I once got paid to pretend to be a drunk German soldier singing propaganda songs in a pub. That's not even the weirdest part of how I got here.
I recently sat down with Gabe Shadid on the Epic Score Podcast and we talked for a while about how I went from being a teenager watching MTV's Headbangers Ball to composing music that ended up in the Pacific Rim trailer. It was one of those conversations where you look back and realize how random the path actually was. I want to share some of it here for anyone who didn't catch the episode.
How does a guitarist end up composing for trailers and games?
At 14, I saw Steve Vai and Joe Satriani on TV and decided I needed to play guitar. I got private lessons, got decent enough, and at 17 joined a band. I say "band" loosely. We were more of a photo project than a music project. We had more pictures of us looking like Poison and Motley Crue than we had actual songs. I think we played one gig. At our school.
But at 23 I got serious. A drummer I met in a rock club, a guy I initially thought was arrogant (he thought the same about me), became my bandmate. We were both into Dream Theater and started writing together. He was the one who told me about a music program in Los Angeles. So I got on a plane and went.
What was it like studying music in Los Angeles?
I studied there for a year. Sounds short, but Frank Gambale, one of my teachers, told me something I still think about: "You will never play this much music in your life again." He was right. We had session workshops every single day. In the morning you got a chart, maybe something from the Real Book, and by the afternoon you had to perform it live with a professional rhythm section. It wasn't just theory. It was performing, reading cues, reacting in real time. Joe Porcaro, the father of the Toto guys, was the drum teacher. Sometimes I'd sneak into his classes just to watch.
What happened when you came back to Germany?
A few weeks after I got back, a band called Reinvented hired me as their guitarist. We wrote songs in that Goo Goo Dolls kind of vein, got a record deal with a BMG sublabel, and started touring with bands like Guano Apes, Raemonn, and H-Blockx. It was a great time.
But something shifted during the album recording sessions. I kept gravitating towards the console, the plugins, the faders. I was more interested in what the recording engineer was doing than in playing guitar. I started showing up at the studio on days I wasn't needed. I didn't ask for money. I didn't even ask to be an assistant. I just said, "Can I come tomorrow and watch?" The engineer was patient enough to explain everything. That's where I fell in love with production.
How did you get into writing trailer and cinematic music?
I was spending time on composer forums and I noticed something. Everyone was writing these beautiful melancholic pieces, trying to sound like classical composers. But nobody was writing the action stuff. Where were the pounding drums? The hard brass? The Wagner meets Hans Zimmer sound? I knew there had to be a market for that.
So I wrote a demo. It was terrible. The hard drive it was stored on died, and honestly, I'm grateful for that. But I sent it to Doug Rogers, the CEO of EastWest Quantum Leap, and basically said, "Your demos are brilliant but where's the action music?" He wrote back, sent me an NFR copy of the software, and asked me to write two demos. People actually liked them. I had no formal orchestration training. I just used my ears and went with what felt right.
Separately, Gabe from Epic Score had been lurking on the Vi-Control forum and heard one of my demos. He reached out, asked if I wanted to write for Epic Score, and that's how I ended up with a track in the Pacific Rim trailer. Wild how that works.
What's the Wolfenstein story?
This one still makes me laugh. Mick Gordon, the composer behind the Doom and Wolfenstein soundtracks, reached out to me asking if I knew anyone who could sing in a rough German voice. I sent him one of my own tracks. He said, "That's exactly what I want."
So he hired me for all three Wolfenstein games. Not to compose instruments, but to sing as the German characters and help write lyrics in German. The game has an alternative universe where instead of the Beatles, a German band gets famous. They needed propaganda songs, drinking songs, the whole thing.
The best part? For one mission, you sneak through a pub and hear soldiers singing. That's me, plus the entire MachineGames development team, who learned the lyrics phonetically because none of them spoke German. A room full of Swedish developers singing a Bavarian drinking song they couldn't understand. It's one of my favorite credits.
How did you go from composing to education?
A few months before Covid, I decided I wanted to build something of my own. I love collaborating and working for other people, but I wanted something that didn't depend on the next pitch or the next rejection.
I started with courses. The first one, about trailer music composition, did well. Then I did one on video game music, which is its own world because you're not writing a linear piece. You're writing chunks: a battle loop, an intro, an outro, layers that stack. The player essentially composes the final experience by how they play the game. That's a completely different way of thinking about music.
After about ten or eleven courses, I burned out. Not from composing, but from the cycle of constantly needing to create the next course because the previous one's sales were declining. A coach helped me see that I should take all that material and turn it into something live and personal. That's how Audio Artist Rise started. Instead of selling another course, I show up on live calls, do one on one sessions, and give direct feedback on music and demo reels. Completely different energy.
Why do most composer demo reels fail?
I can say this bluntly: nine out of ten composers send terrible demo reels. They send a SoundCloud link with the subject line "listen to my music." That's it. No context, no hook, nothing that makes someone want to click.
Gabe confirmed this on the podcast. Epic Score has about a thousand unlistened demos sitting in their inbox. And if you're using a free SoundCloud account, the person on the other end has to sit through a minute of ads before they even hear your first note. That's a guaranteed skip.
I always tell my students: your subject line matters more than you think. If you're trying to get into game music, something like "My music is so good it would make Princess Peach forget about Mario" is going to get opened. It's a bit arrogant, a bit funny, and it makes you curious. That email gets read. "Listen to my demo" does not.
Where does AI fit into all of this?
Gabe asked me about AI on the podcast, and my answer hasn't changed. Every time I've tried to get Suno or any of those tools to write a decent production music track, it fails. You hear fragments of John Williams, then suddenly it shifts to Hans Zimmer, then something else entirely. There's no consistency, no arc, no storytelling. And storytelling is the entire point of trailer music. You're the audible marketing unit trying to sell a movie. AI can't do that yet.
Will it get there in 5 or 10 years? Maybe. But I don't lose sleep over it. I use AI for practical things like generating images for social media or building tools for my business. But writing the actual music? No chance. That stays with me.
The podcast covers a lot more than I could fit here. We talked about the two year gap between writing trailer music and actually seeing royalties, what it takes to consistently land work in the game industry, and why personal connections still matter more than blind submissions.
