Hey everyone!
 
It's been a really busy last few years for me, composing for all kinds of projects... This is my newest composer reel, focusing mostly on the film work I've done. Check it out. Would love to hear your feedback. Up next for me is finally releasing my first, under my own name instrumental album after a decade-plus of working on music for all kinds of other stuff.
 
Enjoy :-)
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHOWK50PzP0
 

Impressive PB. Congrats on your success.

thanks Timbo. I'm listening to your "Beautiful As You" right now ... EXCELLENT work. 

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

thanks so much John :-)

Thanks Dave.

This is all very cool! Congrats on getting work and achieving success with your own music. Nice work all around...The music, the reel. It's impressive.

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

Hi David, I hope you don't mind but I am going to give you some tips on making a better reel. I have compsoed a lot of music for TV and films and have produced many reels over the years. Here are few tips:
 
Yours is too long. If you cannot do it in under 5 minutes or less then you will have problems. No one will listen for that long!
 
There is not enough diversity in your music. You have got long scenes that are of a similar vibe and the underscoring is also too similar from cue to cue. You only need one short scene with one type of underscore to demonstrate you can do it, after that you should move on to something very different.
 
I want to hear way more styles and diversity. Your current reel is manily showing off broody underscores which is great but can you do anything else? If so I want to hear it.
 
Don't worry about having the vision. All my reels are audio mainly. The good thing about that is you can show off way more stuff and not have to worry about the vision. People are not interested so much in the visual content. They are listening to the music. Audio demos do that by not distracting you from any visuals and allow the listeners to use their imagination and put your music into different scenarios.
 
Here are some of the areas I have demonstrated in my reels.
 
Thematic
Underscores
Corporate
Jingles/Advertising
World Music
Ambient (Eno style here no rhythms)
Partriotic
Grooves
Heavy Guitar rock based driving music
Comedy
Orchestral Simulations (Classical style)
Electronic
Theatre
Jazz
 
20 seconds of each will result in a demo reel over 4 minutes long! Make the transitions from the various areas interesting.
 
Good luck and your music is good and I hope you succeed in what you do.
 
 
 
 

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.