*may or may not encompass months' worth of happenings

Speaking at the SoundGirls conference

On the evening GMT of 13 December 2025, I joined some friends – Rachel Garett Steele, Bonnie Bogovich, and Kelsey Mira – in delivering a talk about getting our vocals into games. It was called Studio to Score: Vocal Arranging Demystified. (The poster mentions two more friends, Laura Intravia and Jillian Aversa; sadly, they couldn't make the talk due to emergencies.)

(Yeah, there's a cheeky image of me behind the drums at Oyston Mill. The drums are not in shot lol)

It was a thorough talk, from what I remember; we covered various aspects of the process. How we got our vocals in games, how we were picked up by developers, what gear we use, what our recording and mixing process is, how we spoke with developers and what kind of direction we received from them with regards to the way we were to perform our vocals, contracts, licensing, the list goes on.

This is my first speaking credit. I may be mistaken, but I believe the others have spoken at a good few other conferences. Nonetheless, I'm happy to have been able to join these seasoned professionals in delivering insight into the world of game audio, and specifically from the perspective of a vocalist.

Choir directorship

Some of you may have known that in mid-2024 I started directing a kids' church choir in Longridge. I have since moved on from that position to direct a well-established church choir in Penwortham, starting 1 February 2026. I feel like I've stumbled onto them, because they are wonderful singers and they're eager for a challenge. I hope that I can give it to them and that they can feel real satisfaction from it. I'm truly blessed to be with them.

I introduced one of my own songs to the choir and the congregation a week and a bit back (this song is still in the process of being recorded, so I'm not dropping any hints from now). I was not expecting the amount of effusive praise I would get from the people around me for it. This has gotten the gears in my head turning.

These next couple weeks are going to be among the busiest for me: Holy Week and Easter are coming, and there is a LOT of preparation to do. Let's shine.

Harris Open exhibition

My local museum, the Harris Museum, relaunched its open art exhibition, the Harris Open, in February 2026. I am one of 500+ artists to feature there, and I submitted this moleskine journal entry.

If you happen to be able to visit the Harris Museum, my work is number 83, in one of the side rooms! The exhibition lasts until May 2026.

There was a lot of processing that went into this work. I've been mentally abysmal these last several months. At the time I penned the words that would become this art piece, I was struggling to find a way forward with my craft. Various industries have gone to shit, and there seemed (and still seems) to be less appetite for beautiful things in a world of poverty, austerity, hatred, and war. Many creatives I know feel like we're on the front lines of passive resistance, as do I. And I want to stress, that is a good thing in the face of this constant evil and darkness… and yet, we can't help but dream about what came before.

I didn't win any prizes (now why the fuck would I, lol). But I managed to inspire a child who loved comics and wanted to get into them, on the opening day of the exhibition. I've not been back since, at least not yet, and I hope to be back. I don't know what kind of reach this piece will have had since opening day.

Discoveries regarding games I'd scored

For the purposes of this paragraph and all discourse on the games I'd written music for, I use the phrase “shipped titles” to describe games that 1) are NOT jam games, and 2) have made it to storefronts, notably Steam and Google Play. Anything else is a bonus.

I discovered only yesterday that Glue Globs, the second ever shipped title I'd scored, has had 50,000 downloads. For an indie mobile game, this is not bad whatsoever. Honestly, I didn't know what kind of reach the game would have; it looks like it has gone far further than I had imagined.

Today, I found out that the opening trailer of yuri visual novel Bittersweet Blossoms, for which I laid down vocals, is now out. There's still no word on the game's release, at least not yet.

New material and older material

New material is being recorded in Soundskills at the minute. In an earlier paragraph I spoke about a song I demonstrated to the folks in Penwortham; more instrumentation is being added to it at the time of writing.

My spouse and I and another friend talked about the possibility of me either 1) revisiting older material by posting it on YouTube with visualisers, or 2) rerecording and remixing older songs.

I'm taking a hybrid approach. There are songs that I'm not about to touch again, like the OSTs I'd scored (Ley Lines, Glue Globs), and for those, I'd like to slowly release them on YouTube with visualisers. The same applies for jam OSTs that I'm especially proud of. As for lyrical songs, it's worth mentioning that before 2020, I mouse-clicked everything, INCLUDING piano parts, into the piano roll in FL Studio, and so while it is playable, it feels lacking in movement and it doesn't reflect my ability. There are a number of lyrical songs I've written that I'd like to rerecord and release music videos or lyrics videos for, down the line. Let's see where this all leads.

Before I proceed, I'd like to open with a video.

