Interview with Shaun Chasin
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Shaun Chasin
Canadian composer for film, TV and video games, based in Los Angeles. Credits include Way of the Turtle, PUBG Mobile, Domino: Battle of the Bones and the Beyblade Burst theme "Our Time".
Source: SOUNDIRON on YouTube
These answers are taken from Interview with Film/TV and Video Game Composer Shaun Chasin | Soundiron Podcast Ep #27 on SOUNDIRON's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What do you enjoy most about composing?
A good story is a good story, regardless of genre. But lately I've been having a lot of fun writing more family adventure orchestral and kids music, like Way of the Turtle, where you get to write these big, over-the-top orchestral scores. In a smaller indie drama you couldn't write like that. It would be too big for the room and it wouldn't sound correct. But it's so fun to write. Projects like big animation projects are kind of the dream, where you get to write for big orchestra, but you also get to write really thematically and melodically.
What I like about what we do is that it's always different. You might be on a weird quirky kids thing, and then you might be on a serious deadpan drama, and then you might be on a horror thriller thing. We get to shift gears like that, so we never really get bored, because the next project will be different. And even if it's the same, you want it to sound different, so you're going to try to do something else. I like that you kind of never know what you're going to wake up and write today.
What was a great moment for you as a composer?
Domino: Battle of the Bones was a comedy about a domino tournament in Compton, and what was cool about that is I got to do a bunch of music kind of like a '90s inspirational sports movie, like those old Jerry Goldsmith scores, where it's this way over-the-top melodic orchestra. There's a part where there's a big robbery at the tournament and everyone's going to leave, and then David Arquette's like, "Oh, hold on, hold on," and gives this rousing speech as to why the tournament should go on, and everyone cheers. I'm scoring his speech so cartoonishly tightly. Every time he shifts or gets bigger, I get bigger. You never get to do that kind of thing, because it's so over the top and cheesy, but because the idea of the whole story is over the top and cheesy, it kind of worked. So it was fun that they let me do that.
I scored that during COVID, so I recorded some string players remotely, where they each recorded at their own place, and then I doubled up and mixed here.
How did your career as a composer unfold?
With Way of the Turtle, for example, I had done this horror game in 2015 called Hector, and the artist on that game ended up working for this company, Illusion Labs. Then they needed a composer, and he's like, "I have a guy." That happened because I got along with him on Hector and did a good job on that, and we stayed friends after that.
I used to go to this bar, pre-COVID, Backstage. That superhero comedy show I was talking about: the director, I just met him. We were sitting next to each other at Backstage and just struck up a conversation, and now, years later, he's one of my closest friends. He was one of the producers on Domino.
When I'm looking for work, I'm hitting up colleagues that I've worked with in the past and fostering those relationships and wondering what they're working on. By the time you've heard about a project, it's too late to be on it. If you've heard about something, then it already is mostly done, and the composer was hired a year ago.
What advice do you have for new composers?
When you're on any project, first of all just do a good job, so everybody on the project leaves with a good impression of you. Say you got hired by the director. You can't forget that all these other people, the editor, the DP, the colorist, the VFX people, everybody heard your music. People think of networking as you shake a hand and you give the business card, but it's like, no, just be friends with people. Nine times out of ten, people would rather hire the B-level composer who's really cool and fun to be around. And when people say, "We like this, but can you change this," just make the changes. It's their music. Just be easy and flexible to work with.
We had a composer talk to us when I was at Berklee, and somebody asked him about networking, and he said, just leave your apartment and do something. Go on a hike, go rock climbing.
You don't want to meet people who are way out of your tier professionally, because they're not going to hire you. You want to meet people who are at your level on the other side of the coin, and you move up together. If you're a music student, you want to meet film students, you want to meet game development students.
Think about a demanding director, producer or collaborator. What made them difficult, and how did you work with them successfully?
When people are like, "We like this, but can you change this," I've had friends who get all uppity, and they're like, "No, but this is perfect, and I'm an artist." And you're like, just make the changes. It's their music. Just be easy and flexible to work with, and then they'll come back because they had a good experience.
We're craftsmen at the end of the day. Our job is to generate a piece of content that pleases the client and supports the project. So it doesn't really matter how we arrived there. They don't care how hard you worked on it. They care about the result.
How do you keep communication clear with directors and music supervisors?
For a film, sometimes you get the script early, and that can be a good starting point creatively, but you don't really know how it's going to feel until you see picture. Same with a game: often you'll get stills at the beginning, like, here's this character model we made, here's this environment. You're usually brought on way too early to really be able to play the game.
It's a lot of back and forth, discussing what were they listening to when they were working on this project, and what did they have in mind. Sometimes that'll be totally different than what you were thinking, and it can be hard to pull people away from those impressions. If the editor has been editing to this one temp track for months, and the director's been hearing that in every single cut of the edit for three months before you got brought in, then anything different than that is going to be unfamiliar and wrong. So that has to be the starting point: where their head was already at.
