Hire Michael Clinesmith for a Custom Score

There’s a specific frustration that comes with making something and not being able to find the music for it. You’ve got the scene, the level, the trailer cut, the montage — and every track you audition is close. Close in mood, wrong in length. Right tempo, wrong feeling. If that’s where you are, you can hire Michael Clinesmith to write the thing that doesn’t exist yet. He’s the composer behind Piano Reveries, a 22-track solo piano album, and the full original score for Rebellion, the indie RPG on Steam. Custom commissions run through his SoundBetter profile.

What custom composition means

Licensing a library track means finding music that already exists and hoping it fits. Sometimes it does. Usually it almost does, and you end up editing your work to accommodate the music instead of the other way around — trimming a shot because the cue resolves early, or cross-fading a loop that was never built to loop.

Commissioning is the inverse. The music gets written to your thing. The cue is as long as your scene is long. The emotional turn happens on the frame where your emotional turn happens. If the piece needs to sit unresolved for ninety seconds because your character hasn’t figured it out yet, it sits unresolved for ninety seconds.

That’s not a small difference. It’s the difference between music that decorates a project and music that belongs to it.

A composer who has shipped a game and an album

Here’s the unusual part, and it’s worth understanding before you brief anyone.

Endtime Entrepreneurs sits at a strange intersection: it’s an indie game studio that writes its own albums, and a music project that also ships RPGs. Most studios outsource the music. Most composers don’t build the games. Michael does both. Rebellion went into beta on Steam in 2023 with an original score that later shipped as its own Soundtrack DLC. Guinea’s World, a free guinea-pig game, has music by AiryTheDragon too.

Why does that matter when you’re hiring? Because a composer who has shipped a game already knows the things you’d otherwise have to explain. That a battle theme will be heard hundreds of times and cannot have a clever hook that grates on the fortieth pass. That a loop point is a compositional problem, not an export setting. That an area theme needs to survive being interrupted mid-phrase when the player walks through a door.

You don’t have to teach any of that. It’s already in the room.

From piano pieces to full game scores

The other thing worth checking before you commission anyone is range — can they write outside the one style you’ve heard from them?

Piano Reveries is a useful answer, because it’s twenty-two tracks across eight genres with piano at the heart of every one. The Joy in Life is flamenco. Lovely Night is jazz. For Grandma sits in funk and soul. Bb Melody is chillwave. And then there’s the three-movement Sonatina in G, which is straight classical form, tightening from 5:21 to 3:15 to 2:46 across its movements.

The album also proves he can write to a length, which is most of the job in scoring. Happy Anniversary is forty-nine seconds. The Sun Will Rise Again is eight minutes and forty-two. Race moves; Jade’s Lullaby refuses to. Those durations aren’t accidents of assembly — each piece runs as long as its idea holds, which is precisely the discipline a picture edit demands.

And it scales past solo piano. In 2025 the Vassar City Band performed Piano Reveries live as a full ensemble, taking pieces written for ten fingers into orchestra territory. Writing that survives being re-voiced for a band is writing with real bones underneath it — the melodies and harmonic motion hold up when the instrument changes. That’s the quality you actually want in a score, where the same theme may need to appear on strings, on a music box, and on a lone piano in the same project.

How a commission works, start to finish

The most useful thing you can do before reaching out is gather three pieces of information.

What it’s for, and how long. A sixty-second trailer, a looping town theme, a main menu cue, a wedding piece. Length and loop behavior shape everything downstream.

References. Two or three tracks that are near what you want, plus a sentence on what specifically you like about each. “This one, but warmer” is worth more than a genre label. Pointing at something on the album works well here — saying “the restraint of Play in the Grass, not the drive of Dance in D” communicates more in one line than a paragraph of adjectives.

Where it ends up. A Steam release, a client video, a short film, a personal gift. Usage affects licensing, and it’s much easier to settle at the start than to renegotiate later.

From there the conversation happens on SoundBetter, where scope, timeline, revisions, and rate get agreed up front before any writing starts. Expect to hear a sketch before a finished master — that’s the point at which redirection is cheap. A wrong emotional read costs a conversation at the sketch stage and a re-record at the delivery stage. Say the awkward thing early.

How to hire Michael Clinesmith for your project

Start by listening, honestly. The fastest way to know whether a composer is right for your project is to spend twenty minutes with music they made for themselves, where nobody was telling them what to do. You can play previews of all 22 tracks of Piano Reveries right here, and there’s more on the Endtime Entrepreneurs YouTube channel.

If you want to hear a score work in context rather than in isolation, Rebellion is on Steam and its soundtrack is available as DLC. If you’d rather read the notes than hear them, his sheet music is published on Sheet Music Plus and Sheet Music Direct.

Then get in touch. For a formal commission with a quote and agreed deliverables, SoundBetter is the right door. For anything else — a question, a maybe, a project that isn’t shaped yet — the contact page is fine, and a half-formed idea is a perfectly good email.

There’s a version of your project where the music was written for it. If you’ve read this far, you probably already know which scene you’d start with. Tell him about that one.

If this resonated, you can listen to and buy Piano Reveries, read more about the studio, support the work on Patreon, or get in touch about a custom score.