Undertale at Indie Symphony
Undertale at Indie Symphony Arranging for professional musicians is truly intoxicating. Add to that a phenomonal lineup of video game music that delves far deeper than most game music concerts, and source material that is beautifully constructed, and you end up with a very happy arranger boi. This is precisely what occrued this past July in Australia, when the Orchestra Victoria performed their Indie Symphony II and recruited me to arrange a 15 minute sute from Undertale! I had a blast with this assignment. Knowing they were pros that could handle pretty much anything I could throw at them, I went out of my way to feature every section of the ensmeble at one point or another. My favorite moment was when the Bassoon, off on its own lyrical, rubato little solo, morphs into the familiar Megalovania ostinato. I was so sure that would provoke a reaction, and I was right! Another favorite moment was the horn solo in the very beginning. In this day and age, it’s easy to get a little too proud of how good I can get something like this to sound with samples. But there’s nothing like a true artist imbuing it with SUCH elegance and phrasing…the kind that a sample, no matter how well-programmed or advanced, can never capture. Nothing will ever beat a live professional…a body in a chair with an instrument and a soul. But really, the star of the show was Megalovania. I knew this was probably the most beloved track of the game, for reasons that are extremely spoiler-y. Sufficed to say, I tried my best to make it the most spectacular bit! They absolutely nailed this chart to the wall, but I highly encourage you to listen to the whole concert. There were things on it I hadn’t even heard of, and for me the stand-out stuff was the Untitled Goose Game Concerto for HONK! and some incredible choral stuff from Hades 2 and Abzu. A link to the full concert is below. Hurry up and listen, because I think it’s only up for a few weeks! Listen on ABC
Shujinkou #1 on 2025 Hall of Fame
Shujinkou #1 on 2025 Hall of Fame Shujinkou was such a huge part of my life for the past six years. It not only marked my first credit as composer proper for a video game of scale, it also served as such a formative experience as a composer, a leader, an interactive music implementation engineer and all sorts of things. And while there are a few things here and there I wish I could change, I am SO proud of the vast majority of the work I did here, and indeed of what the entire team came together to achieve. Particularly Julian, the project lead who did the jobs of at least a dozen full-time professionals. So as you can imagine, I was ecstatic when I heard the news that this game was in the #1 spot for OpenCritic’s 2025 Hall of Fame! To provide context for how insane this is, Shujinkou is a brand-new IP from a studio with no other titles at all, and has only been out for a grand total of four months. It literally started from zero clout and track record. And while sample size certainly is playing a role here, the critical response has been heartwarming and consistently stellar. The fact that it’s sitting above the wildly popular Clair Obscur is wonderfully affirming. Whether this is a momentary anomaly or a long-term honor, it feels good to be making a splash like this, particularly after such a long and grueling development cycle. For those of you curious to try the game, there is a free demo on Steam here. I also highly encourage you to check out the soundtrack, which has nearly seven hours of music from myself and four other talented composers, with styles ranging from rock to epic orchestral to traditional Japanese folk and so much more. We also tried our best to feature live musicians as much as we could manage on our shoestring budget, and so talents like Zac Zinger and Sasha Y helped to elevate key moments in truly lovely ways. The cherry on top is how many of these reviews are specifically shouting out the score. I went over some of this in a previous blog post, but some examples of that are below! Shujinkou: Contender for Year’s Best Score Glowing Tech Gaming review highlights the music. Shujinkou: Editor’s Choice RPGFan awards a staggering 98/100 for sound. Shujinkou: Music a Strength Strict publication shouts out the score! I’ve been silent for several months here on this blog until recently, but expect more updates to be coming down the pipe more frequently! Exciting things are on the horizon!
GDC Concert 2025
GDC Concert 2025 I am thrilled to announce that the GDC Developer’s Concert is now a regular thing! Even more thrilling is that Austin seems to be hiring me to arrange for them as a regular thing as well. This remains a highlight of my year! We really upped the ante this time. The highlight of the concert was the very first chart, which had the audience in stitches. It was a medley/mashup of musical jokes: what if X composer wrote the score for Y game? This is some of the most fun I’ve ever had as an arranger. I’d go into more detail about it here, but the YouTube video I recently posted covers pretty much everything in great detail. I have an embed for that below. There should be more coming from this concert, but sufficed to say I am ecstatic that this has become more than a one-off celebration. It is now a fantastic tradition that I hope continues for decades to come. Video game music certainly deserves it, and I’m just thrilled I get to be included and to be putting charts in front of monster musicians like Rob Kovacs, Laura Intravia, Kristin Naigus and Tom Strahle! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AhjZUs95sI
Shujinkou Release Day!