This video was taken on Friday 23 January 2026, while my spouse and I were in Christoph Jakob's neck of the woods. One of the nearby small towns has a monthly karaoke night that is hyped up among the locals, and from day one of our visit Chris made sure to let us know that we were going to this. For days I racked my brain thinking about what I was going to sing… then on the night, it hit me.

I could sing Whitney Houston. Specifically, the one song that my schoolmates and I sang every Children's Day when we were in secondary education, when it was celebrated between us as “Everybody's Day.” That song, you know. Greatest Love of All.

And so I did.

The venue was packed that night and the crowds erupted in applause when I hit that initial D5. The praise for my performance was effusive. Notably, many people repeatedly said one thing, in German and in English: “your voice is extraordinary.”

I'd like to talk about that word, “extraordinary.”

For years we were all sold the tale that for someone to be successful in music, they had to be that word, “extraordinary.” Another term for that is that someone is meant to have the “X-factor.”

And to that end, many of us, myself included, were told by our parents, teachers, peers, and even industry figures, that if we didn't make it, we didn't have anything extraordinary. Even the Home Office declared, overtly and otherwise, while I was an asylum seeker, that I had nothing to give to this country. By definition, no skills, nothing “extraordinary.”

In that small town's karaoke night, I was told the opposite for the first time in a long, long while.

See, it's not fact that is believed or taken for truth: it is repetition. We see it in people when conspiracy theories and disinformation are repeated to them on a daily basis by figures small and great who are given a platform. We all can run the risk of believing lies when they are repeated to us and no alternative is presented. We can even believe lies about ourselves.

After I had received this massive effusion of praise, a slew of questions started to run through my head, and they would not leave me. I want to give voice to them now.

These are questions that demand answers, regardless of whether we can answer them.

Do I have the extraordinary to give, yes or no?

If yes, then why the FUCK has my work been slept on for so incredibly long?

I can only imagine that anyone in a similar situation to myself would ask the same questions (as they should). I will go even further, and say that if we can't answer these questions, then maybe we've been lying to ourselves and to each other about “extraordinary.”

This is a tale as old as time, too. I can think of many composers from centuries past whose names we know, who did orchestral versions of popular dance tunes. But they weren't the ones who composed those dances, for all we know. Nor were they the ones who came up with those dances. Gavottes, waltzes, mazurkas, the list goes on. In all likelihood, these dances were dreamed up by peasants whose names we wish we knew. Their names and their extraordinary musicianship, that touched the likes of Bach and Chopin for example, are lost to history. And that is a massive travesty. We have effectively signalled that their contributions are not extraordinary, and that they don't matter (when, in fact, they do).

Today is no different. We don't need to complain about lacking the extraordinary in music when there really are extraordinary musicians all around us. I can name a few, but my list would be woefully inadequate – Christoph Jakob, Psamathes, Fogheart, BLKY, FMA+12Gage, SnugglyBun, all extraordinary in their own various subgenres and niches of music – and I say that my list would be woefully inadequate because I know for a fact that I have only barely scratched the surface with criminally underrated musicians and their individual brand of “extraordinary.”

Music is expression; where singing or stage performance or playing an instrument is involved, music is also athleticism. We push our bodies to the limits to bring forth entire worlds of experience, to communicate with people who need to hear a given emotion or message. And if none of the athletic side of music is involved, we go to some really dark places sometimes to write music. I'd argue that that's fucking extraordinary, and that it's sorely needed in this day and age.

We're at the cusp of recognising entire peoples' musical contributions; we're at the cusp of something better. We're living in a time when the current systems propping us up seem to be failing left and right. Spotify and TikTok, the two platforms used by venues over the last decade to determine whether an artist should ever be played in a venue, have sold their souls for various reasons, the latest being the enablement of ICE and their cruelty through ads, or the provision of users' data to ICE.

Music, as we've seen over the decades, is a reflection of the social situation. Billy Joel did Goodnight Saigon when the Vietnam War was raging. Bruce Springsteen's Streets of Minneapolis, the most recent number 1 hit, touches on the ongoing brutality committed by ICE against the people of Minneapolis. But let's not stop there. Music and social change need not be limited to those whose names we know.

At the end of this we can all emerge better, lamenting that those voices that should have been heard were not, and trying to redress that balance. We can all emerge better, making pipelines for new creatives at any age and at any stage to advance. We can recognise the musicians around us, especially the small ones, and give them whatever leg up we can.

We can recognise that the recognition of talent happens when we return to a stronger sense of inclusive community. Many of the old names we recognise were picked out from everyday community settings: singing in bars, singing in churches, singing in karaoke nights (when, in this day and age, none of these seem to be ways forward for so many musicians). We can reject the brickwalling of smaller musicians and say, enough is enough.

