My Journey To Film Scoring by Randall K. Harp

My Journey to Film Scoring

Recently, I have made my debut as a devotional author, with a  thus-far favorable reception.  Although I have long enjoyed writing of many types, during the past 13 years I have also enjoyed composing and producing music for visual media. You may or may not find my journey to that activity somewhat interesting.

As a boy of 9-13 years old, I enjoyed buying vinyl records (the 33 RPM and 45 RPM variety) of theme songs from TV shows that I enjoyed; themes from programs such as Star Trek and Happy Days. After the first Star Wars film was released in 1977, my sister purchased the movie soundtrack , composed by John Williams and expertly performed my the London Symphony Orchestra. While I had not noticed it when watching the film, I saw on the records' labels that several pieces were titled for a particular character or place, such as “Princess Leia's Theme” and “The Death Star”; melodies and motifs repeated in the music for other scenes. That small seed of knowledge planted then would later be helpful to me in my own film music compositions.

My teen years in music were pretty much dedicated to learning to play rock songs of the likes of Led Zeppelin and Def Leppard on guitar. At age 19, I bought my first synthesizer (a used Sequential Circuits Pro One). Coming to faith in Christ at age 21, most of my twenties were spent playing keyboards in worship bands and in Seeker, a Christian rock band playing original music. While the songs of Seeker afforded me many writing and arranging opportunities, I still hadn't considered composing music for film.

A serendipitous encounter at a church granted me the chance to compose the score for a film student's project. That initial experience transformed a small curiosity into a part-time pursuit,  securing more opportunities to compose and produce music for other small-budget films (such as Everest, written and directed by Sam Parshall). Today, rather than looking for film or video projects needing my music, I'm producing tracks available for licensing to film and video producers that are looking for music. Those curious can listen to some of my compositions on AudioJungle.net and on AudioMicro.com.