Film Scoring - Part 2 - Techniques For The Modern Composer

1. 1 Intro: - way ? No. So we can make layers of it Can kind of fill out the sound. That's what a pad does. Now pads work really well with orchestra. Check this out. Um, ignore the movie for a minute. I'm just gonna throw them. Okay, Now, let's see if we can take this part here and turn it into Ah, more poly rhythmic. And what? I'm working on a scene like this. I'm gonna start with a drumbeat if it makes sense for it to be in there, You know, if I'm working on something like, ah, that that project that was off required that I'm not going to do here is we could do one of these matrix like things. Watch this boom. Let's go up 1/5. Two D. This is like a total of matrix riff I'm gonna do right here than 1/2 step than 1/5. They like that going bone, bone, bone bum. Fifth half, step fifth. Hey, everyone, welcome to my film scoring class. This is a class that's been kind of in progress for a really long time. I had a lot of requests to do this kind of a class for a while, and I just didn't know how to do it perfectly where I was going to be really happy with it . But after a lot of research and looking around at what's on the Internet already and other people that are making classes, I decided Teoh dive in and do it because I really wanted to make a class that was focused on composition techniques in film scoring and less about the technical side of things. You can find other classes, and I might even make one eventually on, like how to set up your software, how to get sample libraries, all the technical end of it. But what I really wanted to do is focus on this is how you write music to go along with film. We will talk a little bit about the technical side of it because we have to. But the majority of this class is about writing music for film, working with film and developing a career as a film composer. I'm gonna show you throughout this class a bunch of my projects that I've done a bunch accuse I've written for different films, different film projects. I've worked on some television stuff, some other things. And during this class, we're going to write our own film soundtrack. And I'm gonna show you how you confined films that need music in them that you can use right away to build is a portfolio. So I hope you decided. Take this class with us. I had a ton of fun making it. It turned into this huge class bigger than any other class of ever made. We cover tons of stuff, really proud of it. I'm really excited about everything that's in this class. And I think it's the best class I've ever made. I know. I say that every time I make one of these, but this one for really the best class I've ever made really excited. I hope you decide to jump in and take the class with me. So we'll see you on the inside. 2. 2 Tools: okay, We're gonna dive into part two. So let's get up to speed by first talking about the tools that we're gonna be using in this class. Now, if you took part one, which most of you probably did, um, if you then you'll be familiar with the tools that I'm gonna talk about. Although I'm gonna talk about a few more tools this time because we're a little bit more advanced. So let's talk about some other things you can use. If, ah, you didn't take part one highly recommend to do it because I'm gonna pick right up where we left off after these couple little intro things. So please take part one. Ah, this class will make a lot more sense if you take part one. Um, Okay, so let's talk about tools. The primary tool I'm gonna be using in this class is able to live. That's this program. Let's minimize this window. This is an audio sequencer, um, and midi sequencer. So we can put audio and midi stuff in like this to put together our track. We could also use notation editor like new score. Um, now, here's the thing about mu score. So This is a more traditional notation editor. We can see that here, um, so we can work in notes. The thing about Mu score, though, is that I don't believe there's away or I haven't found a way to sink a movie in Mu score yet. Like, you can't open a movie I've looked through. Ah, the forums on you score and it looks like it's ah popular feature request. What? It's not one that is currently available at the time of this filming. And so and I'm on Muse Score version two point. 0.3. So if we're at a much higher version of that, then you can, um, see if it's possible in your music or depending on when you're watching this. But right now it's not. So, um, you score can be good for looking at the notes of your project, but not great for actually working on your project because you can't import the film. Um, that's gonna be a little bit tricky. Your other options, if you want to work on notes, are finale finale works. The same is mu score in that you're looking at notes and working with notes so you can adjust notes and things like that, but you can import a film into finale and work that way. Now. I've worked on a project that I did in finale once, Um, and it was a headache. I have to say it was a major headache because the film would