Shujinkou Release Day! The moment I’ve been eagerly anticipating for the past six years has finally arrived! Shujinkou, the most ambitious indie game ever made, is now released. So is its enormous 158-track soundtrack, most of which is unified by dozens and dozens of unique themes and motifs. It’s a veritable melting pot of styles, influences and tone. And as lead composer, I couldn’t be more thrilled to share it with you! I can’t even begin to describe what an incredible experience this was. I’ve made lifelong friends, my chops as a composer and audio professional have grown immeasurably and I was able to write the kind of grand, thematic score I’ve always wanted to write. My heartfelt thanks go to Rice Games for the opportunity, and indeed the creative freedom to do what I wanted to do a solid majority of the time. That’s pretty rare in the industry these days. And rarer still was not only accepting thematic/melodic tracks, but asking for more! One of the cool things the team and I discovered a couple of days ago was that we earned RPGFan’s Editor’s Choice Award, with an overall score of 95/100 and a staggering 98/100 for sound! Read more about it here. EDIT: Another heartwarming review with glowing praise about the soundtrack can be found here. Specifically, it says: …between Brian LaGuardia’s majestic main theme and at least a dozen compositions built around traditional instruments like the koto, shimasen, and taiko, Shujinkou repeatedly soars…At present, it seems like a solid contender for one of this year’s best scores. I was so worried that connoisseurs of the genre would bounce off my western-slanted orchestral stuff and my traditional Japanese instrumentation approach, but here they specifically call those out. My long, long journey with my fellow comrades-in-arms on the music team has been vindicated. I have a mountain of behind-the-scenes content in the pipeline, including a series of commentary videos on my favorite tracks. But for now, I simply have links to both the full OST on all major platforms and the game itself, all of which is well worth your time. You can find all of this on my Shujinkou page below. Shujinkou Page
Silco’s Theme
Silco’s Theme One of the things I enjoy doing between paid gigs is making extremely nerdy video essays and analysis of scores I greatly admire. This December, I had some time to do one on Arcane, a show that surprised the hell out of me in every way possible. There isn’t much I can say here that the video doesn’t, so I’ll just offer an embed and hope you enjoy. Happy New Year! https://youtu.be/RUZx8kq38l4
Space Oddity
Space Oddity I’ve been fortunate to be able to collaborate with the Colorado Symphony on a number of arrangements over the years, but this one was truly unique. I arranged a little song called “Space Oddity” by David Bowie for a cute little chamber ensemble, recorded in Denver’s Meow Wolf. The exact instumentation was a string quintet (including a Double Bass, which was fun), 2 Horns, Flute, Clarinet and, most notably, a Bass Clarinet. As soon as I got the list, I knew it would translate well. Those of you who are symphonic musicians or fans will note that strings often get to be in the spotlight, but here, with such a delightfully odd little song, I wanted to steer clear of that. Besides, with this instrumentation it made sense to keep the strings on chord duty most of the time anyway. But I did manage to sneak in a cello solo and a little energetic line for 1st Violin. The real stars here were the winds, though. I gave Bass Clarinet, in particular, quite a lot to do, because it’s got the perfect quirky tone for this kind of song. And the player absolutely smashed it. Horns also provided a great main melodic device, particularly since there were two of them: exactly the number of main vocal lines in the song (Bowie was overdubbed exactly once). But it also added an air of majesty that lends it naturally to space exploration. I even wrote in a neat little metal mute moment in between the cello solos, which was a fun way to alter their tambre for the lighter section. This was a delightful little project, and I hope I get to do more stuff like this in the future! It’s fantastic to see classical musicians embracing the new and evolving, and it is always an honor to put charts in front of musicians of this caliber. If you’re dying to hear some audio, check out the video below of the full performance, complete with stunning cinematography and the full score with notes! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvXzLUtYT0U
Claws and Chaos!
Claws and Chaos! As a phantom presence in several amazing Video Game soundtracks over the years, I have actually never had a credit in the industry as composer proper until this very day! The album was released this morning, and the game itself will be available tomorrow on Steam. The game is a cutesy, tongue-in-cheek little autobattler called Claws and Chaos. One of the artists brought me on because I was working on another project with her, and it was such a lovely change of pace from the other two behemoths I’ve been working on these past few years – not to mention a wonderful collaboration with great people! I was originally asked to deliver six minutes of music, given the small scope of the game. I fell so in love with the developers and the game itself that I ended up doubling that, scoring nearly ever major cutscene in the single-player campaign as well. This album is special to me for another reason than it simply being my first game OST as composer: I managed to rope in big names that really did not have to take the time to even notice this project, let alone work on it. One was the now industry-famous swiss army knife woodwind player Kristin Naigus. One was Austin Wintory’s multi-talented assistant Dallas Crane, who plays a mean Trumpet and Flugelhorn (he’s also comfortable improvising, which is an incredibly valuable and rare skill as a musician!). And the most insane of all was the legendary Steve Kempster, whose credits include things like Bourne films, Enemy of the State, National Treasure, Twister, Remember the Titans and Ori: Will of the Wisps. And of course, my mother plays violin, managing to hold her own even in the Jazz Improv world. As a result of these heavy-hitters and the irreverance of the game, the album ended up an ecclectic little oddity. It often plays the straight man to the game’s zaniness, but also isn’t afraid to go full Looney-Toons with it. There’s even a Sailor-Moon-esque adaptation of the B section of the main theme as the final track, which doubles as the boss fight underscore and credit sequence. I have more amazing things to share before the year is out, but in the meantime check out the official project/album page here! If you’re looking for more BTS material, I do have a version with commentary on youtube below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go_D3WZX6IM
