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

Using the Circle of Fifths chord wheel

The Circle of Fifths chord wheel is a visual tool used by musicians as a cheat sheet for music theory. It's a diagram containing a list of key signatures and it conveys a large amount of information very quickly to the reader.

The Circle of Fifths diagram can be used for a variety of purposes. It can be used as a reference for transposing music from one key to another. Live musicians may use it to assist with improvising when trying to figure out what key to use. As a composer, you'll likely want to use this tool whenever you want to change keys, such as changing back and forth from major to minor. The following diagram shows a simple version of the Circle of Fifths.

Figure 3.21 – Circle of Fifths

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Music_Scale_Theory_-_Circle_of_Fifths.png

Starting at the top center, the inner circle lists the name of the major key (Ionian mode), in this case, C. The outside...