keep falling out of sync from the score. Um, meaning that if I hit play from the beginning Ah, the movie would start at the beginning, the score would start at the beginning. It was fine, but if I was half hour in and I hit, play on, you know, bar 43 or whatever. The film would sometimes start in the right spot, but sometimes start in a different spot. And it was pretty random where it started phenomenally frustrating. So every time I had Teoh check to see how my singles lining up, I had to start the thing from the beginning. A two hour long movie had to do it from the beginning every time anyway, so I would not recommend finale if you're going to be working in traditional notes. Sebelius is another program that is a decent alternative. I haven't worked on a film in Sebelius but I assume they've got it figured out. And there's a new kid on the block, a new notation editor called Dori Co. But I just got Haven't played around with it too much yet. Um, this is brand new program notation editor from Steinberg. So Dorko is really new, but it's got a lot of potential. Hopefully, it matures a little bit and becomes a really powerful program. Um, but so I'm not gonna work primarily in notation, just like in the first class. I'm gonna work Ah, in a Bolton. And then I'll move some stuff over notations that we can see the notes and ah, what I've done there. But sometimes it's easier just to work in audio sequencer for a project like this since I'm mostly working in kind of loop based things, which I'll talk about more in a second. Okay, um, that's kind of it for tools. Those are the main tools were using. I'm also using an orchestra sample library. Um, not a fantastic woman. I hear a lot of young composers talking about They're orchestral sample libraries, you know, in getting the the most the biggest, most expensive ones. And I don't know I should probably by one, but I disused the the able 10 or Castro library. It works. Fine. Doesn't sound the most amazing, but it doesn't sound bad, so I use that, um but you can also I mean, one of the really popular ones is East West is a company that makes ah, orchestra library that a lot of people like the l A films. What is it called l a scoring strings or something like that? The L. A. Philharmonic, I think, made it is another library that a lot of people like these. They're really expensive. But you can buy them if you want, um, and set them up on your computer, make your orchestra samples sound a little bit better. Um, okay, that's it for Jules. 3. 3 OneOfMyProfessionalProjects: okay. In the first class in the film, scoring one class, I showed you a documentary that had recently done. Um, I thought I'd show you something different this time. Um, this is a film that I worked on a couple of years ago, and it was a really interesting project because it brought with it a couple challenges in one hugely unique challenge. And that was that. The director. Okay, so, first of all, you know, they gave me the script. They said they wanted me to do it, and I read the script was really interesting. Really? Like the movie a lot. And then And so you know, I started to kind of think about ideas for different like sounds we could use in it. Um, I could do an electronic thing, or I could do some acoustic instruments and, you know, it's kind of bumping things around in my head. And then I had a meeting with the director and he said, Nope. I know exactly what I want for music in this, and it's all choir. I want a choir to be all of the music, and I thought that is the craziest thing I've ever heard. Um, And then I So I said, What do I do for words? Cause choirs need to sing words. And then and we kind of talked it over for a while and we decided that they wouldn't use words. It would be a choir singing without any words. Just vowel sounds, just oohs and aahs and stuff like that. So now I'm like, Great. I got a you know, after I two hours of music for a choir with no words, that'll be fun. Um, but it ended up being really fun. We hired a fantastic choir to sing the music. Um, and it's not really well, I was really happy with it. Ah, this that I'm gonna play for you. Here is the very beginning. This is the opening credits. Um, and unfortunately, I can't play for you. The movie. I know it's stupid, but I can't play for you the movie because I couldn't get ahold of the production company in time to ask him if I could use it in this ah, class. There's lots of contracts. You have to sign about what you conduce A with the films and especially the pre edit films like the not final release films, Um, there really protected. Well, in fact, all of them have, like, my name in, um um So, like, on the screen, it's as copy of J. Allen on the screen, because if it gets leaked than everyone knows who it came from. So I can't actually play you that footage, which is a bummer, but I can play you the audio, and this is actually the audio from the studio session. So this is for an octet of men singing. This is all male choir right now, and, ah, these air, you know, each of their individual voices. This is the