Extraordinary happens now, and in our everyday. 

Could you tell that I'm terrible at updating my website, let alone this blog?

Lately I've taken to doing weekly releases on YouTube, mostly of video game covers and sometimes the odd original. Really, I only release (or re-release) originals on YouTube whenever I can get a new song mixed and mastered and whenever I can make a music video or visualiser for it. For the most part, otherwise, it's easy for me to simply improvise piano over some themes that I cherished.

In the way of originals, over Christmas 2025 I released a music video for a song I'd written almost a year prior, called lonely, which dealt with the cultural loneliness I feel around Christmastide.

And some time before that, I released another original, in French this time, called autrefois j'avais une étoile (tr.: “once upon a time I had a star”). It's a song dealing with the loss of friendship. The video has English subtitles if you don't already understand French and would like to follow along.

In the way of improvised piano covers, I finished a Kirby's Adventure-themed series in early December, and then began a Kingdom Hearts-themed series in January. The lot can be listened to in the Video Game Covers playlist – though, bear in mind that said playlist also includes covers that I made before I began improvising almost weekly.

A chapter in my life as a musician is soon to close. In late February, I will no longer be junior choir director. However, another chapter has also simultaneously opened: in early February, I begin my position as an adult choir director, my first such position.

Of course I'm going to feel all manner of bittersweetness around this thing, but also, I must press on.

If Inkfinity Festival has unlocked something in me, it's the desire to share music and visuals with you on a somewhat regular basis. After I'd shared three separate behind-the-scenes videos, there was a void that needed to be filled.

This isn't explicitly a Friday night release – this one was done for the OST Composing Jam, which I'll get to in a bit – but this one is the first video for which I drew and put together a visualiser that moves, lives, breathes. Not just moving peak effects, but moving water, lights that grow and shrink.

I'd neglected my YouTube channel for years for the simple reason that I couldn't figure out what made videos look nice and catch people's attention. Now it's different: I have a release every Friday at 21:00 BST (or GMT, when the clocks eventually go back). That I have a regular release schedule suggests that I've gotten to the point where I'm happy, visually, with what I'm outputting. And I guess I am. Watch this space.

Recently, fellow game audio person SnugglyBun and I tag-teamed for the OST Composing Jam 8. The text theme given to us participants as a prompt was the phrase “one summer night.” An image prompt was also supplied, too: an image by xin.cere depicting a girl waiting on a jetty as dusk fell (hence my visualiser above, which was intended to be a direct reference to this).

One look at the image and text prompt and both Snuggly and I immediately thought, visual novel. The result, as posted on our submission page, is an OST that is both airy and bright, and mellow and emotional.

At the time of writing, we're waiting for the results of the jam (it is ranked). But we're also not holding our breaths. More than 260 people submitted to this jam, which I can only imagine is an ordeal to sift through. After we've dedicated time and energy to a project that we can be proud of, we feel like it's time to move on to the next project, whatever that may be.

If anything, I'm glad I participated with Snuggly, and I'm glad we finished. I improvise piano in a matter of minutes; Snuggly is an exceptional arranger and composer. We've borrowed each other's leitmotifs. For one of these tracks, she took what I had drafted and turned it into a fully-fledged, airy, 2000s instrumental rock track. We've looked upon our finished soundtrack rather fondly, with hearts wide open and bursting with emotion, and no results screen is really ever gonna take that from us.

Prices subject to revision every one or two years, or whenever inflation hits.

If you love what you see and hear, head over to the Contact page!

A lot has happened in the last two weeks, and I've been taking a while to process them all. I think I'll write about them all here in this one post.

Rebellion Festival

First of all, the punk band in which I play drums, Those Fucking Snowflakes, opened Rebellion Festival in Blackpool!

For those of you unaware, Rebellion Festival is the punk festival in Britain. A selection of acts across various stages of their career, from the new and undiscovered to the absolute stalwarts, perform in different stages at the Winter Gardens in Blackpool, and it typically spans four days in the start of August, from a Thursday to a Sunday. (Just before that, you have Rebellion Fringe, where various venues across Blackpool host punk bands and people party through the night.)

This was us when we were done with our set. We were on a high of emotions and we felt this was our best gig yet.

As we were the opening band altogether and we were playing on the Introducing Stage at the Pavilion, we were surrounded by merch shops on the outer perimeter. We were expecting to have numbers not far different to what we were used to playing to by this point. What we weren't expecting was a 200-, 300-strong crowd and people from outside looking in. This was our biggest audience yet.

