I'm making music for a game called Homewords, a hybrid visual novel / adventure game that you can try out right now!
Homewords by jmaster2710 (itch.io)
Homewords by Jmaster - Game Jolt
Or you can just listen to the demo soundtrack on YouTube if you prefer
Homewords Demo OST - 01 - A Walk in the Park - YouTube
Go wishlist it, join the discord and such if you're interested (links in to those are in the demo pages). I've been working on the music for this game off and on for the past year or so and I think we've made something pretty special and I'm excited to see how the final game turns out!
In other news, I was super honored to win the Newgrounds Underdogs Audio Contest this year. Thanks again to all the judges, @TaintedLogic for the invite and good job to everyone who participated. Seriously, finishing music is hard work. It took me a long time to learn how to actually finish the projects I start on, so props to everyone who submitted and ended up with very cool tracks in the process!
My final submission song was this here..
I had the idea of doing a video walkthrough of my project in Reaper if anybody wants to see the project in boring amounts of detail
Moon City Song Walkthrough - YouTube
This is my first time doing something like this so you can probably hear in my voice how nervous I sound, if anyone finds this useful or interesting please let me know
The-godlike-psycho
Do you have any advice for people who are starting their music Career? If you do I would like some advice for making music in general?
Michael-Flaherty
I've never given anybody music career advice before, let's see how this goes.
I think the best advice is one that addresses a particular problem. If you know where you want to end up in your music career and you know how to get there and you know what's stopping you, you don't need advice you just need patience.
For me (and for most people it seems) what always got in my way was lack of motivation, due to not knowing what my end goal was (which I still don't really), due to wanting everything I make to be perfect (which I still do), due to music making sometimes feeling like a slog and hard work instead of feeling like a fun creative outlet (which always creeps up on every single project). What helped me get over that oddly enough was advice I got from a James Gunn tweet "Finish what you start". If you can hold on to the 'just get across the finish line' mentality, that helps me shed perfectionism and generally stay out my head and work on music. Getting involved in contests forces this mentality which is good! Also I have almost 2 decades of making music and building up an arsenal of tools and techniques so making music for me is going to be straight up easier for me than for anybody just starting out unfortunately, so if you feel like you're unskilled and you aren't getting anywhere, we've all been there and eventually you won't be if you stick to it.
If you're issue is not being able to build up an audience, apparently you're supposed get really good at a particular niche and then pump out that and only that type of content on a persistent basis. That's what algorithms like. I'm not going to bother with that, that sounds exhausting.
If you're issue is getting stuck/getting writer's block that stops you from completing songs, I have 2 pieces of advice.
* You don't want to be constrained when you're creating music. If you're working on a song you may be tempted to leave things as it is because you may be afraid that if you delete anything or change anything, it'll never sound as good as it once did. That's why for my projects, I put my project file in a dedicated folder, name that project "1" and then constantly create new versions. So I can always delete/change whatever I want freely. Ironically I rarely go back to those old versions, but having them exists helps a great deal.
* Music making and all creative work is problem solving and you should approach it the way you solve any problem at a high level. Figure out your problem, gather up solutions, test, measure, repeat. This maybe doesn't sound relevant to music, how do you measure the success of trying out a different musical phrase or whatever? But you can measure it, albeit imprecisely by just feeling out whether it accomplishes your goal or not. This is very much the mentality I carry when creating music in every stage of the process.
If you're problem is you are a complete beginner and you have no idea where to start or how to progress my advice is the super generic advice: learn the fundamentals and practice with purpose.
Hopefully this helps and good luck!