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

Understanding sharps and flats

Later in this chapter, we'll explain how to use the music chord wheel tool for composing. But the chord wheel requires that you first understand what sharps and flats are. On a piano, you'll notice there are white notes and black notes. The white notes are whole tones. We assign whole tones the letter names C, D, E, F, G, A, and B. The black notes on a piano are semitones between the white notes. We call these sharps and flats. Sharp are indicated by a # symbol. Flats are indicated by a ♭ symbol. The following diagram shows piano notes with note labels.

Figure 3.19 – Sharps and flats

You'll notice the black notes each have two names on them. For example, the black note between the C and D note has the name C# and D. C# and D mean the same note.

To clarify, sharps and flats don't mean black notes. Sharp just means a raised note by a semitone and a flat just means to lower a note...