About me

• Freelance music composer
• Studied: BA (Hons) Creative Music Production, 2014
• Contact me on LinkedIn

About my career

After I graduated from Manchester Met, I had a range of jobs that were unrelated to my field of study. However, without these roles, I would have not known how to turn music into a professional and profitable profession. These job roles included working as a scuba diving instructor in Thailand, a guide safari in Lapland, a waiter in Australia and an English teacher in France. 

Now, my full-time role is that of a freelance music composer. I find projects that need a soundtrack and suggest musical options to the directors/producers. If they like my suggestions then they invite me on board to create the soundtrack, this is what I consider as the artistic part of the role. However, this is only 20% of the role, I then spend the rest of my time networking, selling, and promoting my work. 

My time at Manchester Met taught me the fundamentals of music production; from how to use a Daw to knowing which DI box to use on a bass guitar. I was a total production illiterate and so my learning curve was staggering. Even now, I put these fundamentals to use on a daily basis, though since then, my knowledge has built up extensively. 

Quite some time after my Bachelors, I felt the need to specialise. At Manchester Metropolitan, the knowledge was very broad and useful for someone like me, who loved music but was unsure which way to go with it. In 2018, four years after graduating from Man Met, I started studying for an MA ‘Music for the Moving Image’ at Leeds Becket University to dwell more into film scoring and composition. Throughout my career, I have also found YouTube videos and orchestration books to be a great source of knowledge, I try to learn something new daily even if it is through a short video or a couple of pages.

My top tip for students

As a music freelancer, one of the main lessons I have learnt is that, unfortunately, producing the actual music is just a small part of the role and there is whole host of other aspects to the job. From web page design to social media promotion, to copyright law. If you want to make a living as a musician, you have to think of yourself as a company, therefore you need that extra commercial knowledge. Also, make sure you research industry people that you find interesting. If you watch a TV show and you like the soundtrack, find out who wrote it. Discover their story, background and studies, this will help you gain a global vision of the industry.

I’m inspired by

Artists who dare to be different. Not only in music but in every other creative field. Having your own unique and distinctive voice is, in my opinion, going to set you apart from others who just copy or imitate. Picasso, Gaudí, Pollock, Stravinsky, Wes Anderson, Ennio Morricone, these are just some of the genius’ who stood out for this exact reason.

Why I love Manchester Met

My favourite aspect of studying at Manchester Metropolitan was that we had access to an immense amount of music tools and resources, and we had a lot of time and encouragement to use them.

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