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

Chapter 3: Designing Music with Themes, Leitmotifs, and Scales

In this chapter, we discuss music theory for composers. We will give a foundational background for how to apply music theory for film and game composing. We will discuss how the concepts of motifs, themes, and leitmotifs can be used to come up with musical ideas. We will discuss what scales are and how to use them. We will use scales to explain what modes are and how to use them. Finally, these concepts will allow us to use the Circle of Fifths chord wheel tool to show how scales relate to each other and how to smoothly transition from one music key to another within a song.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • Toolkit of the composer
  • Understanding and using themes, motifs, and leitmotifs
  • Understanding scales
  • Understanding and using modes
  • Understanding sharps and flats
  • Using the Circle of Fifths chord wheel