Composing Moody Stock Music for YouTube

1. Intro: Stock music really is the bread and butter for most of us in the industry. It's a way to get your music out there and earning royalties so that it's earning its keep, so to speak. A lot of producers make a lot of music and get it out onto websites that host stock music, where Youtubers can browse and choose what they want and add it to their videos, and then they pay a royalty and then we get paid. So everyone's getting paid the Youtuber. Us everyone. There's also nothing more fun than stumbling across a Youtube video, watching it for a while, and then hearing yourself in it, and then being like, oh my god, you don't have to go the route of using stock music websites either. I know I like to work with Youtubers directly to get music to them that is specifically made for them. We're definitely going to talk about that as well. But today we're going to have a look at creating generic Moody stock music. Because moody Youtube videos are on the rise. When I say moody, I mean murder mystery, other types of mystery, conspiracy theory. Anything where there's a mystery to be solved, something's gone wrong, there's a problem. Or some of those movie recap, Youtube channels that explain the plots of movies or ones where they explain a Wikipedia page for a dark topic. There's a lot of useful application for dark and moody music. And since most stock music that's available right now is Happy Cheery Go Lucky Stock Music There's a bit of demand for more of the dark type and that's not too hard to make, really today. I'm going to run you through my process for creating creepier, more heavy, more moody music to be put within the context of stock music, underneath something else, underneath somebody talking, underneath something mysterious. I really love to make something of it heavy. And today that's what we're going to do. So to participate, I recommend you get a door installed. I'm going to be using Ableton Live 11. And really that's all you need. I'll show you a few plug ins that I like to use and you're welcome to use them too, and we will just make it. I'm Jordan, by the way. I'm a producer and composer from Australia and today is Moody Stock Music So please join in. We're going to have a blast. 2. Building a Chord Progression: Let's get started by moving over to the arrangement view. Okay, we need to begin with chords. Well, that's how I like to begin. Anyway, I'm going to use the Spitfire Origins intimate piano plug in. I like to start with piano. Usually I may change my mind away from piano. That's how I like to get started. I also like to begin with 8 bars, also something that sometimes changes. Now we get to do the fun thing at the start of composing anything, and that is choosing the key for stock. Music I really love to compose in a minor key. I like that minor keys are interesting, they create some intrigue, they make you wonder what's going to happen next. I don't know, Not so standard as a major key. I don't want to say needlessly optimistic, but it's the job of what's prominently on screen to be needlessly optimistic. I think it's our job to provide the question why, what is going on, which is something that a minor key can facilitate. I turned on the Scale button so that I can more easily see what notes are within the key that I want to compose within, let's say minor. That it's not random, but I love, I love, I love composing with an in almost every direction, minor has a mysterious feel while still having some body to it. Now from here we just put down some Ds. I'm going to drag out the chords for the length of the bar. Look how easy it is when I've got these colors here. I've got a great starting day busy without really thinking about it. Now I turn this on, this makes it so that as I'm drawing a chord, I can hear it. This icon, headphones. Okay, I'm going to press space and listen to what I've made. All right? Pretty standard. Listen, did you hear that sound at the end like that artificial piano Sound I think that's what you get for when you pay for the plug in little bells and whistles like that. See right at the end, that end of the piano note. Sound It's artificial, but it's nice. I dragged it up four spaces, 1234. I may not necessarily want this chord, but 1-4 makes me feel good. Usually from here I have the feeling that I want to go up one, and from there I'll probably want to go back down again. 