Who is your favorite composer, and why?
Jacob Collier is upsettingly good at music. There's a video where he shows a modulation to G half sharp, and it sounds so natural. He's moving through keys, and certain notes in each of the chord voicings he's just making a little bit brighter, a few cents sharper, and he arrives at this big triumphant G chord, and you're like, why is that such a bright, epic chord? It's G half sharp. Then he goes and plays a G on the piano and it's flat, and you're like, oh my god, that's so cool. The amount of control to get there so fluidly is just bonkers.
Jason Graves is one of the coolest game composers of all time, and he's just so forthcoming with all this information and happy to share. It's really cool.
Describe your musical style.
Whenever I start a project, the first cue involves just building a big template of all the sounds, things that might work for the game. Some of them end up getting used all the time and some of them end up getting hidden or deleted from the template. Most of my noodling in my early writing happens on piano. Even if it's a big orchestral thing, there's probably going to be a muted piano track in there that, if you just solo it, would have all the chords mapped out.
If you use a preset, that means anybody else has that preset and can have that exact sound. Any really big score done by a really experienced composer, you don't know what any of those sounds are. Everything was tailored and custom made for the project. So if I know I'm going to need pads, I'll try to make a couple of pads from scratch, so we have things to lean on that will instantly sound unique to the score. Then you try to do your best to retire them after. A harmonica is a really horrifying sound if it's slowed down and lowered. It makes this haunting, unsettling growl, and since it's a wind instrument it has that organic nature, which makes it almost more unsettling.
Tell me about a cue or score that was hard to get right. What was the project and why was it challenging?
In Way of the Turtle, each of the explore tracks has a corresponding tension layer, and the volume of that is controlled by the number of enemies on screen. As you're in more danger, the music gets more tense, and as you're clearing out an area, it's fading out. Each one also has a corresponding low health layer, so as your health drops below a certain amount, it will start to fade in. But what we actually found was it got super annoying if you were wandering around and you couldn't find a heart. You're not in danger, you're just chilling at one heart, and you're like, great, I know, I don't need you to keep dinging in the background. So what we had happen is the low health layer comes in, and after it's been there for a while, it fades out a little bit and stays at a really low volume. So it's there.
With a film, the bad guy opens the door on this frame for every single viewer. But with a game you might wander around an area for five minutes or stay somewhere for 20 minutes, and if the music is not changing based on game elements, it's going to get frustrating and boring.
In which area would you like to improve as a composer?
That's definitely a thing I need to improve on. I think we all do, because often when I'm working on a lot of things, I'm stressed out because I have too much work, and then the project ends and I get stressed out that I don't have enough work. So you're constantly living in a state of stress, either because you have too much or not enough.
I was talking to a bigger composer about this, and he was like, you just need to allow yourself to chill. If you have a week off work, it's not the end of the world. Especially as younger composers, it's really easy to be like, oh no, the project ended, my career is over forever. And it's like, no, just chill out, and then when something inevitably comes up, you are rested and ready for it. There's an interview with Jerry Goldsmith's wife where she was talking about how he, even to the end, was always paranoid he would never work again. One of the greatest film composers of all time had that insecurity his whole career. So it's something to work on, to actually accept the time off and allow yourself to rest.
What are some of your professional goals for the future?
Just keep working. I got some interesting features that got pushed back because of COVID, but are hopefully filming early 2022. And then I got a couple of documentaries that I'm excited for, on some interesting topics.
I have some friends who have started video game audio companies, and they have a ton of employees, and you talk to them and they're like, "I haven't written a note of music in a year." That's definitely not for me. I want to work on projects. I want to be in a room alone writing, and I don't want to be managing a big team, or working on too much to focus on individually.
Shaun Chasin's Full Biography
Shaun Chasin is a Canadian composer for film, TV, and video games. Most recently, he scored the documentary MAMA!, a powerful film which follows three mothers as they fight for accountability for their fallen sons, whose lives were cut short at the hands of police following the George Floyd protests. Prior to this, he scored the comedy feature Domino: Battle Of The Bones, starring Snoop Dogg and David Arquette. He has also written music for dozens of games including the online shooters PUBG Mobile, Apex Legends Mobile, and Ring Of Elysium, as well as the virtual reality hit Quell 4D, and the family adventure Apple Arcade launch title Way Of The Turtle.
In addition to film and video games, he recently scored the Tubi original superhero series Grounded. He has also contributed music to hundreds of episodes of television including the crime investigation series Killing Fields on the Discovery Channel and the survival reality show Alone on The History Channel. Shaun also wrote the theme song "Our Time" for the anime Beyblade Burst, on Disney XD. The song has gone on to garner millions of views on YouTube, as well as inspire dozens of fan covers.
Shaun resides in Los Angeles with his lovely partner Rachael, and their two cats (and studio assistants), Bogie and Milton.