It has now been nearly three months since Sony’s much-anticipated PSP successor, the Vita (code-named NGP), was released in North America.

As an early adopter — thanks more to an excellent trade-in offer from GameStop than any particular fervour for the device itself — I have now spent an appreciable amount of time with the new console and wanted to assemble my thoughts in a way that might help those who are considering buying the device, as well as those who may have been discouraged by a proliferation of doom-and-gloom reports from various tech blogs.

Here, then, are some things I think you should know about the Vita; how Sony marred the presentation, why the Vita might have an identity crisis looming, and why you’d be hard-pressed to find a more impressive slab to put in your pocket even so…

Context: Bridge Over Troubled Waters

The minefield of the current market is an unlikely place to expect a wise company to throw in their new console, especially a portable one. If you’ve been following the news, you will have run into numerous discussions about how the portable gaming world as we knew it (those of us who grew up with GameBoys and the like) is changing, monopolized by Apple’s ubiquitous ecosystem and those who compete with it.

This is not at all an unfair reality to point out, but it needn’t be sensationalized. And it is especially true in light of the fact that Sony isn’t positioning the Vita to compete with iOS games, or even with the 3DS; rather, they are interested in fulfilling the long-standing dream of carrying a fully featured, extremely capable piece of gaming hardware with you wherever you go — and on this level, the iOS devices remain unable to compete for now.

Ideally, we could claim that Sony is therefore aiming to sail right over the hyper-casual gaming market and aim for a loftier audience of more involved gamers who have wished for a true console-quality gaming experience on the go. Unfortunately, the reality of the situation is that right now they appear to be having trouble making a commitment to one side of the spectrum or the other, the result being that the Vita’s position in the gaming universe is leaning awkwardly toward the half that it can’t compete very well with. Who, exactly, is Sony intending this thing for?

But before I try to answer that, let’s talk a bit about the device itself.

Hardware: A Slice of Awesome

Anyone who’s glanced at a spec sheet for the Vita will come to the realization that the engineers at Sony have shoved nearly every available piece of technological wonder into this device, both familiar and less so. The result is an incredibly versatile piece of gear that offers developers an almost overwhelming array of features to work with. This is a brilliant move because it makes it easy to produce games that emphasize what Vita can do that its competitors cannot.

Actually spending some time with the Vita quickly reveals the highlight of that long spec sheet: the OLED screen. The display is utterly gorgeous, with vibrant colours, deep blacks, and an appreciable resolution. It’s not a ‘Retina’ display, but it’s lovely and its touch capabilities are responsive. It is also quite large, which makes the device itself a bit more cumbersome than you might be used to, but it’s well worth it for the cinematic gaming experience it provides.

Ergonomically, the Vita poses some challenges. Because of the many different input methods (front touch, rear touch, buttons, dual sticks…) and the fact that you may have to use several in concert, playing the Vita becomes an exercise in awkward manoeuvring. There doesn’t seem to be a consistently secure way of holding the thing while you’re playing games that require you to switch between different input methods, suggesting either that games should consider this more seriously in their design, or that we should all play our games on beds or sitting above a cushion so that any accidental drops aren’t catastrophic.

The buttons themselves feel agile and aren’t too clicky, which I love, and the dual sticks have a surprisingly dynamic range of motion, managing to be very usable despite their smaller size. They don’t click in, and they’ll take some getting used to in order to translate your badass console controller skills to the miniature version here, but the challenge comes from the less comfortable ergonomics of holding the Vita rather than any deficiency in its actual control systems.

Alongside the more familiar features, Sony also pioneered the back touch panel. This unusual input system does what you’d expect it to and is well thought out in terms of offering touch input while you’re holding the device like a normal controller. Thus far, not too many games have made extensive use of the back panel, but those that have are doing a good job of beginning to explore the possibilities of the new concept.

Overall, Vita’s build quality is sturdy and attractive, and the arrangement of buttons and ports is familiar. Those concerned with size and weight should definitely go try one before they place an order: these are not ‘portable’ in the sense that you can pocket them. The Vita definition of ‘portable’ is more along the lines of “now you can have great gaming experiences without carrying your PS3 around with you.” Bottom line is that if you have room for a paperback novel, you’ll have room for the Vita, and that’s perfectly fine by me.

Speaking of storage, Sony’s most robust anti-piracy measure has been the use of an entirely proprietary memory card system for the Vita. The cards are tiny and come in a convenient array of capacities, but they’re very expensive (thankfully slightly less so than when they were first announced) and can’t be used by anything else (yet). If you’re planning on buying your Vita games digitally, like me, then plan to invest a bit extra in a higher capacity memory card.