opening credits. So what I asked him to do here is this is a very slow and somber opening is very sad movie . Um, So what happens is there's all this kind of text floating around in this very kind of sad ah, slow moving way. And then it kind of gets more intense right at the end. And then at the end, it cuts off really, really, really abruptly. It's just like snap and this guy kind of wakes up. So it needed Teoh have this very slow build to this end, and in this very abrupt end. So what I asked these singers to do here was kind of fun is to sing with Ah, their mouth closed toe hum, Basically. So all of this opening stuff there humming and then right about here, they slowly start to open their mouth. So on an ah sound, they go ma and slowly open their mouth and had a really cool effect for this crescendo here . And then they just kind of get louder and louder on that cord until here. Ah, and then it just cuts off very, very abruptly. So this is all very quiet. So, um, turn up your speakers. Good allowed. Put on headphones. Um and ah, let's hear it. Way, - way . 4. 4 ANoteAboutTheCompositionExamples: okay, Like I told you. Ah, before in the first class. I just want to point out that when we're working on this project throughout this class, I'm gonna be working on this devil sleep movie. Um, I'm just gonna be continuing it from what we built on in the first class. Maybe at the end, I'll put the whole thing together, Um, and give it to you to download or something. Maybe this session I don't know. We'll see how it turns out. But, um just a word of caution that for each que that I'm working on what I'm really doing is focusing on a specific technique and, um, not obsessing over the details like I should be for each Q. So I'm kind of going through and fast and trying to talk out loud while I'm doing it. So don't hold it against me that this isn't my most brilliant work. Um, but I'm trying to put in ah, thought to each technique that we're working with, so keep that in mind. Ah, in other words, some of these cues they're kind of kind of corny, but, um, they work for the purposes of demonstration. Okay. With that Let's dive back into the the meat and potatoes of our content and move on to the next section. 5. 5 WhatIsAtmosphere: now, that example I played for you of, um, the project of mine. Ah, couple of videos ago with the choir is a good introduction to our first big topic of, uh, part two of this class to what we're gonna dive into right now. And that is atmosphere now. Atmosphere is something that we work with for a particular kind of Q. You can do it in a lot more spaces than you would expect. But what we're talking about here is a que in which you you really want to stay out of the way of a lot of stuff happening. Um, typically when we talk about atmosphere, we're talking about a subdued feeling, something very spacious, something very open. I guess we could think of atmosphere in terms of of, ah, really chaotic scene. Also, we could think of it in a lot of different context. But primarily what we're talking about when we say we want atmosphere here is, um, something very slow, something subdued and something kind of passive. Um, we use a lot of different sounds for this. The orchestra works well for this kind of atmospheric sense. Um, if we're working with electronic elements. Something called a pad works really well to talk about all that stuff in just a minute. I think of atmosphere a lot if you see a scene in which were kind of there's like a panning meaning, like the camera is like moving across, Um Ah, sunset, Um, an outdoor scene Like what we're seeing here on the screen now, um, planets, you know, like, four out in space. And we see planets, you know, and we're just kind of kind of perceived The vastness of this, this space Ah, nature. But for me, nature is as a little bit different. But that can work too. Um, water, something huge. I think I like atmospheres when we're looking at something huge, like like the earth or a big landscape, or like the ocean. Um, because you can't write something that is big enough to symbolize that. So instead you go with small in quiet, you know, you imagine what the sound is in that space. So it's a little hard to explain. So let's look at some examples. I have two examples for you here. One something kind of intense and atmospheric, and some and another one that's just kind of happy in its own kind of sad way. Hard to explain. This is a tough to explain concept, which is why we're gonna look at some some cues here. Okay, so let's break to a new film and then we'll talk about some examples. 6. 