123 to three. This note needs to go up so that I'm staying within the key. It's too far down and there's no reason why, and look, see, this needs to be moved. There's no reason why it needs to go up or needs to go down. Literally, just a feeling great. Now these are traditional chords, I'm going to make them seventh chords, which means just adding an extra layer on top. Three notes become four. I'm going to jump two spaces, becomes D, E, F, G. Of course, when I say two spaces, I mean two within the key. I'm not counting each individual note. I'm going two notes up. Only orange notes count. These gray notes don't count when I'm considering the jump. Hm. It's all right. Now, for some added depth, I'm going to the root of each here. I'm going to make another one, but an octave lower. This is three. I'm going to add two. This is a three. I'm going to add two. Exactly the same for each one. No, it's an for a second, I thought it was, I was like, what? G sharp. Can't be sharp. Okay, Let's hear that. All right, cool. That's our first four chords. I'll turn that off, that's a pretty ying over here. I'm going to just edit them a little bit. It's like, well, within different methods of making music, there are different ways of doing it. I'm really into the whole question and answer style. The first 4 bars ask the question, the bars answer the question. Here we posit a question, over here we answer it. I'd like to take the second a little bit in response to us having asked the question, then this one stays the same, and this one is like the final point. I'm going to keep it the same. But then literally just invert the D, this is a C four. Drag it down to an equivalent that's lower. This is an E four. Just pull that down to an E three. This is a, I'll make this a three. Literally it's the same but inverted. It's just going to sound a bit more complicated while still being the same. Once again, it's a, it's a thing that's done, let's just say it's a bit of a classic thing to do when finishing up asking that question. And the fourth part leads into the first part of the answer. And then the fourth part of that is the same as eight, is the same as number four, but just expressed differently. Okay. I thought that this part was a little too high. It was too much of a jump. I thought that this could have been higher. Maybe I liked that one actually. No, Maybe we can bring that down so that it's closer to the resolution. Maybe that would be better. Can't forget about those Bates notes. They need to change to that one's wrong as hell. I have changed my mind. I'm going to bring across that original and invert this one too. That's a, we've got a, let's drag that down to become C. And there we go. We're getting more complex all the time. And it was an idea and it fell on its face. Let's strike that one back up. It's still inverted. Is that inverted? No. The last one, inverting that final chord, usually does sound quite nice, but in this case it doesn't drag that on to the key. That would actually be lovely were this to be something for horror. How scary was that just then? That kind of like was freaky M maybe? What was this originally? Let's bring that lower. Yeah, Like it is in the beginning. It's a little too final, if that makes sense. It sounds like it's over, like the song is finished. The trouble with that is we don't want that, We want the song feeling there's more to be said. That's a lot better be cause it's, it continues the question that was sounded better before, it's wrong and also right. So I'm going to keep it. Okay. So now we have like a vanilla set up. Now we just need to make it so that it's not so pele like that. Maybe half. Maybe not, maybe quarter and then shoulder again. Maybe longer. Aan maybe irregular. Drag that one out. Hmm, Maybe maybe I just do that. Let's see how that sounds. Sounds quite nice. Mm. I just deleted it without checking what the heck it was. Hm, I don't know. I dont, do I want that to be the exact same, Literally, this point of the process is just just keep drinking, and clicking, and dragging, and playing, and thinking, and getting a feeling, oh, the bass note, I was like, what? You can't fight me, You can't do what. You can't do your own thing when I have commanded you to do something else. Al right, that'll do a strange pattern. I'll replicate that over on the right hand side. We'll keep, but we may have to change it later. If we add a drum beat and it fights the chord syncopightynopation, we may have to change it, but for now we'll keep it. The drum is the king of syncopation. We don't want to do anything that fights with that. We have this. For now, it's a good place to start. Let's build on this. 3. Adding Bass Lines & Synthesis: One thing you want to make sure that you've done is not trapped yourself into the interesting chord progression without having the vanilla version always ready to go, already made unaffected, just sitting there just in case. I have the feeling that a chord progression that moves in unexpected ways like this, not only may not even be useful at all, but it may not be useful for the entire track. We may want to start or end the track with the vanilla version or even just a jazz version that's just a bit less jazzy or jazzy in a different way. Make sure you have it like this unchanged, ready. Just in case I'm going to pull the interesting one to the site. Keep the vanilla one there at the start. I don't really know. It's just maybe from here we want to make the baseline. Now the baseline can be achieved in a few different, easy ways. I want a regular baseline and then I want a deeper baseline. There's a few ways of doing this. I could have just this lower note, or I can