Welsh guitarist and composer finished his long-paused Berklee degree online while building an international career scoring movies, TV, and ad campaigns.

Owen Gurry’s guitar work can be heard on films like Blade Runner 2049 and Thirteen Lives, and his compositions show up everywhere from Netflix dramas to global ad campaigns. After first attending Berklee’s Boston campus in 2007, he returned years later to finish his degree in Music Composition for Film, TV, and Games through Berklee Online—this time while working full time as a session guitarist, composer, and producer. “I 100 percent directly applied the stuff I was learning as I went through the online degree to what I was working on at the time,” he says.

Why was it important for you to come back and finish your Berklee degree after so many years?

Owen Gurry: When I first came to Berklee in 2007 and studied on campus, it was one of the best summers of my life. It’s really where I turned myself into a professional musician. But it wasn’t cheap, and I already had one degree and a master’s under my belt, with the student loans to prove it! So I went back to the UK and started my career. That went pretty well, and a few years ago, I got to the point where I thought, “Well, now I can afford to fund myself and finish that process.” So that’s what I did. I contacted Berklee; I spoke to Mark Hopkins, my Academic Advisor, who had fantastic advice about what I could do with Berklee Online.

I was able to have my normal life and I could carry on working. I could have my home life, I didn’t have to move back to Boston. I could do it from my home in Wales. That flexibility was really valuable to me. I also met some really cool people from all over the world.

I was also able to take credits from my degree and master’s in something completely different, and apply them to the degree program.


Okay, so you mentioned a “degree and master’s in something completely different.” I have to know what that “something completely different” was!

Owen Gurry: So I grew up in a really rural place and although I was obsessed with guitars and music from about 15, there was no way at 18 I was going to be able to make a go of that, living in the middle of nowhere. So I chose a degree in something else. I did my bachelor’s in psychology, and then I carried on and did my master’s in neuropsychology and brain injury. That was always like a career backstop for me: If music didn’t happen and I couldn’t make a living out of it, I still had something to fall back on.

So I had gone through this process of getting a degree and a master’s as a safety net for my music career, but I wasn’t really sure how I was going to launch my music career. I’d heard about Berklee because some of my heroes had been here, and the thing that really motivated me to do it was that I was working as a data analyst: I was like 22, and I had a meeting with my manager. He said, “You’re doing really great. Give it a couple of years, and you could be the head of the department.” And that scared the hell out of me! Because at 22, I did not want to be the head of the statistics department. So I looked at Berklee. I looked at what I needed to get in, both in terms of money and in terms of qualifications, and I set about achieving that.


Your style is so adaptable to many different types of music. How do you keep informed about the nuances of what differentiates those styles of music?

Owen Gurry: One of the things I love about my job is the variety of things I get to do. One month it might be some folk, then the next month it might be a hardcore album or some EDM, and then some string music. And I really love that. That keeps me interested, that constant changing of material.


How is it that you find yourself working on such a range? Is this because you are creating for libraries or is it just the wide range of clients?

Owen Gurry: I do three things for my job: I work as a session guitarist, I work as a composer, and I work as a music producer. As a session guitarist, I’m best known for working on movie scores. I’ve been the guitarist for a composer called Benjamin Wallfisch for about 10 years and been on about 20 of his films in that time. Films like Blade Runner 2049, which was scored with Hans Zimmer; A Cure for Wellness with [writer and director] Gore Verbinski; and Ron Howard’s Thirteen Lives. My job there is kind of a cross between traditional guitar playing—where someone writes something and I have to replay it—and sound design elements, where I have to mangle a guitar and make it sound not like a guitar at all. I also do hired-gun session work for other composers and jingle companies, that sort of bread-and-butter session work.

I’m primarily a media composer, and a lot of that is writing music for sync licensing, library, and music production. I write large catalogs of music that is then used by broadcasters, advertisers, TV shows, and streaming services all across the world. And that can be a variety of styles of music, too. I’m fairly lucky in that I have quite a good reputation with the library publishers I work for. I tend to just tell them what I want to work on and we agree what I’m going to be doing. I’ll be watching Netflix and I’ll hear some woodwind music or some flute music, and think “That’s a great idea and that I should do some more of that!” I pitch the idea to a publisher and they’ll say yes or no, and then I go away and do it. I hand over the music to the publisher, and it’s their job then to take that to broadcasters and advertisers, streaming services, and people making movies.