6 ExampleDistrict9: Okay. What we're going to see here is the main title from Ah, the scifi movie District nine. Ah, this was composed by Clinton Shorter. Ah, and what we hear here is really interesting. We're going to hear Cem orchestra sounds some pad sounds and a pad is just a synthesizer without any real attacks to it. Very slow moving a lot like an orchestra. Um, so a lot of slow moving sounds a lot of slow moving cords, and then we're going to hear this singer over top of it. And the singer ah is going to be singing in multiple languages. The words were not really supposed to get. I don't think, um, it's really just the melody. And one of the key factors here in this kind of atmospheric thing is that you either don't get a melody a lot of the time or you get one single melody really isolated without a counter melody without harmony in it. It's not harmonised itself in any way. Um, it really kind of stands on its own. So that's what we get in this one. So let's watch it way. - Okay . I'm gonna pull it out there because it kind of slowly moves here into this opening sequence from the main title. So, um, I'm primarily concerned with the beginning part right of this Q. Just kind of its own cue on its own. So what we heard is slow moving orchestra and that singer, you know, And when I heard it this time, I don't even know if I would call that singer a melody. Necessarily. It really serves to kind of set us in a certain place in a certain time. Um, but it's not like something you would walk away humming, right? Um, we couldn't whistle that melody, but it does serve an important purpose. And I would say that purposes primarily atmospheric, but it's a really beautiful, uh sequence. Um, I and and you can hear it the end there. We started to transition into a more rhythmic section by adding an ostinato right, um, and ostinato came in Ah, and then we added some percussion. We kind of built on it from there, but we still even in that section had this really slow moving string section. Okay, let's look at another one. Another example of this, that's that's very different. Um, still, it kind of serves the atmospheric sense, but, um has a kind of happier sound in a way 7. 7 Example FindingNemo: Okay, let's hear a very different kind of example now from Finding Nemo. Ah, this is by Thomas Newman, A Z, the composer Newman We know for writing all kinds of stuff. Really. Song based stuff is probably his best known work. Um, this isn't that this is a much more ah atmospheric kind of peace. And what he's doing here is he's got this kind of slow moving strings, background pad kind of thing and a piano part that got you know, I I really want to say the piano partisan noodle e like he's just kind of noodling around. Um, he's not. He's outlining a core progression and playing. Ah, very methodical, but we're really kind of just playing around in a major scale. Um, maybe you might call it actually the relative minor at some cases, cause it gets kind of a minor sound. But there's no distinct melody that comes out in this lets us here. And so you might say there was a hair of a melody. They're creeping out in the strings, but we really only heard at one time it wasn't, You know, this kind of repeating melody that we would want in our head and walk away whistling. We might walk away whistling that, actually, because it was very memorable, as Newman's melodies usually are. But it was really just presented once. It was kind of a fleeting melody, really. The piano didn't have any repeating ideas to it. It was just very kind of atmospheric, right? That's what we're looking for here. And that's what we're talking about. Okay, so I've been using this word pad a lot. So let's go to a new film or a new time. My head is stuck in film, a new video here and let's talk about what exactly that means, and they will try to work with one. 8. 8 PadSoundsAndTheOrchestra: Okay, let's talk about the pad and how that relates to the orchestra. So, you know Ah, I'm back in a built in here, and we're gonna get a little technical for a minute. Here. Um, I have a whole separate class on synthesis in which we talk about pads a lot. A pad is a word that we use for a type of sound. It's not a type of synthesis, necessarily. It's type of sound. Um, So I'm gonna go here to just some presets, and if I open so this without going into great detail about how able to live this program works. This analog is the name of a synthesizer here. Um, so in it, I've got all these presets for bass sounds, brass sounds, effects, guitar sounds and pad sounds. Let's open those up. And let's listen to some of these. Some of these are energetic. Some of them have a lot of, uh, great to him. Uh, let's use ah, like that one. Load up that one. Play with it for a little bit. So what we like in a pad is something without a lot of attack to it. Meaning when I pressed the keys down the sound slowly phasing. When I lift Mike fingers off the keys, the sounds slowly fades out. So I'm lifting my fingers off the keys right now. Right? So the sound fades away, fades and fades out. Um, no. While it's building up, it can't have some grit to it. Uh, but it's very layered, like that s so we can make layers of it. It can kind of fill out the sound. That's what a pad does. Now pads work really well with orchestra. Check this out. Um, ignore the movie for a minute. I'm just gonna throw the movie off the screen. Um and I'm just gonna make a little section of pad here. Well, Kerrigan, get up here. The payment. Good luck. Care life. Okay. Oh, really? Not yet. He's got a