have both lower notes. They're both the root note of the E two and E three. Do I want both? Maybe, but I want to keep my options. Maybe I will delete the higher. I don't know. I'm going to just give it a try. I've got my originals over here for this. I'm going to try out my original cinematic pads. I'm going to increase the reverb on them like this. Maybe I'll decrease the attack so that they're not hitting so strong right away. Increase the cinematic. Let's see how that sounds. To lower the volume over here, not bad. Let's see how that sounds with the interesting chords. One thing I know for sure is I want to put that attack back. I don't know, It just sounds like it's out of time, has some distortion. Alright. Quite cool. Quite cool. We don't need this audio track. Well we may need them later so I'm not going to get rid of them completely. But we'll add another miti track, put another baseline down. Why did I make a new one? I'm just going to copy it. Let's put in serum. Serum is amazing tool for you to synthesize your own music with. I love it. I can't speak highly enough of it. This is a paid plug in. It is more expensive than the Origins which we've just been working with, but the possibilities are literally endless. Synthesizer is a tool with which you make music from scratch. You make your own sounds, which is useful in so many different contexts. I'm going to get serum in on this. I'm going to add a sub level, let's just see how it sounds. Just vanilla. Oh my God, doesn't it just destroy your ears? I'm going to add some unison and I'm going to detune it. It just means more voices. See, oh my God, it's way too loud. Still way too loud. O add a second oscillator. Well, that's quite funky. Pitching it. Oh, maybe I'll add it that way. What was it? I'm going to put this on repeat while I play with my synthesizer. If you are curious about using a synthesizer in particular, by the way, I just highlighted those 8 bars and I pressed this button, which is going to keep them playing on a loop. If you're curious about the synthesizer, I have a skill share class just for the synthesizer, go check it out. Literally just turn it back out. You've been at a filter, Filter's not much good in this case. Maybe I want to change the shape I might want to use to filter in a gradual way. All right, there you go. That's pretty interesting. Notice when I was playing there, how much you can really do with a synthesizer, honestly. You can see people creating sounds that are just unlike anything that's ever existed. Is just absolutely unbelievable because it's completely original made by you. All right, So that's a pretty good baseline. I want one more baseline, a deeper one, which I'm going to use serum four as well. We're just going to use the lowest of the low. I'm going to take these and I'm going to make them even lower. I'm going to put serum onto it, add the sub level, see how that sounds? Maybe lower. Oh gosh. I'm going to change the shape of the sound. That's hey, sounds like a proper base now, getting transfixed by this. Quite, quite nice. Alright? We need ourselves a melody, that's for sure. Let's get started on that. 4. The "Chop Method" For Melody Construction: Now reach the melody portion of the day. Let's create ourselves a new Midi track using our chord progression. We'll do the chopping up method. If you've taken any of my other skillshare classes, you'll know my method for melody creation, which is just to take the chord progression, chop it up, indiscriminately deleting notes, dragging notes, making them longer, making them shorter. It's totally a luck situation. What melody we end up with is anyone's guess. Obviously, I'm not going to create these and then be stuck with what I've made. I have to actually like it, but this is how I do it. I am, I'm struck by a melody in the shower person. I won't say that's never happened. Like, let's be honest, we've all been struck with melodies in the shower. I actually find that this method comes up with pretty much always better melodies that I'm able to come up with at the shower. I can't say. I've never been struck by melodic inspiration, but I will say is it is a lot less reliable than this method. All right, let's just see what we have so far. Wait, no instrument. I'm going to press these yellow boxes to turn off the bass lines. For now, they are not going to be helpful. No instrument is on there. What are you doing? Put a piano down, just like that. Let's see, So that's no good. Um, I want shorter notes. I like that. I don't like that long start. I actually do that. I do that a little bit too often for my liking. I'm gonna change that. Let's see now that notes a little bit too short. I kind of have the short notes and then more short notes. Oh, that was a bit too rough. Let's make some more short shorties at the beginning. I actually love this and I love this, but I kind of both. I'll move these. I may have to lose them, but I like that stepping. Sound Keep moving them. Come on, let me keep them. Oh gods of music. Let me keep everything that I