Oh, Vita also has a camera. So that’s…um. Yeah.

Software I: Interface Shame

If you are the kind of person that doesn’t notice interface design, then ignore this section. For the rest of us, we have a serious problem here. As far as I’m concerned, Sony dropped the ball on this aspect of the Vita’s design, and they did it in a way that counteracts their otherwise consistent emphasis of how the Vita sets itself apart from the rest of the pack.

Consider the purpose of the user interface experience. Beyond getting you from game to game and back again, it also subliminally establishes the aesthetic of your experience with the device — and this is why I have a problem with the Vita’s. I don’t mind that Sony borrowed liberally from both Nintendo and Apple in its implementation of homescreen icons and their functionality, nor that they ditched their magnificently subtle and iconic XMB from the PS3 and PSP (yes, that’s right, I like the XMB). What bothers me is that their new interface is bizarrely out of step with the sleek and sophisticated hardware design. Everything about the Vita screams next-gen gaming, a platform open to creative development for all target audiences, and yet the interface is a childish, bubbly, and biased system that assassinates all the positive expectations that Sony has built up with every other aspect of the Vita.

On the most superficial of levels, why is it so juvenile? I understand that one cannot ignore the presence of the casual market and that they need to be enticed, but not at the expense of the device’s identity as a product of the cutting edge of portable gaming. One of the reasons I liked the XMB so much was that it was a neutral and versatile interface: by default it didn’t imply that the PS3 was a casual or a hardcore gaming system; it provided a sleek and customizable system and then let the games dictate their own aesthetic so that the console itself remained agnostic. This was a massively important concept that Sony seems to have discarded without any apparent justification — and at the expense of their console’s credibility.

This new interface, for instance, can only be navigated via touch. And only using the front screen. Why would a system that boasts at least 3 possible control areas only allow the use of one of them on its own menu system? They had to build an entirely different app, the ‘Welcome Park’, to provide users an environment in which they can familiarize themselves with all the various input options. The fact that it’s nicely gamified is great, and the concept of the ‘Welcome Park’ is fine for more advanced functionality, but it’s no longer a seamless learning experience if we have to go to a separate tutorial app just to learn the basics. Are we honestly expected to believe that the best minds at Sony couldn’t think of a way to build an input method tutorial in more organically? If only they had a more direct environment they could do that in…you know, like their main interface system!

Frustrations aside, the Vita’s interface is at least functional, and even innovative in one particular way: the tearing gesture. The basic premise of Vita’s interface is that each of the nauseatingly infantile homescreens presents you with an array of app icons, each of which opens into its own ‘page’ of sorts that contains some basic information about the title and some additional functionality dependent upon what the app is. These pages remain open, letting you keep apps in a sort of stasis that implies multitasking. To close them, you simply ‘grab’ the top corner of the page and ‘tear’ it off the screen in a satisfying gesture that’s unique to the Vita.

This kind of flash of brilliance makes me even more disappointed in the interface, because it shows me that they had the creativity to produce something revolutionary and authentic, and instead chose to realize a sad synthesis of familiar elements, cobbled together from competing paradigms. For shame, Sony.

Software II: Apps and the Store

If you can get past the look of the interface itself, you encounter the core system applications. I won’t bother delving into the details of the Content Manager, Browser, Videos, Music, Remote Play, etc. because they’re all quite self-evident in their functionality and aren’t really going to make or break anyone’s decision to purchase the Vita. They work. Some of them more elegantly than others.

Instead, I’ll focus on some of the more influential elements. The Vita, as of this writing, boasts a fairly modest number of available third-party apps, but they include giants like Facebook, Twitter, and Netflix — all three of which are very well designed and feel like native applications rather than just re-skinned wrappers for the web interfaces of the various services, so kudos to Sony for that.

They’re all accesible via the Playstation Store, and since the push toward a digital-only distribution system for games is unmistakable, I want to talk a bit about the experience of using Vita’s store. Thankfully, it’s fairly easy to get around, and the welcome area sorts titles into helpful categories like “Vita Only Games”, “Cross-Play Games” (Vita -> PS3), “PSP Games”, “Apps”, and a few others. This makes it very easy to narrow down your browsing to the category that’s most relevant to your needs, but you quickly come up against a few fundamental issues that detract from the shopping experience.

