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

Toolkit of the composer

When you sit down to compose (usually at a piano and computer), you're faced with a blank canvas. At least that's how it's depicted in movies. It looks like there's nothing, and you have to invent. From an outsider's perspective, it seems like the music just pours out of you. That's the romantic fairytale way of thinking about composing music.

Music bursting out of you sounds lovely but isn't very reliable if you need to create music consistently on demand. Where does music come from? The notes we play aren't random. Certain note combinations and melodies sometimes sound really good together. It seems like sometimes all the notes flow and support each other. How does this come about? There must be some kind of relationship between note combinations that allow this to happen.

You've been given a film composing assignment. You've seen the story you need to create music for. How do you start? How can you...