The Craft of Scoring for Picture 🎬
For composers writing for film and TV — whether you’re landing your first project or leveling up an active career. Weekly notes on craft, spotting sessions, working with directors, delivery, and getting paid. Written by a composer still in the trenches.
Ostinato: The Simplest Tool for Building Tension
Scoring Notes Every composer learns the basic version of this technique early: repeat something, tension builds. Two notes, a driving rhythm, done. But that surface-level understanding is exactly why so many ostinato-driven cues start strong and then go flat by the second minute. The technique isn’t just “repeat a pattern.” It’s about what you do underneath and around the repetition to keep the tension alive without the audience consciously noticing why it still works thirty seconds later....
Modal Interchange: The Harmonic Trick That Adds Instant Emotion to Your Score
newsletter ScoreSchool Borrow a chord from the parallel key and watch a cue transform. Here's a technique that sounds complicated but takes five minutes to learn and will change how you write cues for the rest of your career. It's called modal interchange — sometimes called borrowed chords — and it's one of the most-used tools in film scoring that almost nobody explains simply. What it actually is Every major key has a parallel minor key, and every minor key has a parallel major. C major and...
The Conversation Every Composer Avoids (And Why You Should Have It First)
newsletter ScoreSchool Here's a conversation almost every composer avoids. A director reaches out. They love your work. They want you to score their project. You feel that rush — validation, excitement, the sense that this could be the one. And in that moment, you do the thing that quietly costs composers more than almost anything else in this business. You start writing. You don't ask about the fee. You don't clarify what rights you're keeping. You don't define the scope — how many minutes...
A free lesson, before the doors open!
newsletter ScoreSchool You've got the talent. You've landed a few gigs. But there's no real pipeline — just gaps between projects, and no clear way to turn "occasional" into "consistent." That inconsistency isn't a talent problem. It's that nobody ever handed you the map for how this industry actually works. That's why I built Score Your First Scene — and to give you a real feel for what's inside, I just released a full lesson from the course on YouTube, completely free. It's Lesson 4.3 on...
You Don’t Need Berklee to Score Films. You Need This!
newsletter ScoreSchool What separates the composers who make it from the ones who stay stuck Let me paint you a picture. You’re sitting at your DAW. Session open. Great libraries, solid template, real talent. You know how to make music that moves people. But right now you’re staring at a video file someone sent you and you don’t know where to start. Not because you’re not good enough. But because nobody ever showed you the process of going from a blank session to a delivered score that makes...
How Film Composers Actually Get Paid 💰
newsletter ScoreSchool The Four Ways Film Composers Actually Make Money Most beginners think a composing gig is one transaction — producer pays you, you deliver music, done. That's the visible part. A working composer's income actually comes from four streams, and the upfront fee is often the smallest over the life of a successful project. 1. The creative fee. The money the production pays you to write and deliver the score. This is what you negotiate upfront. 2. Performance royalties. Every...
No Credits? Here’s How to Get Your First Film Scoring Project!
newsletter ScoreSchool The exact steps to build a film scoring portfolio and land real projects — even if you’re starting from zero Every composer I talk to hits the same wall. You’ve spent months — maybe years — perfecting your sound. You can write tension. You can write emotion. You can write cinematic music that genuinely moves people. But when it comes to actually getting hired to score something, you freeze. Because every opportunity seems to require credits you don’t have yet. Here’s...