“I was very lucky that there were a couple of instruments hanging around the house when I was young. Luckier still, my parents recognized me trying to pick out tunes on a toy guitar, and that perhaps I would enjoy some lessons. I started playing guitar at five years old, and from then on pretty much spent my entire childhood and teens playing, writing and studying music. When I left university I got an assisting job in a studio… That was great as I got to learn some rudimentary engineering stuff whilst getting into the computer audio software that was just starting to become the norm then. My shift into films happened a couple of years later, and was a strangely fortuitous story… I’d had a bad day at the studio, and decided to walk home rather than get the tube to clear my head, but stopped off at a newspaper shop on the way. The first thing I picked up was a music magazine that had an advert from a film composer looking for an assistant. The list of things he wanted from someone was pretty much a list of all the things I wanted to get into, so I applied and ended up working on and off with Trevor Jones (DARK CITY) for the next few years. That was a great education, as I got involved in all aspects of film score production, from programming to arranging, orchestrating to occasional additional composing, along with sometimes playing on the final scores. It was a pretty steep learning curve at times, but I soon found that making music to picture was the thing for me; I found the relationship between the two fascinating and satisfying, and I felt very much at home sculpting music around scenes and stories. Trevor would always record at Abbey Road, and when, some time later, the studios were putting a team together for the LORD OF THE RINGS scores, I was lucky enough to be asked to take part as a music editor. Off the back of that fantastic experience, music editing then became a path for me for several years.”
– Steven Price on getting into Film Composing.