The audience was wonderful. Some were singing our lyrics, people who previously weren't familiar with us even. Some were dancing. The atmosphere was very electric. The crew – the crew were absolutely wonderful. The help they gave us was invaluable, and a number of them rooted for us individually and as a band. They kept a well-oiled machine from start to finish, with so many bands performing and so many moving parts to worry about, and they gave us a great sound. I have nothing but massive respect for them and just how tight they were.

The food was great, too. We had a selection of vegan meals: nachos, butter “chicken,” a burrito whose fillings I don't remember… I don't even remember the full extent of the menu but I went for the burrito. There was also a cake on the side, with the lightest whipped cream I'd ever tasted. Once we'd eaten and hauled gear away, we could enjoy the rest of the festival, hopping from stage to stage to enjoy the music of a good few other bands.

I can only speak for myself in these situations; I will cherish this experience forever.

Inkfinity Festival / SATUR-8

For the last several months, a bunch of us creatives banded together to make a modded Splatfest (for the uninitiated: a Splatfest is an event in the Splatoon games, typically structured like a festival with lights, in-game music performances, two straight days of matches, where people get into teams and battle each other.) We called it Inkfinity Fest.

This team had the likes of Caitlin Koi, riji monogatari, tacoyaki, other people who knew what they were doing – 3D modellers like LegendofLonk Studios and Nami so 95, scriptwriters and lyricists like Sally Strings, modders who knew the battle mechanics like Alessio798, composers and arrangers like Lumiflag and Xion … and two meeps, Christoph Jakob and myself. I don't think I've cited everyone in this team – it's an extensive team, to be sure.

Christoph mixed a few tracks, notably our crown jewel, Three Wishes, which is due to release on 13 September.

As for me, I composed a number of the SATUR-8 songs, first drafting them on piano. I'll provide the current strongest example, a battle track called Deepsea Rainbow Trihards, which is based on three songs from Caitlin's, riji's, and tacoyaki's bands – Rainbow Rumble, Deepsea Graffiti, and Triumphant Trihards.

The whole thing includes all the team shouts – ordinarily, if a particular team is winning and there is only one minute left to go, their specific fragment plays at the end of the battle in-game. For illustration purposes, here is Trench's:

The themes were all arranged by Xion, but to demonstrate how they began, below is the behind-the-scenes video that shows the piano sketch that began it all. All themes that I composed for Inkfinity Fest follow this process: I open FL Studio, make sure the piano is connected, and then chordbash until I'm happy with what I hear, then I send the MIDI over to either Xion or Lumiflag for arrangement.

The above video premiered last night to a small audience – my YouTube channel has been small for a long time – but Caitlin hopped on, which made my day, and riji watched it soon after the premiere had ended.

Footage for Inkfinity Fest is hard to come by, especially footage featuring SATUR-8 songs specifically, as the songs are typically played randomly. However, if you want a taste of what Inkfinity Fest looked like, a stream or two of it exists.

My sincere hope, from all of this, is that everyone in this team gets hired for games industry work. There are a good few people who specialise in narrative here and they've all but smashed it. Christoph's mixing takes several leaves from the bands he loves, notably Red Hot Chili Peppers and Bear's Den. Lumiflag and Xion are powerhouse arrangers. Lonk and Nami so do wonderful 3D work, and they, riji, and Caitlin have done excellent work compositing their videos. WiglahWoo has a sexy voice (they are Mito from Trench). Caitlin, riji, tacoyaki, and Sally Strings are great wordsmiths. tacoyaki is a great organiser, for the project wouldn't have come together or the ship wouldn't have been nearly as tight without them. I am the least of these, but I daresay I composed and I composed and I composed.

Games industry people? If you're reading, you've got a pool of people here to hire!

A renewed vigour for solo stuff and Two Meeps

Things are cooking in the background. Watch this space!

Hey folks! One of the bands I'm in, Two Meeps, just released our debut album, Valid, on 24 July 2025 at midnight CEDT!

The band is just two people – Christoph Jakob and myself. We've been close friends for a few years now, keeping frequent contact with each other, and we have been working on this album for a year and a half. We'd frequently sent each other music we like; Chris has sent me stuff from Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bear's Den, twenty-one pilots, and John Frusciante. In return, I'd sent him stuff from Steely Dan, Mylène Farmer, and the odd musical theatre piece. We figured we could combine those influences together, and cover some really difficult subject matter in the process.

And when I say difficult subject matter, I mean difficult emotions. Things we don't talk about out of discomfort, social awkwardness, or something else. Emotions like shame, anxiety, righteous anger, existential dread, confidence (or lack thereof)…… our goal with this was to make songs that channelled those emotions, whether musically or lyrically.

