Life Tips Daily

As a video game music composer myself, one of the things that I’ve learned about the profession is that you will go nowhere if you’re not versatile. You could be the most fantastic composer since Mozart, but if you can’t write a rock song then you’re lost.

This applies to all aspects of anyone’s life though, not just my composing. This is because, no matter what you do, without the ability to adapt to new circumstances, the changing world will leave you behind in the dust wondering what hit you.

This is important to keep in mind because no matter what you do and what you like, it’s always good to have alternatives. If one thing fails, you’ve got something to fall back on. Likewise, within your field, you need to make sure that you can keep up with any advances and, more importantly, be an active thinker.

What I mean by that is that you should strive to be a person who doesn’t just KNOW all the stuff and have the amazing ability to spew it out, you need to be the kind of person who can know the stuff and then analyze and synthesize it. That way, you’re not just knowledgeable; you’re innovative! If you can take the existing content and make something new out of it, then you’re an active thinker and you’re going places.

As an example, being a pianist myself, I know a lot of pianists who have been classically trained and who can play back any (and I mean ANY, it’s incredible) piece of music that you put in front of them. It doesn’t matter how complicated or how insanely challenging the piece is, they can sight read it perfectly. Now, for many that is the ultimate in what one can achieve as a pianist and so they are completely content as such. But then there are people like me who come along and mess them up - it’s remarkably easy. All I do is take the sheet music from in front of them and tell them to improvise. Nine times out of ten, they don’t even know where to start, let alone where to go from there.

For me, it is more important to be able to USE what you’ve learned in order to make something your own as opposed to just regurgitating it again like a machine. We’ve got machines for that, after all, and they’re a lot more efficient than any person could ever hope to be.

So leave that to the machines and use your talents and creative abilities to take what you know and apply it one step further; it could mean the difference between getting or missing a job.