like. Who was it that said creation is like killing your babies? I don't know if someone said that. I think I should copy this across. But higher, come on. Oh, my babies do. Alright, cool. Kind of. We're asking, we're answering questions. Let's lengthen that one and then have it go into the next bar and be longer. Not mysterious enough. Still not mysterious enough. We need a certain are, there's a note that would posit a stronger question. Which one? That's quite good on 4 bars. That's a question asked. Now, a question needs to be answered in the second 4 bars. Let's. All right. All right, Cook. Cook, See it's kind of the same, but it's varying up where change ended up. We're in the answer portion now. It reflects what was asked without being the same. Let's copy this across, but make it lower. The trouble with this melody is it's a little overcomplicated, I think doesn't fit. Oh, it's close to fitting. I tried to leave that outside the key just to see if it would work, but it doesn't. It sometimes does. People are right when they say that you can compose outside of the key, especially melodies. That is true, everyone's done it, it's hard to pull off really smart people can do it really well. I feel very uncomfortable doing it the majority of the time, especially for our purpose stock music which is going to be used in the background of something. Oh, there's nothing that's going to pull attention more than composing outside the key. Let's stay within the confines of the key until the day in which we become center stage, which we are not in this circumstance. All right, I'm trying to simplify it. Now we're in the background, we need a simple melody. I just cut away those. Maybe these establishing notes don't need to be there. It's alright, but it's way too fast. Let's lower that speed down, maybe one oh five. It depressing al right? We have some bones here, we have some bones here, We can chop and change this. Let's put the base back in. See how it sounds. Man, that's distracting. Let's put that interesting call progression in there and see how it's at the, oops. So I just chop it up like this, right? Not bad. Except that either the melody needs to not be a piano or the progression needs to not be a piano. Which is fine. I can soften that up with something else. Maybe they both need to change. I don't know. But I think right now what we have are all of the components that we need. Now it's about literally just arranging it all together. It up, giving it some structure, and then we've got a T. Let's do that now. 5. Arranging Everything We've Made: Let's begin arrangement with, I don't know, with serum it might be a good place to start just on its own. Let's drag everything across. We're making the sandwich now. Let's turn everything back on so that when it comes in we can hear it. It's too quiet when it's on its own. So we can have it a four volume now and then have it lower later. All right, maybe we chop up this one. Let's split it. Or we could do command E. Let's split it and have it join in halfway through. Good, let's have it repeat with the full version. And you know what, I used a cinematics drum sample last week for our beginner's class. And it's still on my desktop. Let's drag that bad boy in. I'll put it here and down in the audio section. Turn that on. Nice and quiet. If you haven't checked out Sematics yet, gosh, they have so much good free stuff. Let's add another layer once again in the second half. And then we'll put in our regular no, we'll put in our jazzy chord progression here. Should it be piano, We'll see. All right, so see we're building up. We're building up, this is how we do it. We're adding layers to our sandwich. Okay. No, at least not how it is now. Maybe with some reverb. My favorite brass brass blast, sorry. Nope. Too weak hold act. Oh no. Oh my God, terrible. You don't have to use presets like this. I just like to. All right. You know what, I'm not digging piano. What can we use? Oh, should we try? Serum can't hurt two oscillators again. Let's see what shape Maybe the acid and then the second one, maybe this one. We're going to need a lot. We're going to need tune it out. And then the second one also a lot. Maybe tune a little bit out. Definitely going to need a little bit of filter on there. Okay, Turn it down. Let's see. Goodness gracious, I need to put that Jesus Christ. We need to have it repeat. Goodness gracious, never really notice you do it, I guess. All right, from there, we bring in the melody with everything else. Let's see how that sounds. I like it but so quiet. Let's get a little bit of once again, I'm going to try brass first, right? It's good. But everything else needs to shut the heck up. So let's get some volume automation on them. So basically these need to be as loud as they are until now. We need them to turn down by themselves, that's just automation. We're going to touch the audio so that the Ableton knows what I want to automate. And then I'm going to press just the letter A on my keyboard. Bam, now we've opened up automation and it's on