The most prominent issue is loading time…for some inexplicable reason, even on a very fast Wi-Fi connection, the store takes ages to render games lists and descriptions. Perhaps this is a minor quibble, born of being spoiled by quick access on other devices, but it’s noticeably laggy and discourages people from idly browsing for games as much as they might otherwise do, simply because it’s annoying to wait for things to catch up.

Next, you’ll notice that in each category, there’s no easy way of skipping to a different letter of the alphabet. This isn’t a huge concern now, since there are relatively few games available, but for the moment if I’m looking for WipeOut 2048 and don’t want to search for it, I have some scrolling to look forward to. In the PSP games section, they’ve rectified this by adding in another menu layer to sort things, but this seems unnecessary — a system like the iOS music player’s scroll list where you can simply tap the appropriate letter along the edge of the screen seems like a more straight-forward solution.

Once you’re ready to buy a game, you encounter my final issue with the store experience: lack of information. Each item’s listing includes the price, the buy button, and the publisher’s description. This is great, except that I also love seeing some screenshots, perhaps even a trailer. No such luck in the Vita store. Given the already slow loading times, I guess that’s a good thing, but for me it has meant that each time I see a game that looks interesting in the catalogue, I have to put down my Vita and Google it on some other device to get some more information (or exit the store and use Vita’s browser).

Everything else about purchasing and managing games and apps works like clockwork and I’ve encountered no issues so far, and I’ve bought all my games as digital versions rather than bother with the boxes.

Software III: Near

Sadly, Near is another example of Sony taking cues from the competition but failing to assemble them into a meaningful alternative. Near is the equivalent of Nintendo’s StreetPass & SpotPass systems built into the 3DS, and it’s intended to be a similar sort of live social interaction gimmick between players, allowing you to exchange profile information, game goods, and statistics.

In theory, all is well here, but in practice Near is full of issues and manages to be one of the most obtuse systems you could imagine. Worse, in the process it completely destroys whatever chances it had of being as directly inviting as Nintendo’s offering, which not only features the same basic social functionality, but also extends to encompass the activity centre (counting your steps, etc.) and turning the process of exchanging gifts with other players into a more charming and personal experience.

Opening the Near app brings you to a screen with 4 tiles: ‘Out and About’, ‘Friends’, ‘Discoveries’, and ‘Settings’. There’s also the ‘Near’ update button in the top right of the screen. As a general idea, tapping that button will perform a manual update and beam out what you’ve been playing, how far you’ve traveled, and your basic profile info to nearby players based on how you’ve configured the settings. At home, I’ve found that this works pretty well, but just last week I spent a number of days in Boston attending PAX East and was appalled to discover that my desire to connect via Near to that wealth of gamers was consistently foiled by the device’s inability to “obtain data for my location”. After 5 different Wi-Fi networks and 3 days all around downtown Boston, I gave up.

Rather than letting you access all the various aspects of Near from the main screen, you have to dig to get to them. Tapping ‘Out and About’ is the entrance to the rabbit hole, showing you an overview of what games are topping the charts nearby, what titles have seen a surge in popularity, and what discoveries you’ve made. Tapping any of the items will take you to another screen depending on what type of entry it is; if it’s a popularity notice, a strange radar screen that displays who’s been playing the title in question as a sort of circular distance scatter plot appears. If it’s a game notice, the ‘Player’s Voice’ page for that title shows up. More on that later. Beside this listing, you’ll see an unexplained crown icon. Following your curiosity, you tap it to reveal the popularity chart, displaying all the titles you’ve encountered so far and how many people are playing it, as well as details like whether it’s gone up or down in the charts recently. Good to know, I suppose.

To the left of the interface, you’ll also notice that each of these screens opens as a virtual tab, so the expectation is that you can flip back and forth between them. But, bizarrely, that is not the case. Tapping on any of the tabs will close any subsequent ones, and tapping the home tab will take you right back to the main screen leaving you no way of returning directly to the popularity chart, for instance, without performing two more taps. Why? And why aren’t the tabs simply present all the time so you can quickly get to the part of Near that interests you? More interface usability madness.

Since it’s intended as a social system, viewing the ‘Player’s Voice’ tab for any game or app will show you a store link, an option to launch the title if you have it, a list of emoticons people have chosen to represent their experience of the app, and a ‘Buzz Rating’. You can view the ‘Player’s Voice’ data either from people you’ve encountered, your friends, or just people you’ve played games with. Those Buzz Rating concept has potential, but the numbers are pretty meaningless for now since the way they’re calculated is never explained and you have no real sense of what the scale is. Facebook has a 1.3 among my peers, for now. Is that good? Bad? Who knows. The Vita’s manual explains the Buzz Rating calculation as follows: “average rating by the players who have played the game and the number of people who have played the game”. Just smile and nod.

