Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Love game music but don't know what to learn next? Start with the free 6-Level roadmap: bestmusiccoach.com/roadmap?htrafficsource=yt&el=composers-use-tempo-contrast-to-make-your-game-music-hit-har
We want to create emotion in the video game music we compose and to do that we need some type of contrast. Now when it comes to speed, the first thing that people hear in your composition is going to set their expectations or their baseline for the rest of the piece of music. So if you come charging out the gate at 250 beats per minute with blasting double kicks and distorted guitars, there's a certain feeling that people are going to anticipate that if you then drop to a slow ballad it's going to create a tremendous amount of contrast. Now we can also think about this at the level of the entire game as well. So the music people hear on the load screen, the lobby screen, that sets the temperature for everything they're going to hear next. So how much energy do you actually want in your lobby screen, right? Because if you have too much energy and then you're letting people down in the energy in the game, it doesn't really work, right? So is there enough energy in the lobby where we're excited to go play the game, but when we hit in the game, it's like boom, oh yeah, this is it? So think about managing the expectations of the people who are going to be listening to your music at the piece level but also at the work level, the work being the entire OST throughout the game. Check out more useful tips like this. That, by the way, is literally one sentence on page 90 of my new book. It's called Compose Legendary Video Game Music. It's available for purchase on Amazon now. It's based on all the experience I've had composing music for a couple indie games and all the people I've helped compose both video game style music and music for video games. You can go check that out. It's available on Amazon now.
Love game music but don't know what to learn next? Start with the free 6-Level roadmap: bestmusiccoach.com/roadmap?htrafficsource=yt&el=composers-use-tempo-contrast-to-make-your-game-music-hit-har
We want to create emotion in the video game music we compose and to do that we need some type of contrast. Now when it comes to speed, the first thing that people hear in your composition is going to set their expectations or their baseline for the rest of the piece of music. So if you come charging out the gate at 250 beats per minute with blasting double kicks and distorted guitars, there's a certain feeling that people are going to anticipate that if you then drop to a slow ballad it's going to create a tremendous amount of contrast. Now we can also think about this at the level of the entire game as well. So the music people hear on the load screen, the lobby screen, that sets the temperature for everything they're going to hear next. So how much energy do you actually want in your lobby screen, right? Because if you have too much energy and then you're letting people down in the energy in the game, it doesn't really work, right? So is there enough energy in the lobby where we're excited to go play the game, but when we hit in the game, it's like boom, oh yeah, this is it? So think about managing the expectations of the people who are going to be listening to your music at the piece level but also at the work level, the work being the entire OST throughout the game. Check out more useful tips like this. That, by the way, is literally one sentence on page 90 of my new book. It's called Compose Legendary Video Game Music. It's available for purchase on Amazon now. It's based on all the experience I've had composing music for a couple indie games and all the people I've helped compose both video game style music and music for video games. You can go check that out. It's available on Amazon now.
