My New Composer Reel

Impressive PB. Congrats on your success.

David, Very impressive work. Congratulations on a rewarding future. Very nicely done.
 
Peace and Blessings, John

Thanks Dave.

thanks clint! great guitar work on your tracks by the way. listening to a few right now.

Thanks for the feedback Jeff. Certainly don't mind the constructive criticism. You know I definitely wrestled with how long to make it, but after reading a lot of conflicting sources, and a lot of conflicting in person talks and seminars etc etc, I decided on what I did definitely on purpose for a few reasons:
 
1) I was split down the middle on whether to keep it at a maximum of 5 minutes or a maximum of 10 minutes. In the end I went with the 10 minute option even though all the advice I had found was rather split down the middle. To be honest, I will admit that vanity probably led to my decision of 10 minutes haha, but I also feel like my "point" has been made within 5 minutes and if someone isn't going to take the time to watch the whole thing, at least they'll have a good idea of the quality of my work within the first 5 minutes. That's part of the reason I frontloaded some of what I considered my BEST work from the last year (although only work I was truly proud of made the reel in the first place... I've worked on probably twice as much as what made the reel). Also why I kept that comedy-rap song for the end. I figured they can watch 5 minutes and know if my application is worth responding to, or if they're really into it and feel like sticking around, there's a little extra.
 
2) As for the style of music, this is also somewhat intentional. broody and dark music just happen to be my specialty. It also is what I'm trying to sell myself on at the moment. I certainly try to have a good range as a composer, but right now I feel like focusing on a few styles that I am good at was the way to go, but that also brings me to the next thing.
 
3) One of the big pieces of advice I got from the Sundance Composers Lab a few months ago, was to create multiple reels for multiple things. The guy's name escapes me right now but I have it written down, but he's a music supervisor for many big Hollywood films. He said it's cool to have one overall reel for your landing page, but that it's also a great idea to have a reel for happy music, a reel for sad music, a reel for video-game music, a reel for dance music... Etc etc. This way you can send specific ones for specific opportunities. While it definitely works out that the majority of my work is the dark and brooding type of stuff for my more "dark" reel, it also is in the plan to make more, specialized reels in the future. As a matter of fact as soon as I finish my album that I've been working on, I'm going to get back to work on my video-game reel which I have about 8 games to grab footage from. It was a little hard for me to cut this one down though because, well, like I said, probably a little vanity involved haha, but I just really wanted to get to show a bunch of these films. But I think the video-game reel won't pass 5 minutes, and yea, probably some of my other reels will be kept shorter as well.
 
So yea, that's where I'm coming from with my decision to do the reel the way I did but still, I definitely appreciate your advice and I can't wait to make some more reels.
 
Actually if you check out my first reel... My 2010 reel ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CenbD7RdVAw ) which is definitely too long at almost 14 minutes you'll see a lot more variation in styles since, back then I was just taking anything I could get but now I seem to be finding (and they're finding me) projects that play to my strengths more.

hey Jeff,
 
yea i'll definitely check out your reel and music. going to bed right now but i'll check it out tomorrow. and yea i'm a member of a number of libraries... audiosparx, musicdealers, scoreascore... a few others. i've been slacking in updating them with new tracks, but i have over 60 tracks ready to go that i just gotta lock myself in my house for a week and go through the long uploading processes haha. i honestly think the uploading process is harder than the composing part :-)
 
you can check out my website at http://www.bydavidrosen.com