Using the Power of Simple Math to Create Sync Licensing Success

Marcus (Da Fingaz) Manderson in his home studio in Virginia, United States

Embrace Your Passion

Music got me up at 6 am nearly every Sunday for twenty-five years.

The scale of our performances on the big day meant we had rehearsals nearly every day of the week and because we started from scratch each time, it was always a ton of work.

Every evening, except Wednesdays when I went to Bible study, I would work on a fresh, new setlist for the Sunday worship, charting chords, and annotating melodies and lyrics on multi-layered vocal arrangements for as many as five or six choirs. More often than not, right when we had everything as tight as we could get it, someone would throw in a last-minute request on a Saturday night, and it was a race to strip it down, transform it to their particular style, and learn it off by heart before the morning. 

We were like a touring band, preparing for sell-out concerts, except we fitted it around our full-time jobs and family commitments and our venue never changed.

Even if we knew the songs that came around, it didn’t save us any time. There weren’t many songs we hadn’t played before, but no two Sunday lineups were ever the same. The choirs differed in age, ability, and style making us musical alchemists, on hand for whether they wanted to turn gospel to funk or jazz to soul. We spent hours meticulously tailoring rhythms to help the lead vocalists shine to their exact specifications only to find that on the day, they stood up and did whatever they felt like in the moment making us switch gears and improvise with them. 

As a band, each aspect of preparation and performance took everything we had to give, but it didn’t matter whether we were playing in the key of hip hop, soul, or R’n‘B, each week without fail we raised the roof of my local church in Virginia so high it didn’t come down until the following Sunday when it was time to start all over again.

God Put Me on This Earth to Create

I started playing piano around the age of ten but it took me a few years to find the discipline I needed to excel. My teacher from church regularly shook his head when he looked at how many minutes of practice I’d noted in my book for the week. I loved my piano practice; I couldn’t wait to sit down and play every day but put little energy into my workbook's dull, repetitive exercises and spent more time freestyling, improvising, and dreaming of growing up to be like my musical heroes. 

I grew up in the '90s when the distinctive sounds of Virginia hip-hop and R’n’B were exploding around the world, fuelled by future icons of the industry like Timbaland, Pharrell Williams, Chris Brown, Missy Elliot, and Trey Songz, to name just a few. I too wanted to break musical barriers and work with the biggest names in the industry as a record producer and I didn’t understand how practicing scales and arpeggios was going to get me there.

That was until I hit Senior Year and decided I wanted to audition for music school. I found a new teacher who told me that seventeen years old was about ten years too late to start classical training, however, she was willing to help me get good enough to make it sound like I grew up dreaming of becoming Mozart instead of Pharrell. 

With one year to get in shape for the audition, I set my focus into hyperdrive, and it paid off. In 2002 I walked into James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia as a music industry major.

Now there was nowhere to hide. Freshman year kicked my butt; I had to get up every morning at 5 am and hit the practice room before class, trying to reach the same standard as all the other students who had been studying since they were five years old. I was still a Freshman when they paired me with a senior percussionist for his final year performance of Franz List’s Rhapsodic Fantasie. I sat on stage in the auditorium packed with students, parents, and teachers, sweat dripping down my neck as my fingers ran across the piano so fast I felt like I was chasing the Keystone Cops.

That same year I married the love of my life. After we graduated college, I moved back to Viginia and spent a year studying Pro Tools music software at the Omega Studios School of Applied Recording Arts and Sciences in Rockville, Maryland. I still dreamed of working as a big-time music producer, but I found a steady job at National Geographic as a sound engineer, and the church offered me a paid place in the band. Not long after that, I became their official keyboard player.

Piano and organ were my instruments for the next fifteen years, taking music from the best gospel artists on the planet, Ty Tribbet, James Hall, Richard Smallwood, and Kirk Franklin, among many others, and turning them into six different genres each Sunday.

So when I say I can diversify, I mean there isn’t much music I can’t play.

Live Your Life in Song

Did you know there’s a person assigned to curate music for every time one of the Kardashians gets mad? On their TV show, at least.

We often think of music creation as being exclusively for pop stars, bands, or record producers, but there’s a whole other world of creators that goes untalked about; people who make music to enhance the media you consume, and I’m one of them. 

‘Sync licensing’ is the business of making music that synchronises to a moving picture which can mean anything from movie soundtracks, TV shows, video games, advertisements, and even theme park rides. 

In almost everything we consume, music is underneath it all, heightening our experiences and creating share-worthy moments. Would our hearts bleed as much for poor Simba losing his father in Disney’s ‘The Lion King’ if it weren’t for Hans Zimmer’s heart-stirring score? Would you feel as pumped riding the trippy race tracks in Nintendo’s ‘Mario Kart’ if it weren’t for the fast-paced, arcade-style soundtrack hyping you up?  Maybe it’s the catchy theme tune of your favourite burger brand that puts the extra crunch in your french fries, you never know.

