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

Understanding modes

Modes are scales, but a specific type of scale. They have some useful applications when composing music and we can use them to create specific moods.

Let's take a look at some more of the scales in the stamp tool of the Piano roll we saw in the preceding section. If you open the stamp tool again, you'll notice there are a series of scale names. Some of these scales may feel unfamiliar to you if you haven't studied music theory before. For example, you can see the scales Aeolian, Pentatonic, Dorian, Locrian, Lydian, Mixolydian, and Phrygian, as shown in the following screenshot, as well as many others:

Figure 3.9 – Modes

What are these? These are modes. Modes are a type of scale. The seven modes in their logical order are Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, and Locrian. They are related to each other. To explain how, we need a visual.

Use the stamp tool to select Major Scale and place this on...