Dave Sheard
Composer
Dave is a British composer based in Edinburgh, Scotland, specialising in music for video games and its implementation. With a background straddling classical music, rock music, and coding, Dave is passionate about bringing the worlds and stories of video games to life with music.
Dave concluded a Master’s Degree in Composition for Video Games from ThinkSpace Education in December 2022 with a Distinction, only the second person ever to do so on the course. In June 2024, Dave began working with Brilliant Skies, the Scottish games studio responsible for From The Depths, scoring and designing music and audio systems for the studio. Shortly after graduating, Dave also scored “Broken Angel”, a short film by Hiraeth Pictures, which won Best Short Film Fiction at SeeMôr Festival Anglesey 2023. The film’s success continued when it was nominated for and won further awards at the West Lothian Film Festival 2024.
An experienced coder and web app developer, Dave is able to liaise with developers on their terms. He is enthusiastic about being involved in music’s implementation in games directly whenever possible, seeing the implementation stage as an integral part of the musical process that allows him to develop a closer relationship between the music and the experience.
Dave has worked with several high-profile producers and brands, including Matt O’Grady (You Me At Six, Deaf Havana, Architects), Neil Kennedy (Creeper, Boston Manor), Gibson and Red Bull, performed at notable events including Download Festival, and appeared on Kerrang! and Scuzz over several years. Drawing on his combined experience as an orchestral double bassist and touring rock bassist & vocalist, Dave writes embraces hybridity in his projects in pursuit of a unique musical identity.
Skills
- Wwise
- Cubase
- Reaper
- Logic Pro
- Unity
- FMOD
- Unreal
- Coding
- Hybrid
- Orchestral
- Rock
- Folk
- Sound Design (Music)
- Live Performance
- Multi-Instrumentalism
- Songwriting
Other Skills – Voice Acting & Dialogue Editing
Dave appeared as a voice actor in Fallout London, a DLC-sized mod for Fallout 4 released in July 2024. Dave played a generic voice type for “hooligans” (example here), a prolific type of standard enemy in the game equivalent to “raiders” in Fallout 4, as well as several other NPCs (example here), contributing a total of roughly 1200 lines to the project. Dave also assisted the team with the process of dialogue editing for implementation, editing several more characters across thousands of lines of dialogue. The mod has achieved resounding success, with over one million downloads to date on GoG alone.