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

FL Studio core tools

Tools in FL Studio can only be really understood once you start using them. This is a book about composing techniques, so instead of listing every control and feature, we'll just focus on the need-to-know features and then get to the fun stuff – composing. In this chapter, we will cover the basics for beginners. We'll load an instrument into the Channel rack, create a simple melody in the Piano roll, add it to the Playlist, route it to the Mixer, and export it from FL Studio.

At the top of FL Studio, you'll find the menu panel and the player. The menu panel contains the FILE navigation dropdown for creating, saving, opening, and exporting projects. Below FILE, you'll see text describing the name of whatever button your mouse cursor hovers over, as well as a list of keyboard shortcuts for using the control. If you're ever wondering what a plugin or control is called, it will be described here. The following screenshot shows the...