And on the topic of smiling, I hope you enjoy doing it because if you want to use the emoticon system to rate games, then your only options are various forms of smiling. Need to give a negative review? How unfortunate for you. You thought Treasures of Montezuma Blitz was exploitative garbage? Hmm, did you mean Heartwarming? Captivating? Engrossing? Head-desk at will — for instance, a good time would be when Near pops up a helpful “Pick an emoticon!” alert every single time you open any application’s ‘Player Voice’ page.

If you stumble back to the main page of Near, you can also stalk your Friends and view your Discoveries, which may include goodies that you can use in your games. This remains the only reason I can think of to put up with the otherwise catastrophically broken Near application.

Software IV: Games

Thus far, I have played the following titles on my Vita:

• Uncharted: Golden Abyss
• WipeOut 2048
• Rayman Origins
• Treasures of Montezuma Blitz
• Super Stardust Delta
• Mutant Blobs Attack

Rather than go into depth about them, I will say simply that the line-up of currently available games on the Vita is not as strong as I would like. This isn’t to say that the games themselves aren’t strong individually, because they generally are very impressive and make good use of the system’s capabilities. The problem is simply that there aren’t that many of them, and some of the titles I was most anticipating — Warrior’s Lair (originally Ruin), for instance — are nowhere to be seen.

So while I wait for Warrior’s Lair, for LittleBigPlanet, and for the many other exciting titles that are coming in the next few months, I’ve been playing through PSP games that I hadn’t finished before. They mostly look excellent on the OLED screen, even though they’re upscaled to fit. The games’ individual art styles have a huge impact on how well they translate, I’ve found.

The fact that I have had to buy these titles again does not make me happy, but the fact that they’re mostly dirt-cheap now has made it bearable.

Conclusion: To Vita, or Not to Vita?

The short answer (he says, hilariously, after writing a 3,000 word review) is that I consider the Vita to be worth a purchase.

A slightly expanded version would admit that perhaps it’s not a system you need to buy just yet, nor at all if you’re only interested in the kind of gaming that you can get on your iPad, but if you appreciate a truly impressive level of technical fidelity and potential control flexibility in your gaming life, then the Vita is quite simply peerless and will have no trouble leading the portable pack if only Sony would make some adjustments to the presentation and commit to celebrating the many distinguishing features of the console.

I have come to really love my Vita, despite its garish interface and the issues I noted above. As a gaming console on the go, it’s fantastic and I eagerly await the coming titles that will begin to push the console’s potential to its limits.

Have a Vita, want a Vita, hate the Vita, love the Vita? Tell me about it in the comments!

One becomes sharply aware, but without regret, of the limits of mutual understanding and consonance with other people. No doubt, such a person loses some of his innocence and unconcern; on the other hand, he is largely independent of the opinions, habits, and judgments of his fellows and avoids the temptation to build his inner equilibrium upon such insecure foundations.

— Albert Einstein

A clear horizon — nothing to worry about on your plate, only things that are creative and not destructive… I can’t bear quarreling, I can’t bear feelings between people — I think hatred is wasted energy, and it’s all non-productive. I’m very sensitive — a sharp word, said by a person, say, who has a temper, if they’re close for me, haunts me for days. I know we’re only human, we do go in for these various emotions, call them negative emotions, but when all these are removed and you can look forward and the road is clear ahead, and now you’re going to create something — I think that’s as happy as I’ll ever want to be.

— Alfred Hitchcock

I recently did my very best to enjoy Hugo.

It shouldn’t have been difficult. Besides a wealth of Oscar attention, the film had strong production talent behind it, a wonderful community of good actors (many recognizable from the Harry Potter series), and an overwhelmingly attractive visual design. So what went wrong?

Unfortunately, too much. Watching the film was like watching all that’s negative about modern Hollywood wreak havoc upon a good film in real-time. What clearly began as a sweet, compelling seed of a story — complete with charming characters, imaginative ideas, and opportunities for sumptuous visual flair — soon collapsed under the weight of bizarre choices, misguided effort, and flat out poor direction.

One of the strangest aspects of the film, stranger than the fact that such an utterly poor script was allowed to develop around such a beautiful core concept, was the presence of many little details that betray a significant weakness in directorial merit on the part of Mr. Scorsese, whose legacy needs no introduction and — one would think — needs no defending.