firecracker. If you ask me, we better stay away. You okay? So we mute the audio for the movie because we're getting into that. So here's the pad that I just made. Okay. Now I can blend that with an orchestra. Really? Well, so I want my llegado orchestra. That's tremolo. There's my llegado orchestra way up there. It's going to copy this onto that. And then what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna take my volume and turn it all the way down. I'm gonna fade it up. Not that loud, but and faded up. Now, I'm just gonna take these, um, notes, stretch him out to fill. So there's no empty gaps there. Same notes in the same places. And now I'm gonna take the volume for this one. I'm going to slowly pull it down. Oops. Starting right about there. So now what we're gonna hear, we're gonna hear all the pad, and then the volume is gonna go away. And here we're gonna hear all the orchestra, and it is going too slowly, or we're gonna hear no orchestra and is going to slowly come in. So at the end, we're going on Lee here. Orchestra. Okay, so this is going to demonstrate how well these two things blend together, so let's hear it. Okay, let's make that even a little more dramatic. Where we have for most of it, we have both orchestra and pad to the shape of those sounds are roughly the same. Where when you have a big string ensemble, you don't have these really harsh attacks. You can. But you typically don't in this context, especially not if we're using llegado strength. Right, because llegado means kind of slow. Um so the shape of the sounds, what we would call in a synthesis world is the envelope of the sound is more or less the same. So these come blend really well. So we like to use pads and orchestra at the same time. They can serve a similar purpose. Uh, and they can combine to make a really interesting sound together. So if we're doing something completely Elektronik, we would use a pad sound for using. If we're doing something completely acoustic, we could use the orchestra. If we have the option of both, we can get really interesting and blend the two together. Now, this is just one pad sound. I could use a whole bunch of other things here like, let's try that one. Why not? Right. Let's get weird with it. And I'm gonna fill in these gaps here too. Let's try that. Let's see what happens, you know, have us a little bit too intensive a pad. Ah, with all that motion in there. But I really liked how it faded away and just kind of left this strings behind. It's a really cool effect, Um, so it sounds like the sound is leaving. But there's this kind of echo of the acoustic strings still there. That's what a pad is and how you can blend it with strings to do something really interesting. 9. 9 UsingModesForAtmosphere: one other thing that is really useful for this kind of atmospheric sound is drawing from modes. So if you took my theory classes, you know all about modes. Ah, if you didn't jump over to those classes and review modes because, um, they're gonna be really useful to you in this class, um, in any kind of film court scoring, let me get rid of my pad here and my orchestra thing here. And let's try to do just something atmospheric rely on the piano a little bit here, see if I can do kind of look that Thomas Newman thing, um except not gonna play this in, I'm gonna plunk this in and I'm gonna click in the notes. So I need a minute clip and let's open that up a little bit so we can see now what the modes are if you didn't take that class. The modes are like the major and the minor scale. We've got the major scale. We've got the minor scale, and then we've got about five other ones. Those are called the modes. Technically, the major and minor scales are also modes themselves. We like to think of the major scale as happy and the minor scale. It's sad, and these other five are like somewhere in between, right there more nuanced characteristics of happy and sad. We've got one that's kind of super happy, and we've got one that's, you know, kind of dark and sad. Um, let's use a little bit darker one. So this is to me we're gonna use the Dorian mode and the Dorian mode to me, primarily a minor mode. Eso is based on the minor scale, but it's, um, not super sad. It's somewhere between sad and content is where I like to think of it. Let's make a Dorian scale first, and I'll show you how we can use this. So if you remember the pattern, Dorian is the 2nd 1 So there's a pattern to these modes. If I start on sea and make a C major scale, which is just gonna be all the white notes, there's a C major scale. Now, if I make a if I want to make adoree and scale, all I have to do is take this lowest note, move it to the top, and now I have a D Dorian scale. Okay, Now, uh, We've been using C minor for this film so far. So if I want to use see Dorian, I'm just gonna move this everything down. Ah, whole step to get it to see Dorian. This is like C minor, but it's got this raised sixths scale degree here. So I am going to use Onley These notes. I don't use a c Dorian scale now, before we were using C minor, which is all of these