You get what you pay for, and you sound like everyone else. But if you’re going to, just get Kevin McLeod’s music. It’s free and there’s tons of it. Chances are, my site is not the first music site you’ve visited.
You may have seen other sites that license music out really inexpensively. Perhaps, if you’re a game dev, you may have been browsing the unity asset store. These websites/stores sell music tracks from about 1-5 minutes long. They allow you to search for tracks in the genres you want, in the tempos you want, and can offer some other filtering choices. It can be easy to find the good pieces too - Filters will often allow you to put the most purchased or highest rated pieces at the top of your search. Those pieces tend to be fairly high quality. When working on a budget, these pre-composed pieces of music may be a good fit for you. They won’t strain the project’s budget too much, and they’ll get the job done, at least for the most part. So, why shell out a ton of money for custom-composed music? Believe it or not, I’ve got a couple reasons. Exclusivity Firstly, with custom music, you’re talking about music that is unique to your project. It won’t have been heard anywhere else before. One hazard of using pre-composed music is that your audience could have heard it somewhere else before, and that can really take them out of the experience you’ve made for them. And often, the filters that allow you to see the best work (Most bought, highest starred) are filters that are giving you the work most likely to have been heard by your audience before. Some of these tracks will have an exclusive option - But they are more rare, and more expensive. By paying for custom-composed music, you are ensuring an exclusive musical experience. (Depending upon the terms you and your composer agree to.) Thematic Ownership A second problem with pre-composed music is that you are limited in what you can do with the tracks, and how you can legally use them. Imagine this. Let’s say you’re making a podcast. You’ve found the perfect pre-composed tracks for your project and place them perfectly over the characters, places, and ideas that need consistent music. You make your podcast, and the first season becomes fairly popular. Your patreon is successful, you’re getting good reviews and some press attention, and going into season 2, you have an actual budget. So, now, you think, you’re going to hire a composer! And now... That composer cannot use any of the thematic material from your first season. Womp womp. A piece of pre-composed music you bought that you played whenever a villain was in a scene? You can pay to license the exact track again. The composer you hired can place it. But whatever composer you have for season two cannot play with the theme, elongate it, re-harmonize it, contextualize it in other themes for other characters or places unless you pay to license that piece again. And that’s true of any track of pre-composed music you purchase. You’ve bought a track. You can play the track in the project you licensed it for. But, the musical ideas in the track are not yours. You didn’t pay for those. Depending on what license you purchase, you may be able to transform the tracks as you see fit (Though that’s not a guarantee), but you’ll need to own that license for every episode you use that music in. So now season two starts, and your composer is coming up with all new material. It’s really good, but none of the characters or places have the same music. The tonal shift perplexes your audience. Depending on the terms of your contract with a composer who is doing custom music for your game, you will most often have the rights to those themes. If you make a sequel and John Williams calls you up and wants to do the score? Well, he can use all of that music you already have associated with your story/franchise. He can Williams it up and add in his own style, mix and match with new themes for the new season, and reflect character growth in the ways he uses the motifs. And that’s something he can do because you paid for custom music. Real Time Adjustment Would you believe it if I told you that about half of my scoring work is spent on just a fraction of the length of the work? Sometimes all I’ll do in a day is work on several spots, just five seconds long each - Finding the perfect place to loop, smoothing out a transition, making a stab time perfectly. With precomposed music, it’s like putting on a chainmail suit on a skeleton. You may get the overall shape right. But it will never conform or gel completely with what’s inside. Custom music turns the music into muscle and sinew to your project’s skeleton. It melds until it becomes part of the project, and isn’t separate at all. And this isn’t just in those transitions either. Maybe a perfect theme that works over one actor’s voice conflicts with another actor’s voice because the synth is stepping on where the second actor’s voice lies. With custom composing, it’s easy for a composer to switch out the synth for another instrument. The composer can keep the intent and mood, and also make the small changes to make it gel with all the small details in your work. Pre-composed music, no matter how high quality, cannot do that. You get to give feedback and make changes! Like the overall feel of some music, but want it over a different scene? A composer you hired can do that. Like the melody, but want it in electric guitar instead of flute? A composer can do that. Want the chords made minor in one section, but major in another? A composer can do that. Any idea, any feedback at all, you can give it to a composer you’ve hired. With pre-composed music, you’re most often stuck using the best fit. What music can give you 80% of what you want? 90%? Well, a composer can give you 100%, and often can give you things you never even knew you wanted. Maybe that electric guitar you wanted is used later, in a neat way, to reflect a change in another character. Maybe the chords you wanted to change are changed to a slightly less minor mode that works better than what you envisioned at first. A composer that you’ve hired can make changes that you want, depending on your agreed revisions. And a composer can actually take ideas you express and translate them with more understanding than a search term in a pre-composed music bank can. So, you ask, should I use pre-composed music in my projects or not? There are pros and cons to pre-composed music, for sure. But, I’d say no, you shouldn’t use pre-composed music. But if you do, use Kevin MacLeod. He writes the best stuff, it’s all free, and it’s licensed under Creative Commons Attribution, which will make things super easy for you. But as for paying for pre-composed music? If you have a small budget for music, I’d suggest just finding a new or student composer who’s willing to work cheaply. You’ll get better results, and both you and the composer could get valuable experience. I don’t know of stock-music you pay for that’s going to be better than anything Kevin MacLeod does. But, if the only problem is that you think you’ve got a small budget, why don’t you reach out anyway? The worst that can happen is a composer might say the project isn’t a great fit, or they’re busy. There’s no harm. And there are some things you can do to negotiate a lower price.
