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

A few final thoughts

There's an unlimited supply of great music to use as inspiration. Pay attention to music in films, games, and songs you like. It's a good habit to try to identify tools and techniques that might have been used in songs.

Try to keep your eye on the big picture and not worry too much about the little problems that show up along the way. Setbacks and uncertainty should be expected. Most skills are hard when new, but they become easier through experience. Projects, clients, and tools come and go. What stays is your ever-improving ability to create slightly better music with each song you work on. Each musical piece you create helps make your next piece even better. What you're able to do now is nothing compared to what you'll be able to do down the road.

Soundtracks are meant to be emotional listening experiences. If your music isn't generating an emotion, you probably need to go back to the drawing board.

Although academics may try...