Your showreel can say a lot about you. And if it's going to get you work, what it needs to say is: trust me.
"This next reel's from a guy called Manson — been out of the music business for a while, but says he's worked with the Beach Boys...”
Have you got a showreel? Well, you should have. It is the single most important, meaningless, terrible, prejudicial, vulgar and helpful part of your promotional toolbox.
Showreels allow prospective clients the opportunity to instantly judge what kind of composer you are. But what kind are you? What kind would you like to be?
And here's the problem. What do you include? Do you feature the music that you are, personally, happiest with? Music that you think your clients will appreciate the most? Music that shows how versatile you are?
Drama Chameleon
Years ago I used to have a sort of floating showreel that I could adapt depending on who was asking for it. For example, anyone making a serious drama would probably be put off by the work I'd done for light entertainment‑type shows. Similarly, anyone looking for music for a daytime chat show would likely run a mile from a composer who waves his serious historical documentary credentials around. So, before sending anything out, I'd try to find out as much as I could about their project and tailor a showreel to them. Prostitutes adopt a similar tactic when they ask what you'd like their name to be.
It worked for a bit, but it does tend to take up quite a bit of time, and it certainly doesn't score you any points on the versatility scale.
In a TV production office, a group of people usually have to assemble a creative team pretty quickly, and the auditioning process often extends no further than "Can someone suggest a good graphics company? Who do we know who can direct? Anyone know any composers?” You can see now why the longer you are in the industry and the more people you work for, the greater the chance that your name will be put forward.
Or to put it another way — the more you do it, the easier it gets.
Building Trust
TV projects are eye‑wateringly expensive things and there are lots of people's jobs riding on them. The amount of effort and expense that goes into even cheap rubbish shows would take your breath away, and there's little room for error. I've had calls in my studio for edits and tweaks to be made to a track of mine at 9am for a show that was going out live at 11am. So think about the kind of composer they want you to be. You've got to come up with the tunes, for sure, but what they really want is to be convinced that you will be reliable, dependable, flexible and, above all, professional in a crisis — the state most productions perpetually hover on the edge of.
So your showreel should be all about getting them to trust you — and the more they see that other people have trusted you in the past, the easier it is for them to trust you in the future. In other words, forget what you think about your own music, and fill your showreel with the stuff you think they might have heard of!