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

Orchestral MIDI programming

Let's get to the real meat and potatoes of this chapter: tips on composing for orchestral compositions. In the new few sections, we'll mostly focus on MIDI programming for string instruments. By learning how to compose for strings, you'll learn about lots of transferrable tools and techniques that can be applied to composing orchestral compositions regardless, of whether you're composing for string, woodwind, brass, or percussion instruments.

Becoming good at composing for strings will give you transferable skills to compose for many orchestral instruments. So, although I will talk specifically about strings, you'll find that these lessons carry over to other orchestral instruments too.

Composing for string instruments

When we talk about string orchestral instruments, we're referring to the contrabass, cello, viola, and first and second violins. Composers devote a lot of attention to the string section of an orchestra...