Not like the brazen giants of German fame,
With clamorous symphonies from land to land;
Here on our digital packets shall stand
A humble human with a DAW, whose game
uses electric samples, and his name
in the credits screen. From his keyboard-hand
Types world-web welcome; his mild eyes command
The high-end PC that twin speakers frame.

“Keep, triple A, your storied pomp!” cries he
With silent clicks. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your indies coding in obscurity,
The wretched retros and your pixel noir.
Send these, the outcasts, the contest-lost, to me,
I move my mouse beside my paper score.”

It’s difficult to get high quality people to work with you for free, but just because you don’t have money up front doesn’t mean you have nothing to offer. The classic arrangement can be to agree on a revenue/profit sharing percentage on the final product, or to arrange for a fixed rate of compensation based on the successful completion of a Kickstarter campaign (or other such crowd funding effort like Indiegogo, GoFundMe, etc.) Additionally, there’s always bartering arrangements. Less established folks might need help with website development, SEO, business card design, or any number of things that your company can do. You just have to ask what a contractor needs and you’ll be surprised. Sometimes you can work out triangular trades.

When you’re setting up a revenue/profit sharing arrangement, you want to demonstrate sales from your previous projects or sales from similar projects done by other people. At the very least you want to show that you have the ability to finish a project and bring it to market with some press mentions. This helps a contractor estimate what remuneration he or she might get and charge accordingly. Typically, people will increase their rate if the payoff is more uncertain or more delayed, or sometimes they might ask for a fee along the lines of “If the game isn’t brought to market by X date, contractor is paid X dollars” so at the very least the contractor is protected against a complete fizzle on the project, yet the developer isn’t taking all the risk as the project is moving forward.

There is an audio solution for any price. If your budget precludes up front payment, contracting live musicians is unlikely and original music will be formed from samples and synthesizers. It’s worth considering where you need music and where you don’t, as well as where you can settle for generic licensed music and where you need your game to have an original sonic signature. The same goes for sound effects. It’s easy to find free sound effects if you don’t mind sharing them with other games. I recommend at the very least having original themes for the important levels and the first screen, and getting by with licensed music for menus, less important levels, and credit screens, etc. Be prepared to say “how much music/sound effects can you do for X Kickstarter dollars, or X revshare, or X bartering assets” and use licensed music to fill in the gaps.

I’ve done revshare projects in the past. It’s a perfectly acceptable way to do business, and doesn’t put too much pressure on the developer, as long as he or she understands that there are limits to what can be offered for a delayed or uncertain payoff. While I prefer cold hard cash (who doesn’t?), or at least a delayed Kickstarter fee, bartering arrangements can be OK. For example, I’ve been thinking about building a small, one-screen HTML game to run off of my website as a demonstration of interactive music. Code and assets for something like that would have tremendous value to me. Perhaps your company can offer 2D art assets or coding for a contractor whose work you admire… (Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.) Who knows, maybe the code you write for audio implementation can be used in your own game or sold on the Unity Asset Store down the line?

Or perhaps you have a completely different idea for a bartering arrangement, like offering some sexy, sexy writing for someone’s blog. You won’t know unless you ask. Granted, a composer or sound designer’s receptiveness to alternative contract models is going to vary according to how busy he or she is or how he or she feels about your project, but knowing this helps you present your project to a contractor whose services you’re interested in.

I hope this gives you a few things to think about. While composing music or creating sound effects free any charge is something very few quality audio professionals can do, there are a number of things that people like me can often help out with: evaluating other musician’s music, offering feedback on choices of licensed music, and providing music style suggestions based on gameplay videos. Bottom line: there’s a broad range of options to consider when contracting with audio professionals. You can work out an arrangement even if you don’t have buckets of up-front money.

One of the most self-destructive things you can do as a composer is being afraid to write clichés. While there are limitless musical possibilities, if you’ve absorbed any influences at all you will inevitably find yourself coming up with something that’s been done before. In fact, if you’re drawn towards particular ways of expressing certain ideas or feelings or sounds, it’s only natural that other composers will have as well. If you don’t let yourself do this and do this often, what’s the point of having influence? You might as well lock yourself in a 5-by-5 cell and pray for musical amnesia.

So we’ve got to be comfortable writing clichés. Not only is the universe of musical language abundant with them, but one of the most common self-criticisms we make is to say “I can’t write this. It’s been done before.” As I wrote in another article, we need to be free to write terrible music. Similarly, we need to be free to write clichés as well. The trick is to know how to handle them. I identify four basic strategies.

The first strategy is to avoid them at all costs. Good luck. If you find something that hasn’t been done before you’re not listening closely enough or you need to get out more often. If you manage to convince yourself that you’re doing something 100% original, your ego will always be at the mercy of finding out later on that yes, it’s been done before. Keep this up and you’ll stop being curious about the world to protect your self-image. It’s a terrible way to live. Don’t do it.

The second strategy is unfortunately common, and is to try to use the cliché “correctly.” This ultimately means using the cliché with all of its other typically associated clichés, ending up with your marginally personal expression of shopworn boilerplate music. Although this is a post about being OK with clichés, I’m not OK with the approach, unless they are paying me a lot of money and the coffee is flowing.

The most common successful strategy is to try to use your cliché with other clichés that it’s not commonly associated with. Essentially you’re looking for a way to subvert the meaning of the cliché by changing its context. I like this approach, and this is essentially what is done by most people who get credit for “expanding the boundaries of music.” The only problem is that it’s always a race against time. Eventually, any original combination of clichés that catches on will be imitated to the point that it’s no longer original.
Also, anyone with a critical ear is going to eventually figure out where your ideas came from, and what the thinking behind it is. Once they figure out that you’re just putting together an unlikely yet successful combination of clichés they will lump you in with everyone else who has the same approach, even if your music sounds totally different. Again, this isn’t the biggest problem in the world. Just be aware that you’re trading a sonic cliché for a conceptual one. There are worse problems to have.

Whereas the approach mentioned above is additive the fourth and final approach to cliché I will mention in this article is subtractive. Instead of mixing your cliché with other clichés to achieve a novel combination, you remove anything and everything that isn’t derived from your cliché. Reduce your music to the very essence of one cliché and strive to make your music contain nothing that is not that cliché. As you go through this process you will develop a deeper and deeper understanding of your cliché, and eventually, if your go all the way, you find come out on the other side with something that is truly original. Traveling inwards, understanding the cliché and all its expressions, its variations, its history, its tendencies, its shortcomings, you transcend it. You personalize it until it becomes universal.

Naturally, this is my favorite approach. The only downside is that it’s really hard, and most of the time you’ll come up short. But you’ll also come up with a lot of beautiful failures along the way.

So to drive this point home, what better way is there to end an article on clichés then with a paraphrased quote by John Fitzgerald Kennedy? “We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”