For well over a year now at Crow Hill we’ve been running ‘Composing Challenges.’ So far, we’ve set 8 Vaults challenges, 3 trailer rescores and one to create music for our Fellowship of the Ring Pull podcast. We’ve had hundreds of people enter and some lucky winners have received some amazing prizes.
So, why do we call them ‘challenges’ instead of ‘competitions’ or ‘contests?’
Firstly, composing is not a competitive sport. Music should not be about pitting composers against each other. At Crow Hill we like to encourage support within our network and it’s been lovely to see people sharing their challenge entries on our forum and showing appreciation of each other’s work there too.
Secondly, we like to encourage people to try new things as composers, push themselves and experience real world scenarios.
Our challenges have ranged from ‘you have 24 hours to compose a 1 minute piece of happy music using the Attic Grand piano’ to ‘we’re offering a paid commission to audio brand our podcast’ right up to our latest ‘rescore our Venom trailer only using sounds you have recorded on your mobile phone and free fx plugins.’
We sincerely hope that every single person who has a go at these challenges takes something away from each; whether that be experience, something new to add to their compositional skillset or, hopefully, just had fun!
So, keep an eye on the website and our socials for future challenges and give one a go! You’ll be glad you did.