track volume. I'm just going to click to create a marker. Click again to create another one. D, oops, are created too many and get that volume down. All right. Let's see how that goes. Let's get this one down as well. Mix there. Ah, track volume. Goodness gracious. There we go. Webs this one hop too far, a lost on two lifeless ones that goes down too far. Good. Still needs something though. I think it's 'cause I turned everything down too far. I just have it go back up again. Look at everything jumping up like that. Gosh, don't do that. Oh, I turned it off. Why? I was so confused. I was automating the speaker off instead of the volume. That's why I was so confused. This is really important. I got to make sure this is more prominent. Alright, Keep making new dots. No, I need that need. That got to be careful with automation. Goodness gracious, don't be sloppy. All right, once that repeats, we need the melody on its own. We need kind of a breath. Is that the vanilla chords or the fancy chords? Now it's vanilla. Okay, we're cool. We're going to keep vanilla. Get out of my way. We're going to have just the melody on its own with some vanilla cords. We're going to delete the middle parts this way, don't actually know if it's a major or minor key. We need a bit of extra mystery. Once we get to this part of the song, we're going to take away what distinguishes these makes them their own. I don't really have a good answer as to why, except that it's going to just, I don't know, add some extra mystery. By this point in the song, questions have been answered. We know what's going on. We have a good feeling as to exactly what's going to happen next. The audience is too comfortable. We need to add some more mystery back. Maybe that last we have it be silent and have the melody finished on its own, and then we bring it back in. Oh, no. All right. Good idea, but not in reality. A good idea in my mind. A bad idea. In reality, maybe we taper it out volume wise. I'm happy with that. Then we come back in with the drum with the melody. The come back you are actually needed. Don't tape it down this time. Don't repeat what I did before please Mr. Cords. You don't have to have 5,000 dots like this. It sounds it's a nightmare in the mastering process to have 80,000 dots. Don't do this needs the baseline as well. I do the 80,000 dots in the creative process just so that I don't lose my train of thought so that I'm not, I don't know, distracting myself from what I'm thinking right now, but good, God, it makes later harder. If you're ready to upload, you got to clean that up. It's a mess. No. All right. Now, now we come back with a key change. How? I don't know. That's how we come back. Let's key change it up. Okay, let's do a ridiculous jump and make it to minus. There we go. Let's try that minus to minus. It's a silly jump, I don't know. We'll see how it feels. We'll see how it feels. The great thing about a jump like this is that the audience is going to feel it, but not too much. I don't see them questioning it too much. I don't see it distracting too much from the main message of what they're experiencing. Beside our music, we don't want to key change, we don't want modulation to total from what's going on. All right, did you hear that? It's humongous but, well, let's get these bad boys in on the party. I don't know, A key change adds more life into a track like this at the right time can be invigorating, especially after we've just done the taper off technique where there's a thought that what did I just do? I just dragged half of them. Goodness gracious. There's a thought that music has an ebb and flow and a shelf life where it loses its impact over time, especially with a recurring melody like this. We needed to taper out, take a breath, take a rest, then come back with new life. Considering we're not adding speed, we're not adding anything fast, we're not adding any extra excitement. Otherwise a key change modulation can do that here. I would just finish off with a little version of the melody. Maybe just that last part, just like this, just added to the end. Oh, maybe some chords as well. Extra help. Oh my gosh. The more I don't include, the more I miss what is missing. Not that one. Okay. It's a little empty. After the key change the key. The job is to provide life in itself. It's not providing enough for me. Let's, this has been a very serum heavy day. Much more than I expected. Let's get a certain sound, a hard one and a soft one. Maybe this will be our soft, tune it out. Filter. It possibly get that volume down. Oh my God, Contact needs a filter. All right, that's a good start. The song it needs, I don't know, it's very background, Let's just say it could use a little bit more, I don't know, some more effects. It could use some more effects. But that's the structure. That's the structure that we want. 6. Final Plugins & Structure Review: Finish up, let's look at some plug ins that we can add to just add a little bit of variety in the way that the chords and things can sound with just some audio