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

Why learn orchestral composing?

When composing for films, you must be able to compose for a wide range of styles and genres. Although you may have a specific preference in a niche genre, having the ability to switch from one style to another gives you more opportunities. Having the ability to compose orchestral compositions gives you an overall well-rounded skill set of techniques and tools to draw upon.

Becoming good at composing music means you have a versatile composing skill set. Composing orchestral music is a great way to get exposure to a wide range of composing situations. Composing orchestral MIDI music forces you to have experience with the following elements:

  • Understanding how to compose chord progressions and spread the instrumentation among different instruments
  • Understanding the limits and opportunities that live acoustic instruments present
  • Understanding how to make instrument plugins sound more real and less synthetic
  • Using percussion to generate...