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

How to get the most out of this book

The goal is to create music that fits your visuals while sounding polished. To get the best results, you need to be creating music on a regular basis. Composing music is just like playing an instrument. If you want to get good, you need to practice. Unlike playing an instrument, when you're composing music, you're less focused on the technique and more focused on the end result of how the music fits the project you're composing for.

You need to think in terms of the big picture about how to design a song for specific emotions, how the song fits the visuals, and how everything relates to your client's vision. Do these things well, and you're on your way to becoming a composer.

This book will give you many tips and tricks, but you still need experience to learn. To apply the lessons in this book, you'll benefit most by having a project to compose for. I recommend finding a moving visual that needs music. This could be a video, video game, or live performance. Then you can directly apply and relate the skills you pick up in this book to your own circumstances.

While reading this book, you can share your music and collaborate in the online Facebook group with other readers/students here:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/musicproducerandcomposercommunity

The FL Studio fruit logo is a trademark of Image Line NV and has been used with permission. This is a courtesy and does not constitute any endorsement of this book and its contents by Image Line.