My Story of Musical Specialization

We all know that the field of media music is highly competetive and massively overcrowded. Every 16 year old with a laptop can produce music and share it via internet with the world. The general devaluation of music (as seen recently by the Discovery "plan") seems to continue and there's no shortage of composers struggling to make a living out of this.

So considering all this it seems like a great idea to be able to deliver something for any music project that comes your way, no matter what style or genre it asks for because it would be great to accept any paying job that comes along, wouldn't it?

In my experience the truth lies somewhere else.

Back in 2008, I was having exactly this attitude, I was working on a few movies that I was fortunate enough to record with real orchestra but was also doing arrangements of pop songs and a lot of "in house" sample productions for commercials, industry movies etc.

I always hated doing mockups, especially back then when the availability of decently sounding samples was way more limited than today. I always felt that no matter how much time I invested, how much I tweaked and fiddled around, it would never sound convincing. On the other hand, I was fortunate enough to be able to record my music with a real orchestra quite regularly starting at a quite early age. 

And every time, I thoroughly enjoyed that experience. The exhilarating feeling of hearing one's music being performed by 60+ musicians for the first time is and always has been one of the greatest pay-off moments of being a composer for orchestral music.

So on the one hand I was frustrated by quite a big part of the jobs that I were doing where I produced sample productions and on the other hand I was loving the real orchestra experience.

Around that time I had a chat with a seasoned composer who was working in the field for several years already and he told me something like this: "Imagine you're a film maker and you're looking for a specific musical genre for your film score. Do you hire the guy who can do this genre "among others" or would you rather go to the guy who is specialized in that?"

This very simple but profound thought opened my eyes. With everything that I said above, I decided I wanted to be the guy who gets called when a real orchestra is involved. I wanted to be the guy who is "the specialist when it comes to writing for and executing real orchestra recordings" and I didn't want to be the composer who get's hired for doing sampled background loops for any industrial movie that came along.

So I made a very radical step in my career and started to reject or delegate any gig that would not allow me to work with real orchestra. I could do that back then because I was still in music university, being partially supported by my parents but also not having a lot of monthly expenses but even that quite comfortable situation brought me very close to running out of money after making that decision.

It was tough for quite a few years and I picked up teaching to generate some steady income on the way.

But in the end the decision was one of the best ones I made in my life. By now, I have built up a reputation of being "the orchestra guy". My work got valued more and eventually also my income grew. I have diverted a bit from this strict decision I made back then and do accept some projects that require to be a sample production only but I gladly reject gigs that try to underpay me or do not value the work I put in there.

I'm not saying this is the definitve way to go, but the bottom line here is: Specialize. Try to find a niche in the field that you enjoy and are good at. It is absolutely impossible to be at competetive levels at everything or every genre but it is definitively possible to be specialized in a specific field (that hopefully remains popular with clients) to build up a reputation in that field.

Now, I don't think you need to do such radical measures as I did in order to get there and I know of composers who happily jump between genres and enjoy that but from my personal experience, I can only confirm that specializing onto working with real orchestra (and using my experience in that field as unique selling point) has really helped to push my career forward as well as making me enjoy what I do way more.