My path to sync licensing began in 2020 when the pandemic hit.

In March of that year, the church closed its doors and it opened up space for me to finally start creating my own music instead of playing other people’s. With the same energy that got me through music college, I set myself in a new direction and got there fast. I entered 200 music contests and secured my first spot on TV in an episode of The Kardashians but it wasn’t until the following year I realised that getting paid to have your music on any media was called sync licensing. 

I studied the business and within three years I had secured music placements on the MTV channel, on TV shows like Catfish, and BMF, on video game trailers, and on documentaries at National Geographic and the Smithsonian. In 2023, I scored an entire movie soundtrack for the movie ‘Hemisphere’, streaming on Prime Video and other platforms, and in that same year, my music premiered at an attraction at Disney Land.   

Working across genres and diversifying my sound means I’m always evolving as a creator. Hitting that big cinematic sound is where I shine and this year, I’ve been focusing on movie trailer music, a challenge too big for some as it requires the ability to create an entire movie score in two and a half minutes. It’s widely considered one of the hardest genres of music to make, but I love the challenge.

The Best Way to Learn Is to Teach

I couldn’t have achieved anything in my sync licensing career so far without the help and support of multiple communities. As much energy as I put into music production, I put into connecting with other artists and creators, building relationships, and sharing my knowledge.

Back in 2020, when I knew no one in the industry and had no clue where to start, I went to where other music creators hung out and joined a ton of different Facebook groups. Entering as many music contests as I did forced me to stretch my music production knowledge and push the limits of my capabilities. From there I built up a solid catalogue of sounds and by the end of the year, I had enough music to reach out to sync libraries.

Getting accepted into well-established libraries that can distribute your music to the ears of decision-makers in movies or TV is essential to any composer’s growth and reputation. 

Now I was no longer playing in church, I finally had time to make it to one of the biggest music tech events in the world, the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) conference in California. For music manufacturers and music tech devotees, it’s the place to learn and connect. Hundreds of businesses and experts in music creation come together under a vast roof to share their knowledge of the latest innovations in the industry. Last year I had the chance to talk to Kendrick Lamar’s sound engineer, Mixed by Ali. 

In 2022 I wanted to start teaching so I pitched NAMM some ideas and secured my spot on stage as a speaker on my first sync licensing information panel. I invited a group of other speakers who came with me and created the first all-African-American sync panel at that scale. 750 people registered to watch the panel but only 150 were allowed in the room. The year after that they gave me a stage three times the size and three panels to host.

Get Yourself Seen

I use social media to attract work and share my knowledge to help others find success.

Networking through Facebook led me to Disney.

In 2023, I saw in one of the music groups that the Disneyland team was looking for an African American composer to update the introduction video for one of their exhibitions. I secured an online meeting, and some of the production team sent me a rough cut of the intro video for the ‘Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln’ exhibit, an animatronic show they were updating as part of the Disney 100 celebrations. They needed a fifteen-minute soundtrack to accompany it. 

The meeting was on a Friday and they were meeting for a screening on the following Monday but didn’t expect me to have the music ready until Thanksgiving break which was a month away.

I told my wife I wasn’t going to sleep that weekend and sent it to them on Sunday night. At the Monday meeting, they were shocked but they loved it. It was a gamble working that fast, but now I’m listed as an official Disney vendor and it’s one of the projects I’m most proud of. It was also the coolest thing when I visited the exhibition with my wife and kids. I went live on Instagram as they played my music and my wife excitedly told everyone ‘My husband wrote this!’

I go live as much as I can on Instagram. One of my outreach strategies is to attract the people I want to work with rather than reach out directly to them. This was how I got one step closer to one of my dream artists.

A few years ago I started releasing instrumental albums for my ideal clients. I made one for Usher and played it all over my socials, then one night, when I was dropping off my wife and daughter at his concert in Vegas, I went live on Instagram and tagged him. The next thing I get a DM from his manager saying to come and meet him inside. I was so excited to meet everyone around Usher, although I didn’t meet the man himself that night.

I live, breathe, eat, sleep, walk, talk, and share about sync music across all my social media channels because I want to help others get a break into the industry too.

I regularly share Logic Pro tips live on Instagram and post how-to videos on TikTok. I have a YouTube channel where I share advice or conduct interviews with music experts, and I know Timbaland has listened to one of my beats on Twitch. 

I’m part of The Recording Academy Class of 2024 and recently completed a music production program at the Los Angeles Academy for Artists and Music Production. 

I also recently completed hosting a weekend of workshops for the Sync Music Production Accelerator in Toronto, Canada, sharing insights into the world of production music.

It All Comes Down to One Simple Equation

The way to succeed in the sync industry, and in any industry as a freelancer or creator, is math. The more you put yourself out there the more chances you have of being seen or heard. 

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Find how to work with Marcus (Dafingaz) via his website: https://dafingaz.com/

Continue the journey with him via his social media channels: 

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© Heidi Pyper 2024: All Rights Reserved