hey, i'm new to the forums here and i wanted to say how awesome i think it is that this type of resource exists. i'm a graduate student at NYU in music technology, and i aspire to be a game composer. what i want to know is, are there any other game scorers on here, and if so, are there any with some experience that wouldn't mind sharing some of it with a fledgling game composer? thanks. either reply here or feel free to email me directly at brun7827@comcast.net, or on AIM at RaelinGarr. -brun7827

Welcome. I am a composer and have done some commercial titles. Some of the lessons I've learned over the years are:

1. Be careful in picking your tool. Price matters, but functionality and comfort matters more. If you are not comfortable with your tool, production suffers.

2. Listen to the customer. Hearing out the customer's vision in it's entirety allows you to be in tune with the project at hand.

3. Know when to lay off the production/mastering. Over mastered/produced music tends to sound robotic and/or unnatural.

I was born and raised in NYC. I migrated to NJ but I still work in NYC. What part do you live in?

I'm from south jersey, about 15 mins. from philly in gloucester county, and i live in greenwich village while at school. what types of tools do you use?

I live in Brick, NJ which is right next to Toms River. I'm directly east from you. I work in Times Square.

I use Steinberg Cubase SX for recording. SoundForge for mastering. I also have a lot of NI plugins like Battery, Absynth, Reaktor and Kontakt. I use a Korg M1 Workstation for my keyboard/midi controller and an MAudio AudioPhile for an interface.

i also use Cubase SX and Sound Forge 7, and i have NI's whole line, alomg w/ a host of other VST plugins and synths. do you work for a game studio, or are you freelance or somesuch?

I'm a composer/sound design in Westchester (about 30 mins from NYC), though in about 8 months I'll probably be a little farther away.

I feelance and get involved in community projects a lot. I also do sound programming on the side.

do you guys know of any decent local game studios that it would be worth contacting? would there be any value in something like that? like anything else in the industry, this is one of those "foot in the door" fields, but i'm having trouble finding the door.

In NYC, there is Take Two (Grand Theft Auto), Microsoft, Vivendi Universal, Macmillian Games and Viacom. That's the only major game companies that I know of that have offices in NYC. I believe that EA and Midway have offices in NYC, but i'm not sure where and what they do here. They could be just marketing offices. Midway is based out of Chicago and EA is based out of Redwood City, CA.

If it's networking, you might want to check out G.A.N.G.