Everything that Two Meeps has done has been between us both. I drew the artwork (including the one you see above, the actual cover artwork), wrote most of the lyrics, composed eight out of the ten songs, played keys and drums, and sang. Chris did guitar and bass, vocals, composition on tracks 3 and 6, mixing and mastering, and all the video editing as he's a YouTuber himself.

If the influences sound like fun to you, or if you find yourself drawn to the cover artwork, you know what to do: head over to the Bandcamp, give it a listen, tell your mum, tell your dog, tell your nan, tell that annoying friend who loves RHCP or Bear's Den etc; yell about it, and purchase it if you can. It's hard in this economic climate, I'm gonna be real.

There are CDs too, a limited run of them that can be ordered through Bandcamp. If you live across the pond from us and wanna order them, you're most welcome to do so… just be mindful of tarriffs.

In the next few weeks or so, expect me to do deep dives into my contributions to some of these tracks.

We've come to part 2 of this series of posts and today, I'm going to be talking about my experiences as a person on the ground in the music industry.

The sorry state of live music

Several weeks ago(? I don't even remember how long ago now) I attended the very first Lancashire Music Summit in my city of Preston. It was held in the former music venue 53 Degrees, itself a testament to how forlorn and bleak it is for music and musicians. A quick Google Search of “53 Degrees” still lists the venue as a music venue, but there hasn't been a gig in there for a good few years. So forlorn was it that the sound system for the day actually had to be rented; the sound system that previously existed there was completely gutted, and it was just not cost effective to have one permanently installed.

The second major roundtable of the Lancs Music Summit described why rather succinctly. The spending power of the everyperson had been decreasing sharply due to the rising cost of living, Covid exacerbating matters, and people not being paid just wages for their work. How would this translate to people going out? Even in pub gigs, the price of a pint averages £6. I remember many of my friends telling me that when the lockdowns happened, they found out how much cheaper it was to order in cans and drink at home, rather than drink socially. Pub attendance sharply decreased. Venues closed left and right in Preston (and elsewhere). The whole ecosystem is based on people being able to spend and socialise, and if people are disempowered from doing precisely that, well, what are we even doing here anymore?

And as for the price of a ticket for a live gig, it's dire. There were people from Skiddle who were present to talk about this. Say someone charges £10 per ticket for a live show. Most of that £10 goes to pay the cost of overheads, any sound system hire, instrument hire, venue costs, any middlemen involved in the entire equation, and then FINALLY the musicians and performers. Paraphrasing what I'd heard said in that summit, we'd be lucky if we earned a few pence out of that £10 ticket.

And that's not even getting into the subject of venues not offering a way forward. The current ecosystem demands that a band cover the cost of their gig with merch sales – merch that they may very well not be able to provide for themselves, merch that people may not be willing to spend money on if they are tightening their purse strings. There is no “play a few gigs here and we'll see if we can't let you support another more established band in the months to come.” Good luck ever getting a way forward if you're a person on the ground in a provincial place.

This is exacerbated by venues' reliance on numbers on platforms like Spotify and TikTok, which is a good time for me to segue into the next section:

Venues' overreliance on Spotify and TikTok

I am writing this at the start of December 2024. It is usually the season of Spotify Wrapped, where people post their listening stats and the amount of listeners they've had. However, I've noticed an increasing disenchantment towards Spotify Wrapped.

It totally has nothing to do with Spotify's layoffs and the absolute turmoil it caused, or the fact that Spotify's CEO Daniel Ek has posted record profits far outstripping Taylor Swift's and Drake's despite the hardship he has caused many former employees and many musicians on the ground. Nope, nothing at all.

It used to be that many people were taken in by streaming as a convenient way to listen to lots of different kinds of music without actually being able to purchase the CDs. In some cases, it was a great way to listen to indies whose physical media might not be available at all, let alone in a different country. But every signup and every bit of ad revenue has gone into enriching the pockets of the person at the top, and not the artists who are reliant on it for even the hope of discoverability. Artists with less than 1,000 listens don't earn a penny from streaming at all, either, and an artist trying to get off the ground is going to suffer – not just online, but offline too, when venues look solely at the numbers of listens to determine how they can treat this artist.

TikTok is like this too. In the past decade and a half there has been much focus on content going viral, and while it does sometimes come as a pleasant surprise to the person who made that content, it is about as probable as someone on the ground ever becoming a billionaire. When these are the stats we're dealing with, then we've gotta present venues with the hard truth: they've made advancement in music performance only accessible to 1%.

However we try to skew that, that's never a good look.