mess. Rift is a favorite of mine for that by me, I mean, we can add some unpredictability to the weight of the chords Sound and jazz it up. Let's try this one, you can hear it's adding some nonsense to the sound which can vary it up already. It's added a bit of excitement. I don't think it's going to distract too much away from the main message of the video, the mysterious Youtube video that's going to use it, but it just, I don't know, It just adds a bit of body and dimension to it. See, I wouldn't add anything to that. I want to start nice and clean. Yeah. Someone can easily talk over this, you know. They never knew where she was until her body washed up on the river bank. I don't know. That's the kind of Bible I'm getting from this. You can of course, change the pattern of this T so that it sounds, see how it's making. It's making like an almost a rhythmic bees. You can vary that. Up right here, we've reached the level of energy that a song can sustain by this point without taking a rest. We're in the rest period now, which we'll slowly build back up on. Also, this is a great opportunity for a tuber to chop this section out. They could start the track right there if they wanted. Or they could time this quiet period for a quiet period in their talking where they need something like that. Then it's going to change. Youtuber could keep that. Chop that out or just so interesting how just one plug in. That kind of the whole job of the plug in is to just mess up the sound. One plug in pops one plug in, which it changed it quite a lot, but it added a lot of body. I'm a lot happier with it than I was without it. The song ends there. It's just shy of 2.5 minutes long, quite short. What I could do is submit it as is, or to increase the length, I could change the melody from here. I could do an ABA structure where this whole part is A. The key change signals the beginning of B, and I change up the melody and extend it. Then I repeat A again, but in of course, the new key over here, that would lengthen the song to 5 minutes or so. That's one option, ABA structure, fleshing out the B, which is the new key, and then repeating the A, which would give me a longer length. Or my second option is I could literally just add another quiet period here. And then after the quiet period, continue it, which would be like ABA as well. But without changing the melody, I could have an A melody. A melody and then repeat the A melody. Or I could have a part which is just this first key part, which is the second key. And then an A part, which is the first key, repeated in the second key. The first part repeated in the second key, which wouldn't require a second melody. They're almost the same three parts with a new melody or without. Then that would probably, the second option would lengthen it even up to 6 minutes. Yeah, you could just keep repeating it. Repeating it, which is of course the value of music like this. It can be as long as you like or as short as you like. A lot of people may use my music 10 seconds in their video because they just chop out one little bit like that. It works in that way. It's designed for that. All right, we are done. We did it. Let's wrap it up. 7. The End of our Moody Journey: And that is it. We did it. I hope that you had a good time. I hope that it was easy enough to follow. If you have any questions, please do, let me know. Stock music is something where the guys who are making a lot of money on it have hundreds and hundreds of options out on websites for Youtubers to choose from. So I highly recommend, if this is the type of thing you want to get into, I recommend that you get going and you make a lot of a lot of tracks, don't think too much about it. Apply the process over and over and over again. If you're just beginning app, you can apply my process or a variation of my process right away and start making tracks until you figure out your own process. It's quite, it just happens over time naturally. The important thing is, is that you're making music, it's the fastest way to learn. It's the most efficient way. And it's going to result in tracks that you can get out there online and you can start earning royalties from. Thank you so much for coming today. If you have the time, please do leave a review. I would really appreciate it a lot. I also have other skillshare classes, so if you want to see more of my technique in applied in different ways, I have quite a few class options. If you're not sure about music theory, I have a music theory class, so there's lots to learn. Once again, thank you so much for joining me. I hope you had a good time. I hope that you apply technique to make a lot more stock music, earn royalties and get money flowing your way to fund more of your music production endeavors. Please do let me know how your techniques go, how you end up making something. We have a project part of the page that you can post your project to, and I would love to hear it once again. Thank you so much for joining me, and I hope to see you back here on Skillshare real soon back.