The Sound Design Diaries #4: The Business of Musical Sound Design

Just the other day, someone asked me for some information on the business side of being a musical sound designer.

I call it musical sound design to tell it apart from “post-production” sound design or “game-audio” sound design, both of which I’m also involved with, but here I am talking specifically about using synthesisers and recorded (possibly manipulated) acoustic instruments to create patches and playable virtual instruments for another musician to use in their music.

The questions were, rephrased:

What are the possible paths to getting this gig?
Is musical sound design, financially speaking, worth the time and effort?

Let me try to answer them.

The Various Possible Paths to Getting the Gig

As I see it, there are three possible avenues to offer your services as a sound designer.

1. You can make presets for synth and sound effects manufacturers

Synth manufacturers are always looking for good sound designers to join their teams. This is true for both software and hardware products, even though sound design opportunities for hardware synths are harder to come by and they are often reserved for the internal sound design team due to the logistics involved with hiring an external sound designer.

Manufacturers will release your presets either as part of a factory bank (typically a new one every software or firmware update, my work on some of the Arturia Pigments factory banks is an example) or as part of an expansion pack that can be purchased on their webstores.

Factory banks often require a more generalist approach, whereas expansion packs are typically dedicated to a specific style or end use.

2. You can market your services to other composers directly

Composers on projects with medium and high budgets often outsource, at least partially, the process of creating a custom sonic world for the film, TV series or game they’re working on.

In this case your job is to collaborate with the composer to help them realize your vision by creating a palette they can compose with.

This can take many shapes: in my experience it is very often a mix of custom, exclusive patches on software synths and sample-based libraries you make from scratch (often in Kontakt, which is still industry-standard).

Composers for media tend to prefer software to compose with because of the flexibility it offers in the event of revisions, but they do use hardware often, which sometimes gets sampled to offer at least a degree of flexibility.

3. You can build your own webstore that sells presets, independently from the manufacturer

Many sound designers do this successfully; this is in many ways identical to No 1., with the exception that you get to choose your own release schedule, the artistic vision and the platforms you work with. This also means that you are responsible for many tasks the manufacturers normally handle, like maintaining the website, marketing the product, performing QA and many more.

This also means that you need to have a very good sense of which software and hardware synthesisers have a large enough user base to guarantee a decent market size.

Financials

The short answer to the second question (is sound design financially rewarding) is yes, but as many things in this industry… it depends.

Musical sound design is a sizeable part of my income but almost everybody I know in the industry, including me, does it as part of a well-diversified portfolio of music-related income streams.

Let me try to give you some numbers related to my personal experience.

Working with synth manufacturers

Prices manufacturers are willing to pay for this work varies tremendously and as you can imagine it depends on the size of the company, their market share, the Country they’re based in and the type of product.

If my memory serves me well, the absolute lowest I have been paid for this is £17 (about $22) per preset – this was 8 years ago when I didn’t have the body of work and the experience I have now – and the highest is probably $60 per preset.

The typical rate is somewhere in the middle: hardware synths can command higher prices, but as mentioned above gigs are harder to come by and they’re often reserved for the internal sound design team.

You will be commissioned a bunch of presets, for some reason (most-likely a residue of the hardware days) the most typical amounts are batches of 20, 32 and 64 presets.

In the old hardware-only days sound designers were paid a lot more, I have spoken with a sound designer at a popular hardware manufacturing company based in California who’s now probably in his 60s and he charged 150/200 USD per preset. I have never been able to charge that much money successfully to a manufacturer but that doesn’t mean you can’t try.

Working with other composers

This is something I have quite a lot of experience with and just like any custom project, the price you’ll be able to charge is a function of your experience, your ability to translate the composer’s vision into something they can use efficiently, your negotiating skills and of course the budget of the project.

I have done this on a feature film, on three fairly big video games and for several music houses, building their internal custom library for promos/trailers.

I have charged anywhere between $500 for a handful of curated custom soft synth patches and custom samples to over $10,000 for large projects that lasted several months, with the cost of recordings not included in the budget.

I am very sure that Howard Scarr or Kevin Schroeder demanded much higher prices for their legendary work on The Dark Knight or Dune (or any other Hans Zimmer project).

Building your own store

This is the side of the business I can tell you the least about: yes, I have founded and run SonoraCinematic.com but we are a company that makes Kontakt-based virtual instruments which is a pretty different business than selling presets, even though several sound designers selling presets also make simple Kontakt-based sample libraries.

How much you can make is obviously completely dependent on how well your business is doing and your marketing efforts.

A couple of extra notes:

Making synth presets is going to take way more time than you think: you need to map all the macros whether YOU are going to use them or not (another user might), mod-wheel, aftertouch, poly aftertouch, MPE.. you need to keep quality very high, keep usability in mind and maintain diversity within the presets;
Typically, there is some sort of preset tagging involved, which can be very time-consuming, and most companies have their own guidelines you need to get familiar with;
In general, complex synths with multiple macros, engines, processors and features attract higher prices than simple analogue or virtual-analogue instruments (your Prophet 5 or Juno 6 clones).
While being able to do a variety of things is good, it is important to have a specialty that your clients will call you for. For example, I think my cinematic and ambient work is appreciated and I am often called to contribute that type of content to a project.

Hope this helps, sound design is awesome and a great source of inspiration, which means doing it is often worth the time regardless of how much money you make with it.

See you next month!