Although I do try to concentrate on types of music that I want to do, it is still targeted to what I think a broadcaster is actually going to use, because that’s what it boils down to. There’s no point in me spending all this time and energy, and often money, making this music for it not to end up on a TV show. So it’s still quite a targeted process.

As a music producer, I take all the skills that I learned as a session guitarist and a composer, and apply that to developing bands and artists to help them write their own music.

Behind the scenes of Owen Gurry’s 2024 chamber project: filmmaker Ben Risley captures the process of composing and recording music for TV, films, and games. Part-funded by Creative Wales (Welsh Government). Click here to watch the full documentary, and explore more of his work at OwenGurry.com.

After you hand over the music to the publishers, do you follow up on where it’s going to be placed, or do you end up being surprised to hear where your music appears?

Owen Gurry: So a lot of the time I don’t even know when my music has been used and I get my royalty statement and that’s kind of fun. My wife and I play this game when we go through my quarterly royalty statements, and find the funniest placement or the one that we might have seen. Sometimes we’ll be watching Netflix or watching TV and we’ll hear a piece of my music randomly, and that’s a real kick. It’s fun.


Is there one that has surprised you the most?

Owen Gurry: I have a good one for this! So I think it’s difficult for anyone who doesn’t work in a creative industry to understand how creative people are able to monetize that, and how they’re able to have normal lives with mortgages, car finance, and all that stuff that everyone else has. I think that’s tough for people to understand.

My in-laws—my wife’s parents—are both former ballet dancers, so they kind of get it. But, even then, they don’t know what sync licensing is. We were on a trip out to Australia to visit them and there was a TV on in the back of the restaurant and one of my tracks came on a TV show. So it was great for me to be able to go, “Well, this is what I do for a living!” So like I said, I don’t often know where it’s going to turn up.


When you work on something like the Blade Runner movie, is there any additional pressure because of how high-profile it is?

Owen Gurry: So Blade Runner was a funny one. I didn’t actually get to know what it was until a couple of weeks in because it was so high-profile. It was kind of a secret. There were lots of NDAs. I wasn’t allowed to know the title of the project. I was given adjectives like “dystopian,” “dark,” and “brooding,” so I had to guess what the project was until it was revealed to me.


So I guess that takes the pressure off a little bit. Not knowing it was Hans Zimmer.

Owen Gurry: I knew Hans Zimmer was involved in the project, but I didn’t know what it was. I had done about two dozen projects with Benjamin Wallfisch, the other composer on Blade Runner 2049, so that made it a little easier. The first big project was nerve-wracking, but after that, you kind of get into your stride and it’s almost like a comfortable place to be because you’ve experienced it and you know what you’re doing.


Hollywood does a fair amount of reboots. Is there any film or franchise that would be your ideal movie to work on a reboot for?

Owen Gurry: I love movies of all kinds, but I have particular affection for the Alien franchise, so anything in that world I would love to be involved in.


Looking at your educational history—which started at Berklee in 2007 (and even before that in other disciplines!)—you certainly fit the profile of a lifelong learner.

Owen Gurry: I started higher education at 18 with my degree and master’s. Then I came to Berklee when I was like 23 or 24. I think I turned 24 when I was here that summer. Then I picked up Berklee Online to finish the degree. I’m 42 this year, and I don’t think I’m going to stop learning. I’ll probably do more stuff with Berklee Online. I initially focused on the things that were required for my degree, but there’s things like the second Orchestration course. I loved the first Orchestration course and it was really valuable to me. The second one wasn’t required for my degree, so I didn’t initially do it.


What have been your favorite courses at Berklee Online?

Owen Gurry: I genuinely enjoyed every course I did with Berklee Online. I did have some particular favorites though, and some of them really surprised me. I was quite scared to do Counterpoint, but it ended up being one of my favorite courses. It really pushed me. It really developed a new musical vocabulary in me, which I really enjoyed. The Contemporary Techniques classes were fantastic as well. They particularly helped me write more experimental music. So rather than writing music, that’s a product that someone has asked me to do, I got to think about my artistic voice and how I might write music that I want to write.

I 100 percent directly applied the stuff I was learning as I went through the online degree to what I was working on at the time. There were projects I’m doing now that I don’t think I’d have been capable of doing two or three years ago, when I started.


 Published October 3, 2025

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