Levelling the playing field

On Friday 6 December 2024 I went to Factory International (Aviva Studios) in Manchester to see an Untold Orchestra production, titled “Movement.”

It was a stellar show if ever I'd seen one, putting previous concerts I'd been in to shame. Full of Black creative talent and songs about identity, historical injustice, and generational trauma, it was a concert full of heart. The venue was packed out. It was a sight to behold.

You see, Factory International is one of a select few music venues and creative spaces in the country that actively looks to feature talent from marginalised backgrounds. Many of these are in bigger cities. Many of us can't exactly travel there. For me, a Prestonian, it is a 45-minute-long drive on a good day; I typically expect the journey to be longer than that, and that is if I can make it. Smaller cities need these spaces.

I went to the summit at the start of WOMEX some weeks ago and there were many younger musicians who expressed similar concerns.

See, for us to level the playing field, we need a culture shift. Music, for the longest time, has been a field mired in individualism, in the belief that success is individual and therefore cutthroat competition needs to exist in order for some people to progress at the expense of others. Venues small and great, labels, record stores, media all promoted this. Sure, there were some places where records of all kinds could be bought and people could discover music of any kind. There was even an elder figure at the Lancashire Music Summit who tried to dismiss people on the ground as (and I'm paraphrasing) “having no passion” when they couldn't even see their own survivorship bias: “I made it, why couldn't you?”

But as the young people at WOMEX said: “support, not competition, is how this industry thrives.” They were aware that the reasons for people not “making it” are diverse, and a lot of them boil down to prejudice and a lack of connections, connections that may be harder to make due to poverty, the need to work several jobs, other commitments, and intersectionality.

And building the kind of city, or even country, where the general public's relationship with music is that of an active listener base rather than a transactional relationship, is not an overnight effort. It's one that feasibly takes decades.

Where I factor in all of this

Right now, I have some connections because I take up space in multiple circles: punk, folk, rock, and indie. My being a drummer means that I am inevitably part of several bands, as drummers are not very common.

It's hard to say where the future will take me, but at present, I am one of many whose songs get lost in the aether. It's said that there are something like 100,000 songs released per day?

To escape this current situation and have better stats means that I'll be luckier than a lot of people, whose songs continue to get lost in the aether. That already is a situation I can't bear. I want all this talk about levelling the playing field to mean something. Whether it's a chorus club where we gather an attentive listener base for indie musicians in our area while they perform and explain the background behind their songs, or a venue that says “fuck the social and streaming stats, let's advance them for their music,” these sorts of efforts matter and would mean a lot not just to me, but to a lot of other people as well. We'd be all the richer for it.

I have long volunteered at, and am currently part of the board of, Soundskills, a creative charity in Preston that caters to musicians (among others). Some time back I spoke with Chris Davis, Soundskills' founder, who remarked that mental health among musicians was quite abysmal. I told him straight up that a lot of this is due to lack of opportunity, and if we are to boost musicians' mental health, we need to not just do sociables to talk about things. We need actual ways forward for them. We need venues in Preston to know that these people are ready to take on their stages, as headliners, with their own brand of musicianship. We need to tell people that there is a burgeoning scene happening right under their noses. I told him about what I had heard in the Lancashire Music Summit and at WOMEX, and he took all of it on board.

Soundskills has recently remodelled its building and is now a green space, and is due to soft-relaunch in the middle of this month, and hard-relaunch in January. I can only presume that then, we would start to look at hosting events again. It falls to places like ours, places like this across the country, to absolutely shake things up, to remind people that the talent that the country is looking for is right fucking here.

Many of you reading this post will likely be coming from Bluesky or Discord, and many of you might be aware that I straddle two industries at once with my work: the games industry and the music industry.

My work as a singer-songwriter, composer, drummer, and general session musician has led me to make friends and contacts, and it has opened up opportunities for me to go to the odd industry events. I want to write about my takeaways from both industries, as there are many similarities between the two, and there is some degree of overlap with my field of work.

In this Part 1 post, I will be talking about my experiences as a game audio person, doing game jams, attending the odd Game Audio Liverpool meetup, and two Develop: Brighton conferences (2022 and 2023).

Actually: let's work backwards.

My experiences with Develop: Brighton

In the two years that I've attended Develop, I've noticed how it tries to cater to game professionals of all stripes. It doesn't do so perfectly, however, and it at least acknowledges that.

My Expo Only tickets allowed me to not only network at the game company showcase, but also to attend various roundtables. One such roundtable, which I remember attending in 2023, was about levelling the playing field in the games industry.

