You love making music, but you also have a full life - a job, a family, or other commitments.
We’ve all felt the crunch of trying to juggle a composing career with reality. But what happens when you land one of the most demanding, high-pressure gigs in the industry - a custom music brief?
Specifically, if you're working in trailer music from anywhere outside of LA, you’re not just fighting a deadline; you’re fighting the clock. When the client wakes up in California, you're expected to start working, even if it's your evening, leading straight into a potentially crippling cycle of late nights and early mornings.
I know this challenge intimately. I went from juggling a teaching job and composing at night to suffering massive burnout.
The question is: how do you fit this lucrative but exhausting work into your life without sacrificing your health?
The Custom Composer’s Real Enemy: The Clock ⏰
The core difficulty in the custom music world, especially for trailer music, is that the vast majority of the industry operates out of Los Angeles. If you’re based in the UK or Germany, you’re operating on a massive time difference.
For me in the UK, LA starts sending briefs and feedback emails around 6 PM my time. For a composer in Germany, it's even later, 7 or 8 PM. To meet the demands of a client who operates on a completely different clock, I found myself choosing to work through the night. I'd finish my day job, get the emails, work until 2 or 3 AM to send the revisions, wake up and teach, and then come home to fresh feedback, starting the late-night cycle all over again.
This brutal schedule - working full-time hours, coming home, and doing another full job until the wee hours - leads almost instantly to burning out. This makes the question of how to manage customs extremely valid.
Strategy 1: Partner Up Wisely 🤝
Fitting custom work into your life depends heavily on the companies and people you choose to work with.
- Avoid Reputation Managers: Some music production companies, the "middlemen," are more concerned with looking good than with your well-being. They might tell you the deadline is Tuesday when the actual deadline is Friday, just so they can submit early. This is an imposed, artificial deadline that you must clarify.
- Seek Out Supportive Companies: The best companies are a dream to work with. They're open about the real deadline, they'll fight to get you more time if you need it, and they’ll be generally supportive. These are the companies that thrive because they keep their composers happy.
- Do Your Homework: Don't just sign up with anyone. The easiest way to find out which trailer music companies have a good reputation with their composers is to reach out to the composers who work with them. If they’re having a bad time, they'll usually be vocal about it.
Strategy 2: Value and Defend Your Time 🛡️
Once you have a good company, the next step is establishing your boundaries.
- It’s an Equal Partnership: You need the company, but they need you just as much. Remember that your relationship is a partnership. They may be taking 50% because you are an equal partner in the work.
- Don't Be Afraid to Negotiate: If they say, "We need this track done in two days," you have to be ready to counter: "Can I get four days?"
- Practice Saying No: If you set a boundary and a company drops you, they probably weren’t the best company to work with anyway. The fear of missing out made me say yes to everything and overwork myself, which eventually led me to step back from a huge amount of my work due to massive burnout. You have to look after yourself.
Strategy 3: Weigh the Financial Risk 💰
You have to decide whether the potential reward justifies the huge time investment and stress.
- Calculate the Odds: Custom work is often a lottery because the odds are stacked against you unless you are an exceptional talent. I personally only won about one out of every ten customs I worked on.
- Compare to Album Work: Ask yourself: Should you work all week on a single custom track that you will probably lose? Or, could you use that same time to write three to five tracks for an album that will provide you with long-term, asynchronous income?
- Check the Payout: Custom fees vary widely. While some major wins can be substantial (I once had a win that paid two years of my mortgage!), others can be quite low. You have to consider if that high-stress work is worth a smaller fee, especially when you might not even win. This is why I've always been a big fan of having my "finger in loads of pies."
Strategy 4: Optimise for Speed and Workflow 💡
Since time is your biggest weakness, you must maximise your efficiency.
- Be Ready to Run: If you only have two blocks of four or six hours to produce a custom, you can't waste time noodling. You need a setup that allows you to hit the ground running immediately. This means having basic templates and preloaded groups ready so you can sketch the track out within the first hour. Everything after that is just polishing.
- Done is Better Than Perfect: To write a great track, you have to write a lot of good tracks. To write a good track, you have to write a lot of rubbish ones. Don't focus on producing ten absolutely sublime tracks; focus on producing 100 and then picking the best 10. This mindset is far less pressured.
- Know When to Submit: If you’ve been working for hours and it’s 2 or 3 AM and you're just mindlessly looping the track because you're tired, stop working. Submit what you have to your middle person. Your fresh ears are gone, but theirs are not, and their feedback is invaluable.
Finally, if you have a family, you need to look at your personal situation and communicate with your partner. You might need to balance late-night work by taking the kids on the weekend so your partner can have a day off.
If custom music is your bag, focus on getting clients who treat you like the superstar you are.
But if it stresses you out and you’re often losing, remember that dropping customs was one of the best decisions I ever made.
The "why" of what you're doing is the most important thing.
