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

Challenges associated with composing soundtracks professionally

If you want to take on jobs composing music for clients, there is a list of challenges that you'll need to deal with. From day one, you're expected to:

  • Know how to find composing jobs. Such jobs aren't usually listed like traditional jobs.
  • Once you identify a potential gig, you need to know how to market and sell yourself to clients to gain work.
  • You need to know how to use a wide array of music production software. Music software has undergone a revolution in the last few decades as music production has become significantly less hardware-focused and much more software-driven. The software landscape is constantly changing as new features and plugins appear monthly.
  • You need to understand enough music theory to evaluate songs so that you can go and create similar scores to existing music as needed. You need to understand how to craft music to fit desired styles and moods.
  • You need the ability to consistently generate production-ready music. You need to have an understanding of composing, recording, mixing, mastering, and how all of this relates to your client's project.
  • If composing for game development, you may need to understand the intricacies of adapting music to video game environments.

Whew! That sounds like a lot of stuff to learn. You may feel a little overwhelmed in the beginning, and that's only natural. This book will help you navigate all these challenges. By the time you're done, you'll have a solid introduction to the tools and techniques to do all the above and much more.