The Challenge Of Composing Epic Music
I've been a pop/rock guy for most of my life. Four years ago, a major music publisher offered me a chance to try my hand at composing epic music (sometimes referred to as "Trailer Music") and to my great delight he loved the results - and so did I. Now, I am damaged goods because while I enjoy producing any kind of music, epic music is by far the most satisfying - so why would I do anything else?
On Youtube, I started noticing other people had been making videos using my new material. At first, I was completely outraged! "Copyright infringement", I screamed. My publisher, Opher Yisraeli at Songs To Your Eyes Ltd told me to calm down. "We're getting paid", he said. "Don't worry so much". Much to my dismay, I discovered later I do not share in those revenues. Oh well...
The challenge of writing such "dense" music which combines classical orchestration styles with new electronic forms was for me, an epiphany. Finally I could use every color on the musical palette and nothing was off limits as long as it conformed to the "epic" genre.
One of the biggest challenges was coming up with titles for each new song. A song title is important. I spent hours researching biblical, religious, Greek mythological and astronomical themes among others, to come up with important sounding words that could be arranged cleverly into an "epic" sounding song title. "The War In Heaven" for instance, or, "End Times Lullaby". My favorite, "Blue Drift" which refers to some kind of galactic anomaly. After producing 60 tracks for Songs To Your Eyes I began to wonder if I might run out of ideas to use for my song titles. Not such an outrageous statement when you look at the volume of Epic music being produced today. It's fun and everyone wants in. There are thousands of composers and some are truly prolific.
I am beginning production of a new 15 song album......well, any day now. It is a huge undertaking and can be expensive. The modern composer must use the newest, latest, greatest sample libraries available in order to compete with the big dogs who, in most cases, have the money to use actual live musicians. There are many challenges to writing this kind of music but by far the most persistent, sometimes frightening element is inspiration. You can't wait for it to show up. You just have to start something and hope it appears. If you believe in your own skills, it will.