Hidden Crunch
Hidden Crunch One of the downsides of being a freelance composer is that you invariably run into hidden crunch. When you have multiple clients (by necessity, in order to sustain your income), none of them really have any idea about what else you have going on. So deadlines can start to compound and overlap in very inconvenient ways. In my experience, this happens more often than not. It’s just one of those realities of being a freelancer. There aren’t really a lot of ways to mitigate this, either, because deadlines are deadlines and there’s rarely much you can do other than A) be transparent about the situation to all parties and/or B) hire on additional help to pick up the pace. A won’t always do much, because clients have deadlines too and can’t always wait on you. And often times, particularly in your early career, B is out of reach financially. So quite often, you simply end up overworked, overstressed and with deteriorating mental and physical health. Even when you love what you do, it can be overwhelming and can threaten to sap the very joy out of it. Ideally, what happens as you progress through your career is that B becomes more attainable because you’re earning more money, and A also becomes more effective because you don’t have to take on quite as many projects in order to stay afloat. But a lot of people don’t ever get there. In fact, it’s a pretty extreme minority of people who end up in that enviable position within the industry. I am fortunate enough to be in a position where I am actually turning down work on occasion, but I also am nowhere near that lovely sweet spot. This is one of the many reasons why most people can’t or won’t stick it out until their career takes off. Frankly, I don’t have an answer for how to solve this problem. The old addage “if it were easy, anyone would do it” does indeed apply here, but I am also the first to recognize that sacrificing health for a career is a pretty toxic mentality, whether it’s necessary in the short term or not. This cognative dissonance is something I meditate on quite often. This is also further complicated by the fact that I, personally, have had some of my best experiences on projects where I’m putting in 16+ hour days and sprinting like mad. This has been the case on everything from being a lowly copyist on AAA films and games to writing my own stuff: being in the zone and putting everything you’ve got into something that you love is an amazing feeling. I am certainly not alone in this either, as most of the more successful people I know are like this too. So it’s a complicated issue. This is also a big part of the reason why I haven’t posted anything for the past few months. Rest assured, though, that once I’m out of this insane sprint and after perhaps the first full-week vacation I’ve had in something like seven years, I will have a mountain of things to post and talk about all over my website and social media. Until then, wish me luck!
Mahlerfest 2024
Mahlerfest 2024 One of the things that helps to break up my parade of professional composition projects is this glorious annual celebration of Mahler’s works. Professional musicians come from all over the country for the opportunity to play in this unique festival, and the results speak for themselves. I’ve been a percussionist for decades now, but these days I am so busy with composition and arranging that this ends up being really my only steady time to be on stage anymore. And every time, it’s both a joy and quite terrifying. It really forces you to play up when you’re around all these pros. But man, the feeling you get when you’re performing the climax of the second or eighth or even fifth is nothing short of exhilirating. This year is no exception, though it is punctuated by the addition of Strauss’ Alpine Symphony! Soon I will return to my (thankfully) plentiful composition projects, but I just wanted to give a shout-out to this magnificent orchestra and the opportunity it offers me every year to be so enriched by its presence. If you are in the Denver or Boulder area or really anywhere in Colorado, I highly encourage you to check it out. Details are below.
Heir to the Empire
Heir to the Empire I’ve been following along with the new Star Wars material by Disney as a life-long fan of the franchise. As a result, it has not gone unnoticed that they are dropping a lot of hints for fans of the Expanded Universe novels (now called Star Wars: Legends) that Thrawn is about to become the new big bad. Obviously I’m very excited about that, but simultaneously it filled me with a bit of sadness and nostalgia, because the original Thrawn story is something we’ll never actually get. The cast is too old (in some cases no longer with us), and the franchise’s sensibilities have all but moved on. Therefore, I was inspired to write an original soundtrack for the book that started it all; the book that had me totally enraptured and obsessed at the tender age of eight and eager for more EU stories. Well, I’m pleased to say that samples have evolved to a point where I can (reasonably) confidently do this! My plan is to treat this as though it were a movie adaptation of the novel, since it is itself based on a movie franchise. So it follows, naturally, that full orchestra will be the bread and butter of the score, borrowing heavily from John Williams’ style and sensibilities (mainly extremely virtuosic and thematic orchestral work, but also jazz here and there). However, there are some fun, unique opportunities in this story that will allow me to venture into new territory with things like synth and world music, borrowing from the new direction the franchise’s sound has taken with projects like The Mandalorian and Jedi Survivor. Should be a fun time, though a bit intimidating! The first tracks are available via the link to the album below. So much of this book reads like slightly harder scifi than Star Wars normally is, so while I’m largely using the JW brush, I’m also being very judicious about where music should be as opposed to writing wall-to-wall. This is a massive project, and I’ll never be able to profit off of it, so it’ll take quite a bit of time. But I’m having a blast with it, and it’s really pushing my mockup and writing abilities! Below, you’ll find the album page, which will have the mp3s, links to the youtube album and evenutally some BTS content as well on youtube. I’m releasing track-by-track rather than all at once due to these circumstances. Whether you’re a fan of the book or Star Wars in general, I hope you enjoy!