Except Hugo is simply a weak film. Weak on so many levels, and in such crucially telling ways, that it becomes impossible to look at it critically without worrying about the master filmmaker at its helm. What happened? Why was the editing so noticeable, so abrupt, so out of step with the world it was portraying? Why were the visual effects — the Oscar-winning visual effects, lest we forget — so dated and strange looking as to appear comically out of place alongside the peerless art direction (which deserves every accolade it has received)? Why was the idea allowed to be corrupted by such a vapid script, to the point where much of it was insultingly banal even when viewed as material aimed at children? How is it possible that so many terrific actors coming together produces such a wooden and unconvincing set of performances, especially from dear Chloe Moretz, whose usual acting talent bears no resemblance to the strangely awkward portrayal of Isabelle in this film?

I have been hard on the script, so in the interest of fairness I will cite a glaring example of the issue to demonstrate what I’m talking about. Mid-way through the film, the children discover a book on the history of film, and in many ways that is where everything really starts to rocket downhill. Suddenly, we go from a charming film with an air of mystery and steampunk intrigue to a horribly on-the-nose documentary-style montage of why film is great and why, specifically, the old filmmaking techniques should be celebrated. Setting aside the heavy-handed approach of using a montage for that, surely someone on the team could have found a way to write it so that it didn’t feel so much like an infomercial.

Now if you’re anything like me, somewhere around this point you’ll pause and think “waaaaait a minute, this is all starting to sound rather familiar.” Suddenly, you realize why the film is disappointing, why it fails to meet its potential, why it descends so abruptly from the passable standard set in the first half: it’s because somewhere along the line, the film stopped being about the kids and their adventure — it became about an old filmmaker who was struggling to stay relevant and be appreciated in a world that’s left him behind. Sound like anyone we know?

Once your mind puts two and two together, it’s no longer surprising that Hugo turned sour. After all, what else would you expect to happen when you turn a colourful, imaginative film into a sappy, self-indulgent autobiographical plea for attention? At least Ben Kingsley is charismatic.

Hugo is a wasted opportunity, but the bigger picture is what’s troubling. The problems plaguing Hugo are representative of the mentality that’s pushing Hollywood further down the current slope into banal irrelevance. The engine of innovation and creative celebration that once was seems to have become a tired, complacent giant, snoring and drooling, dreaming of how great it used to be without realizing that it is asleep, that the world has moved on, and that the audience’s patience for self-congratulatory nostalgia is wearing ever thinner.

The Oscars, ostensibly a formal observance of the finest in the industry, is evidence enough. Hugo was nominated for no fewer than 11 categories, and won five of them — tied with The Artist, a silent film in black and white. Noticing a trend anywhere?

In the visual effects category, Hugo’s cheesy renderings won over Harry Potter’s gigantic palette of extraordinary visual wizardry (the only category in which that film received any notice), and nowhere was Andy Serkis’ brilliant virtual portrayal of Caesar from Rise of the Planet of the Apes given its due. Instead, the Oscars focused their attention on celebrating the past, on glorifying the old ways, and on completely missing yet another opportunity to bring some life and contemporary energy to a dying star.

How much longer Hollywood expects to sustain this system seems like the wrong question to be asking, since their smug fingers plugged firmly in deaf ears betray a lack of awareness that there’s even a problem to begin with. I watch the Oscars every year, searching and hoping for a glimmer of innovation. In the meantime, I support indie filmmakers who are in tune with the world, who are adapting to it, who are pushing the medium forward.

Had I the power to do so, I would humbly submit that the factory-film industry should take a year off. Collect the millions upon millions of dollars that would be spent on the next Transformers, the next superhero film, and distribute the money among the most promising of the new generation of filmmakers. Give them an opportunity to truly explore the boundaries of their ability. Reward their willingness and ambition to usher in a new era for film, and see what happens.

Until that happens, I will continue to offer my support to those whose vision of film is fresh and whose energies are focused on telling new stories rather than wrapping old presents in new paper and delivering them anew like the world’s most pitiful Santa.

One of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. A lot of the time our ideas about what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They’re sucked in from other people. And we also suck in messages from everything from the television to advertising to marketing, etcetera.

These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions.

Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.

