Meet Steve Horner

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Steve Horner. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Steve below.

Steve, so great to have you with us and we want to jump right into a really important question. In recent years, it’s become so clear that we’re living through a time where so many folks are lacking self-confidence and self-esteem. So, we’d love to hear about your journey and how you developed your self-confidence and self-esteem.

I developed confidence and self esteem early on by growing up in a home that highly valued creative risk taking. At a young age, my Dad left his position as a teacher and applied for and won a government grant that allowed him to form a successful non-profit organization that did groundbreaking work in enriching the educational experience of students across the midwest and eventually nationally. I was always encouraged to explore my creative side and received an abundance of encouragement when I began exploring music in the 8th grade. Every creative project I undertake is a chance for me to dig a little deeper and see if something emerges that I haven’t heard before. There have been times of course when I’ve competed for and lost a job or the piece of music I’ve been creating doesn’t connect with others the way I had anticipated. At those moments, there is a definite feeling of dissapointment and sometimes a period of questioning whether I’m really able to do this work at the level I expect from myself but I’ve found that if I just sit with that feeling for a time it eventually transforms into an energy that propels me forward into the next project. The successes are wonderful but the times I fall short are when I learn the most.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

These days I’ve been focusing pretty heavily on creating orchestral realizations of pre-existing artist tracks for use in film trailers. I created an orchestral layer for the Mary J Blige documentary, My Life official Trailer. It was an amazing experience to be able to work with the original stems from her song “I’m Going Down” . It’s an arrangement/production I was very pleased with in the end. An even more recent trailer I provided an orchestral layer for was for the oscar nominated film by A24 Past Lives. The trailer starts with a beautiful recording by Cat Power of the song “Stay” (originally recorded by Rhianna) and then my layer picks up at the mid section and expands into an orchestral arrangement that builds until the end when the final line of the song is sung. Being able to expand outwards from such highly emotional and masterful recordings is inspiring to say the least. This kind of composition inspires ideas and forms that I would never come up with on my own and for that I’m grateful. I also do songwriting/production/mixing as well as creating original scores for mostly animated content for. One of my proudest moments was when I was able to work directly with Andrew Chesworth as the composer on the 2019 Oscar Nominated Animated Short, One Small Step. I’m also doing a lot of scoring and sound design work with an amazing company based in Minneapolis called Make Visual. A placement of my string cover (produced by Sean Harrison of Angry Mob Music) of Harry Styles’ Sign Of The Times in the Netflix Series Bridgerton is another recent highlight that continues to help drive my online streaming presence on Spotify, Apple Music, Ect… I love my work and whether it’s a jingle for a state lottery or something with a higher visibility, I give every project the same energy because ultimately it’s the process that is the most rewarding thing for me.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Perseverance is a quality I possess which allows me to see a project through to the very end even when seemingly insurmountable obstacles present themselves during the creative process. It also helps me stay optimistic during slow times when work is scarce. My production skills and their continued improvement has been vital to my success as a composer. Having the ability to deliver my work as a high quality finished product, completely in-house, allows me to move very swiftly if needed, which is vital in my industry. My ability to successfully connect both on an emotional and intellectual level with collaborators and clients allows me to align with the overall vision of any given project I’m participating in. Music for me is always about making a connection.

We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?

I think it is very important to focus a great deal of energy in the areas one is strong in, however, If you learn that there is an area of weakness in your skillset that is holding you back from being able to utilize your greater strengths, It’s definitely worthwhile to invest significant effort into improving upon that weaker skillset. When I first moved to LA after living and working in the Midwest for the majority of my career, I had certain ideas about where my strengths were with regard to my composing and production chops but soon learned that in the highly competitive arena that is LA, some the the skills I thought were my best strengths were lacking. An example is my ability to create a dynamic , realistic and compelling string arrangement using samples in my workstation. One of my first production music albums had a lot of this type of production involved and the feedback I was getting from the music house that was curating the project was not complimentary with regard to my Strings production. I had always thought that this was something I was very good at and to hear otherwise was a bummer for me. However, once I had a chance to just sit with it for a time, my response was to go back and start digging deeper into my string work. I embraced the criticism as an opportunity to learn more about and improve upon this particular skill so that it would meet and hopefully in the future, exceed the standard that was present in this new arena I was working in. To this day I am still working on raising my game with regard to string and orchestral production and that has actually become one of the skills I utilize most in my current production for film trailers. I’m always trying to learn and improve and that act of doing that is one of the most satisfying and rewarding aspects of what I do.

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Image Credits

The image of me with my wife and grandkids was created by my son Alex Horner. All others are mine

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