Composing / Arranging / Songwriting

From Rain Man to The Lion King, and Gladiator to Mission Impossible 2, Hans Zimmer's music is known by audiences worldwide. With business partner Jay Rifkin, Zimmer is also responsible for Media Ventures, a music studio that offers a unique environment for media composers.

According to Oval's Markus Popp, traditional definitions and categories are inadequate when it comes to evaluating electronic music. Instead, his highly conceptual projects aim to make us understand music in terms of the software processes used to produce it.

Not content with reviving and staging a 1920s avant-garde work for the first time, Paul D. Lehrman also worked out a way to reunite the piece with its contemporary film, which was never used due to technical problems. This is how...

Do hit songs have a hidden ingredient that makes them successful by appealing directly to our emotions? It's a question that musicians and scientists have sought the answer to for many decades. Acoustic researcher Ernest Cholakis has a new take on the theory...

Once Rob Davis was a pop star himself with Mud. Now his songs have taken Kylie Minogue and Sophie Ellis-Bextor to the top of the charts.

Abbey Road's famous Studio One has played host to innumerable big-budget orchestral recordings for film, but the final session before its refurbishment in 2001 saw it being used for a new purpose: to record the soundtrack for a video game.

Gez Gourley specialises in creating sound for console games - whether it be orchestral music or crashing cars...

You don't need to have Top 40 hits to make a living from your music. Just ask Kent Brainerd, who has made a tidy sum by composing music for company training and presentation videos. Find out how...

Richard Buskin talks with two of Sweden's hottest writer-producers about their ongoing work as part of the Murlyn Music Group, including recent hit recordings by Jennifer Lopez, Samantha Mumba and Jessica Simpson.

Richard Buskin meets a successful American composer who's specialised in a unique kind of music for television...

Paul Farrer's name has been a fixture in SOS for several years, but these days he's best-known as the theme tune composer for top BBC TV quiz show The Weakest Link. Paul White asks the questions...

Sam Inglis demostrates how you might furhter enrich your lyric writing with the use of comparisons.

This month, Sam Inglis shows you how to improve your lyric writing by using fewer words to say more.

In this month's installment, Sam Inglis looks at how you can use the sounds and rhythms of words to make your song lyrics more memorable.

Whenever we hear or read song lyrics, we are hearing the voice of a person, whether that voice be the songwriter's own, exploring his or her own emotions and feelings, or someone else's. The second part of Sam Inglis' series explains how you can write for different voices to put across different messages.

Writing the words to songs is often thought of as a process of pure intuition, but there's a lot more to it than that. In the first part of a new series, Sam Inglis suggests an alternative way of going about it.

Whether your bag is pop, jazz, or classical music, or even if you just watch TV occasionally, you've almost certainly heard Richard Niles's work. Mike Senior talks to one of the most versatile men in modern music.

I'm thinking about hiring an arranger to do a half a dozen or so of my compositions so that I can get them recorded...

If something's letting down your pop tracks, it could be the arrangement rather than the song itself at fault. Derek Johnson & Debbie Poyser offer some advice on how to make sure your music gets the star treatment it deserves.

Use of a full symphony orchestra remains a luxury afforded only to the world's top-selling artists or film composers. But with a little help from technology, the sound of convincing strings and blaring brass is achievable on a budget. John Rowcroft reports, and offers advice to anyone seeking to follow his example...

These days, any decent synth or sampler offers plausable orchestral sounds — but there's much more to creating believable arrangements for orchestra than realistic samples. Keyboardist/composer Dave Stewart offers some guidance, passes on some advice from pros, and explains how orchestral samples were used to create an arrangement for the latest Geri Halliwell single.