— Alain de Botton, TED Talk (2009)

From the master himself, I quote:

Start with a concept of your sonic world. Limit your palette to fit the sonic world you’re trying to create — you can get lost and never write a note if you scroll through 1000 presets on average sounding synth. I got rid of most VstIs and just work with the ones who’s audio engines have real depth and quality, like Zebra and Diva, or the Virus. And yes, I have a lot of great old analogue synth that I bought for next to nothing when everyone ran out to buy a DX7.

Before writing a single note, my team and I spend a lot of time programming new sounds, sampling new instruments.

If you want things to sound big, make sure you limit your upper dynamic range. All instruments — especially percussion — sound bigger when played relatively softly. You can always turn it up. When you hit drums too hard, or any instrument is played too loud, they tend to sound only bright and thin and pingy.

I write very strategically for the spaces I record in. For instance, the Hall at Air Studio has a gallery, so I put my horns up there above the orchestra in Batman. The space you have people perform in is as important as the quality of their instruments. Players respond to good accoustics and will give you a better, more committed performance. The same goes for sampling. A dead room gives an artificially surpressed performance. It’s no fun playing in a dead room. Especially brass players like “using” the reverb in the room to give them time to catch their breath between notes, so they’ll have the courage and strength to play the next note stronger. I like recording in churches and halls, not studios and artificial reverb. 2000 years of architects like Brunelleschi figuring out how to amplify a sound beats the 20 years we’ve had of fake reverb development. But if your budget is a bit tight, try a school auditorium. Or an empty warehouse. Use your imagination. You belong to the proud fraternity of poor, starving artists. People expect you to ask them for favors in the name of the great piece of art you are about to unleash upon the world

I got pretty good ears ( I just had them tested…I got the frequency response of a 20 year old. Just luck. I’ve been listening to music in my studio too loud every day for 30 years). But the biggest thing is to learn how to listen analytically. That takes time. I learned from really good producers and engineers. Two month with Trevor Horn on a bassdrum sound will either drive you crazy, or really make you understand the damn thing (I’m not sure which side I’ve ended up on…). I know how to engineer, I know what all those knobs do, but I know that Alan Meyerson has a gift and is better at it then me. But at least I can comunicate to him — very specifically — what and how I hear my piece. I think there is nothing worse for a composer to be at the mercy of technology, the players or a recording engineer. It’s your piece of music. No one understands it better. (I always wonder…I grew up (?) working on Neves and Trident “A“s, Harrisons, etc. So I know why I pick a 1073 for certain sounds or a DBX 160 in my UAD plug-ins. If you never used the hardware, how do you know?).

I always have my monitors set to the same level. It’s the only way I know I’m not kidding myself. I don’t use very expensive speakers, I just use what I really know — and can get replaced easily.

Yes, we build our own sampler, because I can hear the difference, but the comercial stuff is getting better. And my career was just fine when I was only using Akai S 1000s with 8 megs of ram.

I’m a bad player, but a good programmer. I’m forever trying to explain to great players that want to become composers that they need to treat learning and practicing the computer as seriously as they practised their guitar or piano. The computer is a musical instrument and the more virtuouistic you get on that, the better you can express your ideas.

The moment I start writing, I start mixing. Since I don’t write on paper, I spend a long time making each note and sound convey the right emotion. It helps later with the live musicians. I can be very specific in my language (and I use English, not Italian) to convey to them why I want a note or phrase played a certain way. I don’t make changes on the scoring stage, I don’t let directors make changes with the musicians there. The recording is about getting a performance, not re-writing the cue. Nothing sounds worse then a bunch of bored musicians that had to wait while someone’s changed an arrangement.

Most of the stuff I use on a daily basis is off the shelf software — and not the really expensive stuff, either. The best DAW is the one you’re used to.

I don’t understand why people don’t sample their own stuff. I’ve been (more then once) asked to judge “young composer” competitions. After a while you can’t hear the music for the sameness of the sample libraries. I wonder how directors or producers can tell the difference.

And no, you can’t sound like me. You are not me, you are you. Just like I can’t sound like any other composer. Not with any degree of authenticity.

I hardly ever get a temp in the movies I work on (Chris Nolan will not temp with anything that’s not written for the movie. That whole Francis Lai thing is bull. I’m a fan, but I had never heard that score before. And if the rude ignoramus who was trying to hide behind a question mark when he called me a thief had actually analysed the score a bit, he’d have noticed that the whole thing was based on the notes C and D. Not just that riff. It’s a fairly straight forward musical tension device. Seconds, anyone? And the rhythmic figure was — on purpose — a cliche. People can take large chunks of dissonance if you put a groove with it…)

I can get obsessively lost in sound design and just spend 4 days making one pathetic little sound…But it helps me think the whole piece through…

Extraordinary wisdom from an extraordinary man, taken from VI-Control Forum.

n. the smallest measurable unit of human connection, typically exchanged between passing strangers—a flirtatious glance, a sympathetic nod, a shared laugh about some odd coincidence—moments that are fleeting and random but still contain powerful emotional nutrients that can alleviate the symptoms of feeling alone.

— Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Today, everyone who appreciates music ought to take a few moments to recognize and celebrate the birthday of our most beloved living composer: John Williams.

This man writes with more energy, sophistication, and cleverness than most of us will ever hope to achieve, but his greatest talent is his ability to personify Oscar Wilde’s notion of an ideal attitude for exceptional persons: rather than make you feel dumber through his brilliance, his great genius is inspiring, reassuring, and uplifting. It remains humbling, of course, but never belittling or snobbish in the manner of so many other pretentious modern composers’ work.

It is difficult to imagine someone nowadays whose musical life has not been enriched by the inclusion of John Williams’ music in their listening.

So please, if you’ve any love at all for music, take some time throughout the day to enjoy a few of your favourite pieces from the maestro. If you don’t yet have any, I will be posting several of my favourite cues to Facebook throughout the day, so you might want to head over there if we’re not already friends.

Happy Birthday, John. May you continue to shine light on the world of music.

I get asked this question a lot, as I expect most of my composer peers do, and I recently answered it again on a forum so I decided that this time around I would put up my answer here and just refer back to it in the future for efficiency’s sake.

So how exactly does one go about becoming a film/game/media composer? Here are my views, distilled into ten steps:

1. Learn your tools. Master them so they’re never in your way, learn their tricks, personalities, and best practices.
2. Learn to work fast. Then learn to work faster.
3. Make an excellent demo reel showcasing a variety of styles.
4. Make an excellent web presence to host that demo reel and information about yourself. Make it easy for people to Google you and find your music. Make it easy to listen to and share.
5. Send out 10 emails per day to young directors whose work you admire on YouTube, to game designers whose work you admire, to folks you’ve read about in articles, to people you’ve found on forums dedicated to film making, gaming etc. Ten per day. And don’t stop until you start getting answers. For every 50 emails you send, you’ll likely get between 5–10 responses, of which 3 will be a polite no, one of which will be a “we’ll keep you on file”, and the other which might be a “maybe, let’s talk about it.”
6. While you’re writing so many emails, learn to write well. Be concise, affable, professional, and courteous. The better your emails, the more responses you’ll get.
7. Respect your work; just because you’re new doesn’t mean you’re not worth money. You may not be worth $500/minute yet, but you sure are worth something. Find a number and try to get paid for your work, even if only an honorarium. If you teach people that you think your work is worth nothing, then don’t be surprised when they keep coming back expecting you to work for free even when they get bigger budgets.
8. Watch a lot of films, study a lot of film scores, and learn about the process of making films. Not your part, theirs. Find out about cinematography, learn to recognize good editing, refine your eye for good direction and good writing. If you can hold a conversation on their passion with them, you’re already a more attractive prospect than the ignorant composer too caught up in his work to realize that other people exist and contribute to a film. Learn to understand the context within which you’ll be working, in other words.
9. Learn about audio from other perspectives: learn the physics, learn the psychology of musical influence, learn the biases of cultural identity. Learn about audio formats, about compression, about delivery formats, and about the process of implementing music in a project.
10. Learn to manage your time well. Figure out how many projects you can have on the go at once (if it’s just one then you’re in the wrong line of work), figure out how many minutes of music you can consistently write per day in various styles (again, if it’s just one then you’re not going to be particularly competitive), and be diligent about sticking within the zone of comfort that allows you to maximize the quality of your work on each project. But don’t stagnate: let that comfort zone expand as you get more experienced.

Oh, and be careful about considering it as a career. You can make a huge amount of money at it if luck works in your favour and if you’re talented, but it takes a lot of effort and a lot of dedication.

If you can imagine doing anything else for a living, you should probably be doing that instead.

It’s now February, and as we continue to work on the New Years resolutions that stuck (I’m learning Mandarin!) and look forward to spring, it seems people are taking a big interest in their to-do management because I’ve had a couple of emails now asking me where I’ve ended up on the subject since my last post. Good question, and here’s the answer…

I’m still using Things. Actually, that’s a misleading way of phrasing it; I should say, I’m back to using Things again. Here’s what happened.

