A word of warning fellow composers - avoid this project!! Thread

If any of you fellow composers are approached by Mert Guclu to work on the half life 2 mod Experiment 04, DON'T DO IT! I completed 35 minutes of original music for him, made countless changes... and then when I refused to remove one small synthetic effect (which was barely noticeable) and he didn't get his way he freaked and removed all of my music from the mod and proceeded to belittle my career, music, and judgement in countless rant like emails. He also thought it a good idea to call me a facist (ummm... huh?) for giving my paying clients priority and not having the time to take out such a small effect. Turns out I was the 3rd (THIRD!!!) composer he has gone through which must be since he is exceptionally difficult to work with. I've scored countless mods (The Rising, Insurgency, Curse Episodes, No More Room In Hell, Eclipse, etc etc) as well as real AAA games and have never had any issues. It amazes me that after doing so much music free of charge, music that I would charge a client close to $30k for, that someone can be so demanding and degrade into a small child when they don't get their way.

Be wary.

That said, now none of this music has a home... shame... it was quite good, feel free to download the complete soundtrack here:

Richdouglas.net

Rich

He is probably a 14 year old kid. Avoid him as OP said.

I do not know who that said developer is, BUT your compositions are very well thought out and flow beautifully. I am working on a project that would be more than happy to provide your music a good home. I'll send you a PM in a minute to discuss it.

Thanks for sharing those wonderful compositions.

-Devin

It is really sad to me when someone taking music for free do this.

I am one that take musics for free myself on my projects, since I am poor (really, actually I have negative money, but that is another story), but I even went out of the way on my lastest game to code a "EA Trax" thing, that show the name and author of the current tune.

korge wrote: He is probably a 14 year old kid. Avoid him as OP said.

I hate when people bad mouth all teens even though not all of them are bad or annoying :/ It's pointless stereotyping.

And that is a shame. I would be highly dissap-, alright, I'll be pretty furious if that happened to me. Your work should go towards someone who actually appreciates it.

It's actually more common than you think... and I can say so from more than just this place.

Where is the respect for your fellow man...

that's pretty brutal and not in the good way. Ideally I would take a composer and fight tooth and nail with them to get everything right and have fun doing it. I write music but I suck so I know to treat others than have better skills than I do with respect.

Well the guy is "24" with a rank 21 account and no friends lol. Seriously I am cool with my composer because I know nothing about music. But I do point out sounds that I found uncomfortable hearing. I removed stuff from the work list all the time, even my own work. But getting all mad and removing everything is too low.

Well thanks for your comments and support. Heres an update for those interested...

I heard from this psycho 3 times yesterday after I told him I'm not working with him anymor over the weekend. Sad thing is, he cant take the hint and all of these e-mails were making demands and threats. Ridiculous, he seems to think I need his mod...which is not only a horrid attitude on his part, but something I find rather humorous. Long story short, the music for this mod is now being utilized for another mod ( thanks Devin), and Mert may be contacting some of you to work on his mod... Do yourselves a favor and pass.

It's one thing to point out elements you don't like in a civil manner... And a whole nother thing to demand they be taken out. All in all, you have got to trust your composer and their judgement as well as be diplomatic when approaching a free worker about changes.

Please keep in mind your outsourced workers on your mods, be it composers, artists, sound guys, etc are working for free and this has got to be a team effort for a mod to succeed and stay alive through it's dev process.

To those of you here in the states... Happy Thanksgiving!

Rich

Edited by: beckett007

What a dickbag. It's really unfortunate how immature some people in the modding scene can be. And not just nubs working on doomed-to-fail mods, but even semi-pro people leading big productive teams can still be total douches.

He goes on my regrettably-long blacklist of people in the modding community!

If you are ever looking for work, please let me know. I'm one of the lead developers for Half-Life 2: Wars (HL2 RTS) and I'm working on a UDK project for school based on a Descent / Forsaken 6DOF shooter style, both of them could use some energetic compositions. I'm a MASSIVE fan of your work for Insurgency, I always wondered how they got such a kickass professional-sounding theme - I guess it's because a professional made it

^ this guy is legit. he is good for it.