For those of us not in the UK, here we have a North-South divide with regards to wealth and infrastructure distribution. It is a long-running, deeply historical injustice. And that's not getting into things like classism, where working class or the very poor are inhibited almost entirely from getting into games. Or racism, or xenophobia, or queerphobia, or transphobia. We shouldn't have to be the product of several lotteries in order to access, and contribute to, an industry we love. 

I fall into an intersection of many of these: non-binary woman, South Asian, former asylum seeker, bisexual. I had a period of eight years where I was trapped in the asylum process, and thus prohibited from working, but I was born middle class, which afforded me the opportunity to be bundled out of my birth country in the first place. The asylum process robbed me of my 20s. From these experiences, I was able to tell of my journey into game audio, and I mentioned that I was lucky to even be there, part of a demographic with missing data. (Though not for long.) Given that I went straight into work as soon as my asylum seeker days drew to a close, I couldn't, and still can't, afford to go to university or conservatory. But all I did was be present and give my account.

Which leads me to my next section.

Game development in Northwest England

The situation in the North, especially the Northwest, with regards to games, is not great. Thing is, there are a number of dead spots across the country, not just England. I can't account for the situation in Wales, for example. But I do know from experience that much of Northwest England is a dead spot for game development and game audio, and I said as much.

This only just came at a time when events were beginning to be held in different parts of the country. Game Audio Liverpool had been going on for a year by the time I gave my account in that roundtable in 2013. Game Dev London was becoming Game Dev Local, with long-term plans to actively host events for game devs in various different counties and cities. I also have recently been made aware of the existence of GaMaYo, another organisation hosting games industry related events in the North of England.

Liverpool and Manchester are the two bigger cities in the Northwest. There are others, of course — I happen to live in one, Preston — but there's little, if nothing at all, going on for games outside of Liverpool and Manchester. This then brings up the question of commuting costs, fiscal or otherwise. Can we afford to take that day off to attend a meetup? Or is our work too vital to our survival for us to do this? The lack of spending power and the general hardship we all are going through right now, these make going to events that much harder, even if they're in our general region.

To that end, I only ever attended one(?) Game Audio Liverpool meetup. Most of them clash with my Saturday evening organist duties. Liverpool is only accessible to me by train; driving into the city costs me an arm and a leg with parking charges.

Online, and freelancing in general

Freelancing has been a very accessible experience for me from the get-go because of the amount of support I received for it, especially starting out, and I hope to pay it forward.

I was introduced to game audio as a profession by other indie game composers, chief of them Chel Wong, during the first lockdown in 2020. She came across the audio that I had posted on the late lamented Twitter during the penultimate 21 Days of VGM, and introduced me to the server, Beats To Play Games To, a dedicated server for game audio people across the world. From the folks there, I learned the ropes regarding freelancing as a game audio person, and I stored all of this knowledge for when the time would come.

For context, I was an asylum seeker from 2013 to late 2021, and therefore forbidden from taking employment. I couldn't use that knowledge in 2020, but when I was given the right to remain (and therefore, to work etc.) in 2021, all that I had been taught could finally be put to good use. I had joined multiple game jams and put together a body of work, most of it on my itch.io page.

Doing game jams is a surefire way to build material and understand what kinds of devs gel with us. Game jams are short events, lasting anywhere from a few days to a week to a month or sometimes more. You band together with a programmer and an artist, and together you make a functional, playable game based on the constraints given to you. Given that I write my songs on piano, and I plug my piano directly into the PC for this, coming up with music for these short games is a very quick affair, sometimes lasting as long as the full track itself (if it's a piano improvisation).

For those of you looking to get into game jams as a starting point to build material, you will want to build an itch.io account. You will also want to take a look at this calendar, indiegamejams.com. This thing is chock full of events and it can be overwhelming to look at, I'm aware – the key is to pick jams at times of the year when you have time to spare, and then go from there. Many of these jams are titled by mechanics, engine, genre of game, or a feature expected to be seen in these games.

Once you have built enough material for yourself, you gather it together into a reel, put it up, and hope that it gets picked up by a developer. Or, you respond to a dev's call for music for their game. Or, they contact you by e-mail or on Bluesky or on Discord or on Mastodon or wherever. There's an element of luck involved in all of this, but a lot of freelance work is about maximising our chances, and giving a leg up to people interested in pursuing this field.

I've been contacted for game audio commissions on Bluesky, on Newgrounds, and via e-mail so far. At this stage of my career, I multiclass: game audio isn't my only means of income, and that's necessary because I need to live. Many of us who do game audio also pursue teaching and session work, and play live with bands. I play live with bands, I have a pipe organ residency in two parishes, I am a junior choir director in another parish, and I also occasionally take art and voice acting commissions. I have also done sheet music consultation for drums, just the once so far.