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Spoiler alert: It's me. I put the music in. I’m going to be blunt - If it's incidental music, I put the music in.
Period. A hardline stance, I know. I’ve turned down work over it, too. I feel pretty strongly about this. For non-incidental music, like, say, an opening and closing theme for a podcast? That's fine! I don't have any qualms about a creator placing them. Do you need me to export my stems to the dub stage for a final mix? Sure! No problem. But for the initial music placement on cinematic scorings? Music that follows scenes, characters, or ideas? It'll have to be me. This is not a typical stance to take, and you shouldn’t have much trouble finding composers who are willing to create custom music libraries for your film/podcast/game that will let you do all the placements. I’m just not one of them. I have a few reasons why. A composer is the right person for the job Something magical happens when a singer accompanies themselves on an instrument. Even if they hit a wrong note or two; even if their vowels go to a dipthong a little too soon; even if they breath too often and don’t go for a high note. Even with any number of cons, there’s a giant pro: A person accompanying themselves will always be playing at the right time. When there’s a second person accompanying, the singer must work hard and subtly change their interpretation sometimes, to communicate tempo changes to an accompanist. The accompanist, even if splendid, will not ever perfectly match a rubato to a singer like a singer could do for themselves if they’re playing simultaneously. There’s a musical synergy when you have one person responsible for multiple aspects of their performance. I believe the same is true in composing custom music. A composer will always be best positioned to place their music. A composer will be best positioned to come up with transitional phrases, or shortened measures, to ensure things time out perfectly. A composer will know when to change the ending of a loop to make it connect better to the beginning, without a reverb trail. A composer will be the best fit for any number of problems, because while somebody else might think of one solution, a composer can think of a hundred. There was a scene I was scoring that involved a climax on the final line a character said in the episode. And the notes I got back were “Make it louder. It’s not loud enough.” But then I made it loud, and you know what? You couldn’t hear the line. When placing music, you may think you can control volume and make things work. Sure. But what would you do in this situation? Because I had composed the music, I was able to change the meter for three bars, reference an earlier theme, and make it so the strong beats of the music came in between the character's lines. This is the strength of a composer. There’s always another solution, and sometimes, the solution someone thinks of first will be more limited than the options a composer can come up with. I am specifically the best fit for this work I have played and accompanied many singers and instrumentalists, timing things to their breath. I have timed out vamps in musical theatre to variable dialogue perfectly. I have extensive experience in making programmatic music line up and transition well in podcasts and film. I also have experience in middleware, and know how to incorporate music into a game intuitively, and add interactivity. This could be with vertical layering or horizontal resequencing, both of which can sound seamless… If I do it. It is possible that you’d have a splendid producer, or gamedev, who could do incredibly well with just a custom library of music. But every tool in their toolbox would be an engineer’s tool. It would not necessarily be a composer’s tool. Your audio engineer or mastering tech can fade something in or out. But can they cut the perfect three beats from the music so that it lines up and still sounds musically sensible? Your level design lead can increase the tempo of the music and pitch it up when something intense happens; but can they add in a layer of drums and a pulsing synth? I promise, that’s not easy. And it does make a difference. Having years of experience in relevant fields means that this isn’t just a job that a composer is uniquely qualified to do; this is a job that I am uniquely qualified to do. You could make me look bad This is a short reason, and isn’t terribly polite. But, there isn’t a single experience I’ve had where the incidental music left my hands and I didn’t place any of it that I thought “Wow, what a good job they did.” In projects where others placed the incidental music, it… Well... Let’s just say they didn’t make the demo reel. Because the work I do for projects is one of the biggest ways I can demonstrate my abilities to future clients, I can lose work if I’m credited as a composer on projects with poorly placed music and crummy transitions. It’s just not worth the risk for me, personally. This is what scoring is. There is a reason I do not write for stock libraries. There is a reason I do not make custom libraries and have people place the music themselves The reason is this: I don’t like writing “McMusic.” Generalized music that can be used by any production for any genre doesn’t appeal to me. I want to write music that is rooted in your story, and that furthers the goals of a specific scene or level or episode or franchise. I don’t want to write music that’s just general enough to be used ad nauseum. I don’t want to write a four chord track for a corporate start-up to use on their sales pitches as easily as a non-profit could use it to raise money for stray cats. I don’t want to give you a McSuspense track and a McHorror track. I want to give whatever specific creepy big bad you have in your podcast an aural identity. I want people to do a quick turn around the room if they ever hear something that sounds similar to the big bad sound because it’s so specific they can’t imagine it being something else. I want to write music that is as unique as the stories it's undergirding. I want to write music that positions your creative projects and your production company's brand intentionally and specifically. And, for me? That means placing it in the initial draft. I always take notes afterwards. People I work with are able to tell me to move a synth’s entrance earlier, or to fade out later, or to revamp a whole portion, or to move a musical passage somewhere else. And I can do it, and am happy to. I never refuse input from a creator. And, for a game soundtrack, if my usage of WWise or FMOD isn’t up to your standards? I’m completely open to your making changes to make the music better integrate with the gameplay experience you’re shooting for. If after the spotting session you need me to outsource MIDI to a separate orchestrator? That's fine. But the initial placement? The first draft? That has to be me, I’m afraid. This is what scoring is. At the very least? It’s what scoring is to me. And it’s the only kind of scoring I’m looking to do. |
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