Sad to hear but thanks for the warning and I'm glad to see that the music has not gone to waste and your career seems unaffected. It always suprises me the lengths which people think they can go on others good graces, if you are receiving someones time, effort and intellectual property for free, they show them the decency of attempting to understand what that is worth (even if the content is only important to you and the respective party)
This place - moddb.com - is about collaboration and the willingness to put your free time into something you deem worthwhile, without the mutual respect that should be inherent in that many mods and otherwise great working partnerships will fall down.

First of all, that sucks. I know how much work goes into making 35 minutes of detailed music. (Hell i can spend hours on a kick). At least the music can be reused in a different way.

I downloaded the tracks and just finished listening to most of them, i must say i'm incredibly impressed with your work. This sort of industrial meets orchestral compositional style is entirely what i've been working towards with my own work. I must ask about the solo voice on "Death of Marx", was that from a library such as Voices of passion or did you attain that through other means?.

Also if you aren't too busy to answer.How often do you get work? your figure sounded too good to be true. As somebody looking to either go into a career as a coder or a Composer, Would you have any tips for working in the industry for somebody who hasn't entered it yet?

Edited by: tekkentool

beckett007 wrote: music that I would charge a client close to $30k for

K? Typo?

Never mind, i've been reading your blog for the past hour or so. Some gold advice in there .

Heaney wrote:

beckett007 wrote: music that I would charge a client close to $30k for

K? Typo?

On his blog he mentions he usually charges 7-800 dollars per minute for music. so no typo.

...
$30,000???

*rubs eyes*

WHAT?

and now all he needs are clients

Yup... $700 to $800 per minute is the norm around the industry (in fact, it's a bit below the norm). If your music is good enough, you can get away with charging that or more... basically you center your rates around your experience. For example, if you've only scored mods and you start work on your first iPhone game, charging around $150 per minute would be a good idea. Speaking of which, iPhone games, GREAT and more realistic place to start. Been doing this for the better part of 8 years and have had plenty of time to hone my craft... so thats the norm. Stimor... I have plenty of clients at that rate I just enjoy doing mods because of the comradery, artistic freedom (for the most part), and helping people out.

Tekken,
Some advice for ya,

Glad you found the blog helpful / interesting . Man, as I've said in my blog and TONS of other places... becoming a full time composer is damn near impossible, the market is way too flooded and overly competitive. Hell, even becoming a full time sound designer at a company is extremely difficult... I would advise finding another real line of work and keeping this as a hobby (aka... scoring mods). Now, when I say another field... it could definitely be WITHIN the game biz... like level design, art, and programming... all of which are far more realistic positions to obtain. Speaking of mods, I find it rather humorous that the tons of people wanting to break into scoring games think scoring mods will get them there... simply put, it wont. Big time devs don't care about mod work when it comes to music and mods add nothing to your resume unfortunately. It sucks, you have to have experience in order to get experience... takes tons of luck to become a composer for games full time. Another thing to keep in mind is not to spend too much time on specific things (like a kick ) which you'll learn with experience. I can usually compose, mix, and master a minute of music in one hour.... which also sets me apart from my competition, speed. Are you seeing a trend here? You've got to take what your competition does and do it better, faster, and handle it with more professionalism.

As for how often I get work... lately it's been 2 to 3 smaller projects per month, and one larger project every 6 months. I think that's about par for the course.... there's a ton of downtime which drives me crazy sometimes cause you dont know when the next gig is coming and have to budget accordingly. Of course, that downtime gives me time to do what I really love to do.. help you peeps out and score some cool mods .

As for samples... I'm using an onslaught of custom orchestral samples all over my mod scores, Symphobia, Omnisphere, Stylus RMX, Evolve, AIR. The vocal samples aren't VOP, but are commercially available. That library is another one of my secret weapons that I don't want to give away here on the forums.. pm me if you'd like more info. Speaking of samples the "Complete Composers Collection" from EWQL is the worst possible thing you can have in your arsenal... AVOID it like the plague. It's overused and will not set you apart in any way shape or form. Go with something more expensive, like Symphobia... it will help set you apart.

I'm sorry if all of this comes across as crass and negative... it's just the truth. And when it comes to trying to score games, the truth hurts. Just read the boards here and you'll see 2 to 5 new composers pop up PER DAY... and that's just here. There are tons of inide film and game boards out there with tons of new peeps wanting to score games popping up daily.

I'd urge all of you guys interested in this to peruse my blog... unfortunately it is DOA at the moment due to lack of time.. but it's a realistic look at the industry with some solid advice.