The general attitude

Report after report shows how the games industry here in the UK is shedding workers in the thousands despite some companies posting record profits. Some friends and connections of mine were directly affected by layoffs, notably at Riot Games.

Bigger games companies may be more “fun” than other companies we could think of, but they do have a corporate culture and a corporate ladder associated with them. When layoffs happen like this, en masse, it is immediately identifiable as a huge problem that needs addressing – where's all this talent going to go?

As such, there is much more solidarity on the ground. Anyone at all is not indispensable, and yet, our stories and our craft are indispensable. Making games, and making innovations in games, is now the purview of the indie dev space, which is full of people on the ground from various walks of life – some beginners, some seasoned devs who have never been in a company in their life, some who have been affected by layoffs and who were once AAA devs. In many places where they gather, they share their information and resources, conscious that the costs of living are incredibly high and that it takes a lot of energy to even survive at times. I observe that they truly believe that we're all in this together. If we don't help each other in these streets, we risk losing a beloved industry that has touched the hearts of millions around the world. Many games that have been successfully crowdfunded have been funded by fans and developers alike. And even when money is not involved, there is a general staunch support for each other in this space.

While it is luck of the draw which games make bigger numbers and which don't, the general takeaway is the same: make that game anyway, put that idea out anyway. Stories deserve telling with spins and reframing and new settings even if they are fundamentally the same premise as other stories before it. They are all based on individual and collective human experiences, and they deserve to see the light of day.

And it keeps me going, as a game audio person. It gives me real hope. Even if I have no plans to ever join a company, the support shown by developers of all stripes keeps me going in this field. That, and my love of music.

Over the last several months I've set aside drum recording days. Most of them are for an unannounced project. One, however, has been with Those Fucking Snowflakes.

Up until recently, the unannounced project's drums have been recorded at Soundskills [page under construction], the creative charity in the outskirts of Preston that I've been a service user at for nine years now. Unfortunately, the friend helping me at the desk has suffered an injury and I can't record there in the near future, while they recover.

The recent Snowflakes recording happened on Monday 11 November 2024 at Trapdoor Studios in Liverpool. It was my first time there; I was in at 10 in the morning and out seven hours later.

Kit setup

As is practice for a lot of drummers, I tend to use most of the house shells and bring breakables with me – snare, cymbals, bass pedal, sticks. They're called “breakables” because they're the most expensive parts to replace, and also the quickest parts to substitute. It does make for faster setup time than say, if we were to bring an entire kit of our own. However, setup time at Trapdoor wasn't fast. The photo above shows me playing a hodgepodge of different shells, just for the sake of the right timbre. Trapdoor Studios has a good amount of different shells to choose from. Picking the right ones was part of the time taken.

At Soundskills, I typically don't switch out parts, instead preferring to use the kit as-is. But setup time is long there too.

It averages 40 minutes to get everything ready. In both cases, the bulk of that time is taken by the positioning and wiring of mics, and me needing to play each drum, or all of them together, to see if we've got the right postprocessing added.

Recording process

Time is of the essence in a studio session. We only have so many hours, and so many tries, to get something sounding and feeling right. Monday's recording session saw me do four takes of each song recorded there, then the best parts of each take would be combined together as needed. Sometimes we didn't need that at all.

Most recording sessions, I'm typically there for the one song.

But whether it's the one song or multiple songs, the pressure is on. The pressure is even greater if I'm thinking of content for the ol' socials, because if I want an unbroken bit of visuals, then I have no choice but to get a good take without any splicing. It does affect how confident I feel when I'm on the kit, but either way, I'm gonna make a good go of it.

How the day goes

In a three-hour session I typically get a snack and some teas to bulk up and ease the airways. I eat and drink as and when needed, typically between takes.

In a full-day session like what I had on Monday, I have to make sure I bring lunch, drinks, and all of the equipment I'm using. Food break does also happen between takes, but it's not as haphazard. Everyone involved sets aside a time for lunch so we all can continue working as soon as we're done. It just feels like there's more that can potentially go wrong, so doing what we can to smooth things, including timing our lunch breaks together, can help.

Closing thoughts

I look forward to the day when more songs featuring my drumming make it to streaming sites / physical media / people's ears. We creatives know how important it is to have something to show for what we say we do, and sometimes that process of getting that media finished can take months, or even years. With regards to the drum takes, as soon as those are done, there's typically mixing and mastering to do after that.

And if one day, you happen to hear more of my drumming, I hope you enjoy it. x