A Quick Update for Fellow Film Music Nerds After 100 Issues!

This week marks the 100th official issue of this newsletter!

The first issue went out in January 2022 originally under the name The Composer Odyssey Newsletter.

Since then, I've made a pivot not only in the name but what I wanted to share. It's taken a few years of writing to figure out exactly what this space needs to be, and I'm just incredibly grateful to everyone who has been reading along the way!

This newsletter and my YouTube channel originally focused on sample library walkthroughs, tutorials, reviews, etc.

That definitely helped me find my footing and build an incredible community, but I realized that focusing on virtual instruments didn't address the real problem.

A new library doesn't make your music sound better. Your fundamental craft as an artist does.

To fix that, I (over)pivoted to the opposite extreme!

A lot of my content shifted to interpersonal communication, productivity, networking, & career related topics.

Yes- those skills are so important in our field and I still have a passion for helping people make those connections (I personally love talking about that stuff!!)

But it was too big a shift away from what people expected and probably were even searching for.

As composers, musicians, and creatives, most people won't even find that niche all too interesting!

SO that brought me to OdysseyNotes... notes and letters on musical storytelling!

As a kid, I wanted to be a filmmaker. I'd spend hours watching the behind-the-scenes featurettes on those bonus DVDs...sometimes more so than the movie!

Fun fact! In order to prep for the upcoming Supergirl movie, I watched all the Superman bonus features including "Kryptunes: The Music of Superman" the other day. We got interviews and discussions about the film's score and I freaking loved it!

Media composition let's us combine our fascination of filmmaking with intentional musical choices, using it to solve the narrative puzzles within a project.

Storytelling relies on those concrete "architectural" choices.

That's why I made the shift to focus my content not only on score analysis or score reviews...but specifically how media music is used to help support a larger narrative!

I love interpreting what a composer is trying to say with their music within the context of a film or a game or show.

• What are the compositional techniques?

• What's the orchestration?

• What am I feeling in this exact moment?

I love using the story as the foundation for the WHY! And aligning my YouTube and newsletter around this has been so incredibly fulfilling.

Even in my most recent video, I got to dive into John Williams' Disclosure Day score but in a way that just felt like I was chatting with a friend!

(Granted, the film and the score are definitely a bit polarizing. But the score has seriously grown on me over the past week or so! John Williams is just so detailed and nuanced in how his music supports the story!)

That's actually why I even brought back my Film Composer Recipe Book.

I took it down for a while thinking it wasn't in line with the content I was sharing but the more I thought about it, it's actually a great quick reference point if composers ever need to overcome Blank Page Syndrome!

All of that said, I'm just grateful that this newsletter and my channel have given me the opportunity to connect with so many composers, musicians, and overall film nerds from around the world.

And if anything I've shared over these 100 issues has helped you look at a piece of music differently or help with your own music career, then I'm happy.

Truly, thank you for being here and I hope you stick around for the next 100!