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

Soundtrack composing templates

I'm a big fan of checklists – ordered lists to ensure you perform all the prerequisite steps. Checklists allow you to make sure you've paid attention to each step, especially those that are easy to overlook. Some steps feel quite small but, if forgotten, can lead to big problems down the road. The book The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande, provides compelling arguments for the benefits of using lists to improve your workflow. I highly recommend reading it.

The steps in composing music are a repeated process that you'll go through again and again for each music production project. Music production steps can be broken down into a sequential list. This section will provide you with a series of lists you can adapt and use to ensure you've paid attention to all the important things while composing. For organizational convenience, there are three checklists for three different stages of the music production process.

The...