Shortly after my last post, I went a bit crazy and started trying out all of the available GTD options in the world. Happens to all of us at some point, I suspect. I learned that it’s very easy to find rip-off apps, very easy to find blind clones, and very easy to find broken or bloated attempts at solving the problem of managing your tasks. I was left with the conclusion I started with: it’s damn hard to find a good to-do management system. Bloody hell.

But I didn’t despair, and one day a colleague of mine off-handedly introduced me to something called Flow. Now Flow I hadn’t heard of before, but it’s essentially a very robust web-based task management environment that features all the goodies I loved from Things, all the syncing I loved from Wunderlist, and extraordinary collaboration tools. The catch, as you might expect, is that it isn’t free. Not even close. Their current pricing clocks in at $10/month, or $100/year. Educational discounts are available, but it’s still very pricey.

Nevertheless, I signed up and used Flow for quite a number of months — very happily, I might add. It didn’t have a native iPhone app at the time (does now!) and it didn’t have a native iPad app (still doesn’t!) but since it’s entirely web-based, it was perfectly usable from any internet-enabled device, so I can’t say it was an issue. Also meant that sync wasn’t a problem. You may not find a more robust task management system than Flow, to be honest. Especially if you spend some time browsing the available features and getting to know the collaboration features. Delegating tasks, discussing them (with real-time typing indication, like a chat), attaching files, sharing task lists, activity feeds, notifications…combined with a powerful set of task tools including repeat tasks, monthly views, lists, and folders make Flow a force to be reckoned with.

I should also mention one of the only competitors that gives Flow a good run for its money: Producteev. They recently refreshed their branding and they offer a nice, free, and multi-platform solution that should be more than sufficient for most people. I happen to not like Producteev, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why for you…something about the experience of using the app just didn’t click with me. I kept bumping up against aspects of the design and workflow, and I need my task management system to disappear, not keep poking me in the face while I’m using it.

But wait, you cry, you said you’re using Things again! Yes, I am. After some time spent using Flow, I began to notice the same problem I had with Producteev…the experience wasn’t seamless. The web-based design was a joy to use on my computer, but the iPad performance (which I do much of my task-wrangling on) was glitchy and unconvincing. The fact that an iPhone app emerged was a great boon, but ultimately it didn’t solve the issue.

At about the same time, Things sent me an email inviting me to their cloud beta. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it does exist. Though I believed it must be myth, I can reliably report to you that it exists and it was worth waiting for. Things, which I always considered the most intuitive to my workflow (the ‘Focus’ categories are genius), now does the primary thing I was missing before: instant, seamless cloud syncing across all my devices.

And here’s the best part: Siri/iOS 5 Reminders integration is now a reality! Things will now pull all your iOS 5 Reminders into your Inbox, so you can just dictate tasks to Siri while you’re on the go, and then the next time you’re in Things, you can drag & drop them from the inbox to turn them into appropriately categorized to-dos. Wicked.

What’s missing now? Only a few things, for me. Specifically:

1. Basic collaboration features. Nothing fancy, but task sharing/delegating would be great, and now that they’ve built an account-based cloud architecture, I see this being an easier thing to tackle.
2. A month view, like Flow has. That was a huge help in seeing the distribution of tasks long-term; certainly more intuitive than a plain list of them in that case.
3. Natural language New Task creation. Using Siri on the go is great, but when I’m on the computer or on my iPad, creating a task is still just too tedious — even with the global Quick Entry, it takes too much clicking around to make and properly categorize a new task. Let me do it just by typing, like I can when I’m creating iCal events in Fantastical.

And that is the story of how I danced around, got frustrated, and finally made my way back to Things. I wish I could say I’m confident that the folks at CulturedCode will start to move faster with updates and releases, but the truth is they don’t seem like people in a hurry. That being said, the product as it is now (in beta) does exactly what I’d always hoped it would, and it does it brilliantly, so (barring the requests above) I am perfectly satisfied. And productive.

On a parting note, I should address poor Wunderlist. I haven’t neglected them, and in fact I’d still probably recommend them over Things to anyone beginning their hunt for a to-do solution, but for me Things continues to win out. However, that isn’t to say that I’m not very excitedly testing out the new Wunderkit beta — not quite sure how useful it’s going to be for me, but it’s a new toy and I’m loving it, so what the hell.

So that’s me — if you have some time, drop me a note in the comments and let me know what your to-do journey has been like so far? We can do this every year and see what happens.