Richvgi.blogspot.com

Just got brought on to score The Arrangement... one of the top half life 1 mods here at MODDB, turning out really well so far. Here's one of the pieces of music I've done so far:
Richdouglas.net

Rich

Edited by: beckett007

can you play the batman theme?

Lol, Zimmers or Elfmans?

Yes to both.... and the bond theme:

Youtube.com

And the theme from 28 Days Later:
Youtube.com

As well as a slew of themes from retro games:
Youtube.com

I play by ear so anything is possible really.

My action music from Experiment 04 is essentially a play on The Dark Knight by zimmer... uses the same sort of driving string motif.

Rich

Edited by: beckett007

Actually that was my plan of attack, I've been doing programming since i was 14 or so in C# and java. I was basically planning on starting out for indie studio's in smaller projects and hopefully being more attractive than other composers due to programming experience. When i first started thinking about this for a career i had the romantic fantasy of doing it full time for a developer, but i realised that was insane pretty quickly. But programmer/part time composer sounds FUN. Especially thought of starting out in indie studio's because they're normally strapped for work and somebody who can do a few things like map design, programming and composing and Sound design would probably stand out.

On Mod work, it's funny i always hear conflicting advice about that, Mike acton (lead programmer for insomniac) seems to have this concept that everybody should make a mod. Either way, whether or not it gets me any work i'm going to try making music for a few just for experience in layered composing (or Dynamic as you call it on your blog) and sound design In FMOD. I've been programming synthesizers since i was 13 so i'm pretty good with that, but the advanced sample manipulation/granular synthesis sound design. (e.g transformers title sequence stuff) is way beyond me and i don't want it to be way beyond me.

On the few hours of kick tweaking, well in this case i was using a new Drum mastering hierachy, i'd layered 3 kicks and 3 snares. Compressed and Eq'd differently to keep only very narrow frequency bands i liked from the kicks. The kicks, snares whatever were then sent off to different busses (Kick bus, Snare bus, hat bus) which were eq'd and lightly comped. Then it was sent to a Drum bus which i'd used parallel compression on so i could squash it and get the "fat" but keep the transients. Definitely the best drum sounds i'd ever gotten for electronic music. And it meant i didn't have to clean everything up with a maximizer too much at the end because the drums are too loud. Usually i get a dynamic range of 7 or so on a TT dynamic range meter for electronic music, but i was getting 12-13 with this method.

Actually i was going to buy EWQL:SO and SC while they're on sale so i could get them at half price. I mean i know what you're saying, i can hear symphonic orchestra (and even more so Symphonic choir) coming from a mile away. But right now nothing seems as affordable. Though i do prefer the sound of many other libraries (tonehammer requim would completely annihilate East west choir if it could do the word building) The sale and flexibility is drawing me in.... i'm not planning on working on commercial games for a while yet (i'm 16 just by the way). and I think i can still get it to sound apart with different mastering and particularly paying more attention to dynamics and really squeezing the personality out of it. Oculus ex infernei by symphony x, i'm sure it's East west but it doesn't sound like all the unmastered EastWest demo's on soundcloud. (Youtube.com) Right now i'm using Kontakt 4's ESL and it's okay but perhaps not flexible enough. The string quartet sounds fabulous though.

It is also good to note that commercial sound libraries are typically a 1 license 1 source sell. You will only own a license to the sounds used no matter how manipulated. Meaning, if a third party wishes to resale your work which has utilized sounds from a library, they must also own the specific license to those sounds themselves. Now, lets suppose you use 3 or 4 separate commercial libraries (non commercial of course can not be sold) , in this case, they must buy the 3 or 4 seperate licenses also. In short, business will generally gear towards the source of original sound. License fees..yarbles. Strangely, protecting content also played into the many reasons music is a rotten mess period. ha redonkulous..

Thanks for the tip punjab, i'll have to check out the liscensing for kontakt 4/komplete 7 and see if that's true with kontakt, i'd hope not. i mean with enough Processing there's literally no content identical between samples but the same still holds true? Like if i compressed, timestreched and then ring modulated a sample the licensing couldn't possibly affect it surely?

Commercially, it is an overlooked truth, yes. But do note, that usually once you purchase a product such as a library, you also obtain the license within the purchase. Typically, you do not buy a license separately.