I just had the most emotional experience of my film composing life, at a screening of a documentary I scored.
The doc tells the story of a woman who had a ye...
I HATE seeing composers ripped off. Hate it. Because I was painfully ripped off. I HATE seeing composers get bad advice or have bad teachers. Because I was give...
When you’re at an SCL event and you see a man and a woman together, who do you assume is the composer? To whom do you direct your conversation?
When you’re a...
Lately I’ve been working with a few directors who have been giving me tons of notes...revising and working our way through many different versions of a cue. My ...
Was there a Golden Age for media composers when everyone gave ghost writers the credit and back-end payments they deserved?
No.
I don’t mean to be a Debbi...
1. MUDBOUND is your first feature score, and you composed it in five weeks. What was your process, and what kind of direction were you getting from Dee Rees, yo...
Two personal stories of composing for free: a parable full of survivorship bias, other buckets, and Maslow's pyramid, but maybe useful anyway
A few years ag...
I read a memoir about a man who longed to study Zen in Japan. This was shortly after WWI, and the man was reeling from the horrors of war and questioning what l...
I've never done it before, but I'm going to need to do it soon.
For those of you who've used assistant composers--any tips on how to organize it? Do you star...
If you had to choose--if it were truly impossible to do both...
Would you:
1. Assist a well-established high-level film composer?
2. Try to get your own fi...
When I feel stupid, frustrated, or jealous on my composing journey, I remind myself: We're all somewhere on the path.
Composing for media has a lot of moving...
A behavioral psychologist did a test about feeling lucky.
First, the psychologist interviewed people to assess whether or not they felt lucky in life.
The...
Question for you experienced feature film composers...
Do you plan out an overall arc to your cues over the course of the whole film? If you have a dramatic ...
How to do something scary:
Doing the media composer thing involves a lot of moving parts: composing, tech stuff, self-promotion, time-management, learning ne...
I have to admit, I have a bias against going in to debt in order to attend music/art/film school. I'm sure there's lots of useful stuff to learn at film scoring...
Dang I had a rough day in the composing world today.
Submitted music for a series of commercials. Found out today I didn't get any of them.
Composed music...
Miriam Mayer works as a composer, violinist/violist, orchestrator, and score proof-reader for film/TV productions that have included Saving Private Ryan, Star Wars I, Ratatouille, Mission Impossible III.
