Book Image

Music for Film and Game Soundtracks with FL Studio

By : Joshua Au-Yeung
Book Image

Music for Film and Game Soundtracks with FL Studio

By: Joshua Au-Yeung

Overview of this book

FL Studio is a cutting-edge software music production environment and a powerful and easy-to-use tool for composing music. In this comprehensive guide, you’ll discover how to use FL Studio's tools and techniques to design exciting soundtracks for your films, TV shows, video games, and much more. You'll start by understanding the business of composing, learning how to communicate, score, market your services, land gigs, and deliver music projects for clients like a professional. Next, you'll set up your studio environment, navigate key tools, such as the channel rack, piano roll, playlist, mixer, and browser, and export songs. The book then advances to show you how to compose orchestral music using MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) programming, with a dedicated section to string instruments. You’ll create sheet music using MuseScore for live musicians to play your compositions. Later, you’ll learn about the art of Foley for recording realistic sound effects, create adaptive music that changes throughout video games, and design music to trigger specific emotions, for example, scary music to terrify your listener. Finally, you'll work on a sample project that will help you prepare for your composing career. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to create professional soundtrack scores for your films and video games.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
1
Part 1:The Business of Composing for Clients
3
Part 2:Composing Tools and Techniques
7
Part 3:Designing Music for Films and Video Games

What is interactive music?

A video game requires a lot of music to be created. Anything that occurs in a game could require sound. Many of these sounds can change throughout the game. For each environment and level, you may want to consider creating music that adapts to the player's actions.

Here's a list of game sounds you might want to consider when composing for video games:

  • Trailers
  • Characters
  • Button clicks
  • Menus
  • Loading level screens
  • Entering new levels
  • Completing levels
  • Music for each boss
  • Entering new rooms
  • Obtaining items
  • Achievements
  • Ambient sounds for environments
  • Battle sounds
  • Cutscenes
  • Music that characters are listening to within the game
  • Victory
  • Defeat

In order to create interactive music, you need tools to tell the game when to change the music. Some game-building software have tools for creating interactive music built in, and game engines are getting better tools every year...