Meteo Xavier

Hi-TECCCCCCHnical.

If you're just looking to get experience in music scoring, just Google around for Game Development boards and Game Development Engines (GameMaker, RPGMaker, Unity, etc.), post that you're wanting to do some work for free and see what you can get out of it. Word of warning that these boards are depressingly filled to overflow with lots of other composers willing to bite off their own wiener if they thought it would get them hired and even trying to work for free is kinda hard to come by (be prepared to see a lot of SAM FOSTER threads), but then again there are some occasional posts by others looking for composers as long as they don't have to pay them. You'll just need to go and look. And don't get suckered into the "I need connections to be successful!" bullshit. That's just a quarter-truth told by other composers so they can look like they're awesome for giving you advice without it actually dampening their own chances of getting more work. You don't get hired because someone knew you and happened to have your contact info handy when they were talking to someone else, you get hired because you have the skills that impresses people enough to say, "Man, you should go check out that Daniel Caton guy and see if he's not tied up right now." Quality of craft is always the first priority.

To actually have creativity itself cause anxiety is a new one for me. I've not heard of that before. I'll skip the overlong response that is at least 30% explaining about ME than the actual problem and just suggest that the only real way to conquer it is to go through it. Face the anxiety head on, start with small creative projects, release them, learn from them in a detached way (like thinking of them as experiments designed to yield data) and work on it little by little until experience begins to trump anxiety.

Sending .WAV files would be extraordinarily pointless. Their packaging into Kontakt or Soundfont files is such an efficient improvement over just having the .WAV files that you're going to be hardpressed to find them online, much less have someone here email them to you. It's the difference between watching a movie on a screen and watching a movie by pulling out the film reel and looking at it frame-by-excruciating frame. If you absolutely need the .WAVs, there are tools that extract them from ROMs, I think SNESTOOL used to do it. Otherwise use WilliamKage's site above.

It seems that people don't really leave Ocremix, they just keep stalking around until someone makes a reunion thread. I've seen this phenomenon in other places I've frequented. I'd like to study it some more.

It wasn't just a clever name, after all.

Yeah, it's an improvement.

That's because you lack imagination and spherical-shaped testes, jub-jub. Both are required to master the art of the title.

That was indeed an intentional reference.

I'm not reading all that crap just to suggest a name. You will call it "The Solipsistic Ineloquent Buttballs of Prof. Mrs. Hieronymous Beaverwipe, The 13th Duchess of Neo-Gloucester".

I'm not going to do point-by-point responses here - it's exhaustive and the time spent doing it doesn't amount to anything (some of this shit gets REALLY long). If you're better off thinking sacrifices are not required to be made for freelancer success, than that's exactly what you should have in your mindset to keep going. One good thing that the subjective intangibility of the art scene is that a good mentality, even if its motivated by theoretical/academic nonsense, is better than having a poor mentality that is precisely correct. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, guarantees music success better than to simply keep going, so that's what you'd prefer to think on it, more power to it. Even if it wasn't beneficial to have a good mentality on it no matter what, I still don't have too much a vested interest to change your mind on it - composers who are too stubborn to get around the difficulties of finding work with creative risk miss out on opportunities that composers like me get to potentially clean up on. They lose, I win. I'll have a new subject here soon when my availability next allows.

All dues have to be paid at some point, they just aren't equal in consistent in who or how much does what. Sometimes it happens in the form of someone who struggled for 20 years and finally got their break into success, sometimes success comes immediately with the price of failing each time afterwards (and subsequent drug habits, downward spirals, etc.), sometimes it's eating nothing but ramen noodles for 3 years, sometimes it's doing it while one of hundreds of other precedents and scenarios play out - either way, all success has a price and it gets paid one way or another. If freelance composers want to believe they have the same business model and social importance as a restaurant, plumber, lawyer or something like it, that's their business and I hope it works out for them, but I expect composers who call themselves "professionals" to have a really, really good understanding of what they're trying to undertake and how sickeningly overstuffed in supply versus demand the freelance composer market is. Instead, what I see are thousands and thousands of unproven, no-name musicians who want AAA recognition and AAA money doing the same music as everyone else, conforming every aspect of their artistic identity down to what they think producers will want instead of doing much to stand out, and focus their entire advertising plan on going to GameDev websites and posting "Hi, does anyone need a composer?" Then when they don't get the jobs and money that proven, known composers get, they shift the blame of not being able to afford their $2,500 a month townhouse in San Francisco on game music ALONE on their target employers, high schoolers and college student devs who don't already have a composer in place, not being able to afford $30,000 for a soundtrack and people who do it for fun instead of profit. They box themselves in with this thinking and stubbornly refuse to deviate even the slightest to try to risk some innovation and cleverly get AROUND their employment obstacles. They are destined to make a failure rate much higher than it could be and they have no one to blame but themselves, no matter who they put the finger at. I'll believe the validity that music composition is the same business model and infrastructure as the aforementioned businesses when I see people making and running restaurants in their spare time, or 19-year-old plumbers flooding (pun intended) forums with "Hey y'all, does anyone want free plumbing work? I'm looking to get experience and get my name out. My work is inspired by Roto-Rooter and LemKo Leak Prevention. Here's my portfolio on Toiletcloud.com!" - you know, things that generally aren't considered fun pasttimes for most normies that they would get into after work was done...

Making a successful restaurant is NOTHING like making a successful music career. Those two things couldn't possibly be more different for more reasons than I care to type out here. Among the main differences is that most people around the world will enter a restaurant at least once a year, whereas most people will probably never hire a musician for anything other than a wedding or something like it at its closest, much less an indie composer - in addition to the fact that it's very difficult or likely impossible to have and run a restaurant from your bedroom or living room. You can start a moderately successful music composition career with $700 on top of the computer you already own. You don't need to purchase or lease commercial real estate, trucks, vans, tools, hire employees, get special licensing, undergo training and government procedures (except for paying tax)... the entire cost/risk structure is completely different. And I'm not too sympathetic for artists who have to work a "dead-end job they hate". No one likes work, that's what "work" is - stuff you only do because you have to in order to have objective needs met. It goes back to the unshakeable reality of life that sooner or later you have to sacrifice things in order to keep moving ahead. If it's not working a job you should be thankful to have floating your artist ambitions, then it will be the reality that you will have to compromise your art in some way to pay bills and eventually make your "passion" work; where it will give you stress, make you deal with unreasonable people, force you to turn out stuff that can tarnish your name... something always has to balance out there. If you don't choose that balance, reality will choose it for you. In that regard, I'm actually fairly lucky - I actually love my day job AND it allows me to do my music ambitions as I see fit. Sooner or later that reality will no longer be true, but I will give praise to the God or Gods or powers that be that I have it while I have it. Those who can't appreciate what they have will contribute to their failure later.

Well, ***damn, how many mental health disorders can I have? I'm up to EIGHT or some shit. <:S

So? It's not what it USED to be years ago, that's true, but this community is also still far, far from dead. It ain't dead until you type in ocremix.org and a 404 comes up.