Chase Bethea is a freelance composer, sound designer, and audio engineer for video games and other media. Graduating with an AA from Audio Engineering from Los Angeles Recording School in 2007, Chase finished his AA in Music Theory and Composition from Moorpark College in 2015, and his BM in Media Composition from California State Northridge in 2017 with all honors.
The composer won Best Music in Motion Graphic and Poetry Award (2010), and his score from the successful flash horror game
I Can't Escape received an honorable mention in the Indie Game Magazine (2013). Chase was also nominated for Artists of the Year — Independent Composer by VGMO in the entire industry (2016), and signed publishing deals with Sumthing Else Music Works and Materia Collective. His music has been featured on multiple podcasts such as Pixelated Audio, Video Game Island, 8bitx Radio and streamed on Spotify, Pandora, Deezer and others.
Chase wasn't looking to become a video game composer. Studying at Los Angeles Recording School as an audio engineer, he landed a job at an internet media company, Vlaze Media Networks, three months before graduation. "During my time there I had a myriad of job titles — I was hired initially to be a live sound engineer, [but I soon] became a front of house engineer," the composer remembers, explaining that this isn't usually possible until you're 25, or at least that's what everyone told him in school.
At a certain point, the company began creating so much content they needed original music and their own internal library, and Chase moved on to write music in no time. Although at first the workload consisted of composing little tracks, he soon was pumping out almost three tracks everyday. "I taught myself composition and I was validated by my colleagues that it was good because they were using it," Bethea continues. "I still had the job [and] survived the recession and six furloughs." In addition to that, he was also assisting in building computers from the ground up and managing the studio for live performers. There was one score in particular that made the composer change careers forever — after his friend gave the composition a listen, he stated that the music should be in a video game called
Castle Crashers. "And I said, you know what? I'm going to do it," he laughs.
Researching video game audio, Bethea stumbled upon interviews of
God of War II, which introduced him to the process. "I forgot everything, [so] I needed to go back to school [to] be on that level," he says. "I decided that I was just going to learn the basics of music and theory to get that back into me." When Chase didn't make it through the seventh furlough, he enrolled in Moorpark College.
After completing his education there, the composer pursued a Bachelor of Arts in Media Composition at CSU Northridge. While his first choice was UCLA, in his words, their program had a two percent entry rate, was three times more expensive compared to CSUN, and wouldn't teach him the whole gamut of media work. "Cal State Northridge was renowned for being one of the 15 schools of music at that level for media composition, and I knew I wanted to study orchestration, [which] I didn't get at Moorpark," Chase reasons. "I thought I was going to be challenged, because I had already been scouting the program for years."