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

Themes, motifs, and leitmotifs

Before you begin composing, we need to come up with some parameters to compose around. Themes, motifs, and leitmotifs are tools for coming up with musical ideas. They can help us to understand the meaning of scenes and define the qualities we want our music to have.

If you've taken a writing or film critiquing course, you may already be familiar with the terms themes, motifs, and leitmotifs. However, there could be many interpretations of these terms depending on who is teaching, and these terms are usually not used in a musical context. In the context of our discussion, we'll define these terms as follows:

Motif

A motif is a fragmentary musical idea that cannot represent something concrete in a narrative. It's a group or phrase of notes that convey an idea. It's the smallest amount of music you can make meaningful. As you replay this group of notes at different points throughout the narrative, the motif will come to mean...