns out the niche for LIKING recognizable sounds is bigger than we though. 19. Uploading MIDIs from Valkyrie Profile, Secret of Mana, Star Ocean 2, Final Fantasy VI, Super Mario 64, Final Fantasy Tactics and some of Tim Follin's work to your DAW and studying them will teach you pretty much everything you need to know about doing game audio. 20. When approaching someone for possible music work, be bright and cheery, but don't be desperate. Act like a seasoned professional, even if you aren't, and use a tone that says "I can do this work, but I don't need this work." Talk in length about the fine details of how you do things and how this works whether they might understand it or not, as it creates for you an air that the client thinks "Hmm, this guy knows his business." and helps keep it so the client respects you enough not to take advantage of you. If they leave soon after you establish this light bit of dominance in the conversation, then it wasn't meant to be. These things are obviously not objective, and they are subject to much scrutiny and debate themselves, but potentially useful stuff I'd like to impart all the same.

This is the one point I will disagree with you on. Maybe in certain genres starting with something else works, but most music is composed melody first. Actually, starting with a chord is still technically melody first. Great example being that the very basis of part-writing, and how harmony came to be understood today, is by playing multiple melodies at the same time. That's all a chord really is: Different melody lines moving homorhythmically. Pretty much everyone from Bach to John Williams started with a great theme or motif, and harmonized it from there. Not to plug my own shit, but I literally just posted a track for critique over in the Original Music forum before reading this. I started with all the melodies, and built from there. To my ears, it turned out cohesive. So I'd agree that building a piece of music is like building a house, but I'd disagree that the melody shouldn't be the foundation. EDIT: Points 7, 8, 12, and 20 are very, very good points.

Not familiar with the original, but oh my cthulhu this sounds gorgeous.

Excellent stuff here!! I admit that I am one of the heathens that isn't familiar with the source (though I'm liking the description), but I don't think you need to know the source at all to be caught up in all the goodness of this remix. I really enjoy the transitions here (such as 1:25-1:35) and the solo sections are arresting (particularly 3:10+ is bananas!). But my favorite thing of this remix is the way the heavier guitar mixes with the quieter throughline. It gives a real feel of depth and touch and allows this piece to shine beyond just having some nice sections. Special props for the 5:05+ quieting finish - the perfect way to go out, in my opinion! A surprise gem here!