Music teachers are busy.  I don’t need to go into all the reasons why… just take my word for it! So it is a shame that music teachers, who should be engaging with their creative sides as much as possible, are often so caught up with admin and managing a large number of classes and a whole co-curricular programme.

I have felt the pressure of the job, and have neglected my own creativity.  While I regularly perform on my instruments with my students, I have found it very hard to spend anytime composing.

So, this year I’ve decided to do something about it and engaged in a Film Composition course through Berklee University.

This has been a 12-week course in which you analyse different genres of film music composition such as love themes, high intensity action, supernatural/grandeur, sad themes, etc

In addition to analysis, completion of short pre-tasks and quizzes on music theory you have to compose music for a 2-3 minute film clip each week.

In a busy work life at school this has been tough.  But, it’s been awesome. I’ve found the following benefits:

• My students hugely respect that I take my own learning and growth seriously
• My students appreciate that I’m not asking them to do anything in a week that I’m not prepared to do myself
• I have been forced to put admin aside to focus on creativity
• I have gained confidence to share my own work
• I am better able to demonstrate to my students the creative process involved with composition
• I now have a bunch of great templates in Logic Pro which I can share with my students as they do their own film composition tasks
• I have massively improved my MIDI sequencing chops in Logic Pro
• I have finally got my head around some of the amazing possibilities of what you can do with my sample libraries

Tools/software used

Composing a new piece of music that sounds great for 12 weeks in a row is tough.  However, I’ve been fortunate to have the following tools and software at my disposal:

Native Instruments Komplete Kontrol

Native Instruments Komplete 11

Project Sam Symphobia 1 & 2 and Lumina Sample libraries

Spitfire Audio Orchestra collection

Roli controller and it’s Equator Synth

Demo Reel

Well, I suppose you want to hear a bit of what I’ve done.  Here is my demo reel from the course.  I’ve included short excerpts from five of my 12 compositions in the following genres:

1. Love theme – Sense & Sensibility ‘kiss’ scene
2. Action – trailer for Troy
3. Fantasy – from Once Upon A Time
4. Suspense – Iron Man (when Tony Stark is captured)
5. Action/suspense – 2012 deleted scene

The clips don’t make sense all the time with the dialogue and SFX removed (as well as being unable to see the pictures I was composing to) but it gives a good impression of what I’ve been up to.