notes, except for the 6th 1 was down here. So we're just gonna raise that six? Um, and that's gonna give it a little bit different characteristic. So I'm gonna put this over here, and then I'm just going to start it right here, some on my piano, and I'm just going to kind of blindly start putting notes in places here. Let's do longer notes. Okay. My volume down in that track again. Okay, so let's see, we've got there's that six. Let's do that. Let's do even longer notes, actually, because I want us to be atmospheric. So let's go there, there. And I want this to not repeat. That's the trick, I wonder. Okay. Good to see you. Just kind of outlining notes in the scale. Let's go out of inactive. Well above down here. F meter six. Like they're going to see Eaves here. The asked here. Okay, let's hear what we've got. Okay, well, there's our scale. Uh uh. Take this whole thing up. Inactive. Um, Okay, now, this at this point, sounds like just random notes, but, um, because I'm just kind of noodling around in the d Dorian scale, I could just copy it over. Let's see what happens if we do this. And then well, it's not to you. The 2nd 1 Let's just do that. Let's get rid of our scale. We need to hear that again. So now I'm gonna have some harmonies that pop in here. Let's just see what we just did. We're just exploring the sounds that we've got. Uh uh, okay. Not extremely interesting, but let's throw that on our string track, and then let's take this one. Let's go back to just the one note. Get rid of the second note in the harmony here, more or less. Let's hear what we did. Now turn that up. I don't like that one. Okay? I'm gonna do one more thing here. I'm gonna double the length of all of these notes. Oops. Okay, Now, this is double as long as each one of these. Let's just hear what we've done here. And actually, I'm gonna move this down, inactive the strings down, inactive. - Okay , Now we're starting to get somewhere, right? And all I'm really doing here is poking around in See Dorian. So actually, you know, this wasn't my plan, But now that we've got this started, let's move on and jump into seeing if we can find a spot where this fits. And we can develop this a little bit more in our somewhat terrible film that we've been working on here. Okay, Off we go and buy some. What? Terrible. I mean, the film is actually really terrible. I think I've pointed this out before, but if you're just joining us in part to this film, have decided to use Ah, it's just a dumb movie. But anyway, um, it serves our purpose is just great 10. 10 FindingAnAtmosphericCue: Okay, so I've gone through our film and tried to find a spot where we could use an atmospheric. Q. It's a little tricky because this entire film really takes place, either in an office or in a gym. It's really weird, but I found this one. Q that maybe we could make it work. What we're doing here is the cops are interrogated. This kid. You know, frankly, Clinton is in very serious trouble. We're trying to help him all we can. So what I'm gonna do here is, First of all, let's think about point of view. What I'm gonna do is pretend we're in the point of view of the kid. If we're in the point of view of the kid than doing this kind of atmospheric thing that we've been working on makes sense because he's probably a little scared, a little nervous, agitated, uh, this sound could work, So let's roll with that thinking about that as our point of view. Let's see where this Q goes. You're a pretty good with the scene to go help a lot if you want to, so you maybe youngsters don't realize it. But the policy of the department is to stay on your side, especially when we know someone higher up is a real car. You're getting into trouble. Yeah, I'd like to help him if I could, but I don't know nothing about it. I haven't seen Frankie much lately. You know, a lot of people that, like you know, you. I guess you just tell me if any of these people mean anything to you. Brad Smith? No, I never heard of him. Been around a pool hall on the street once in a while. Ever heard of Fred Smith around there? No, I never did. All right, Bob. Letter. Yeah, I know him. He used to live in our neighborhood, but he's all right. He's a nice fella. You never got no trouble. Okay. Oh, home. Don't know. Now, home seems like that he work in a cafeteria. I think so. See more on. But I never had anything to do with him. What did he look like? Kind, I don't know. Kind of nice dresser. Tall? No, not very tall. Why was that okay again? Really long. Queues here. Holy moly. Earlier. Okay, let's call that about the end. Someone's gonna mark that as and at most que atmospheric. Cute. Okay, maybe we won't score the whole thing, but let's see. So that's the cue. We're gonna work out here and try to do some kind of atmospheric thing. 11. 11 ComposingWithAtmosphere: Okay. I've pasted what we came up with earlier. For our atmospheric example. Just adoree and stuff. See Dorian. Ah, into this spot. Let's just see what happens. Yurok again Change? Yeah. You know Frankie Clinton in pretty serious trouble. We're trying to help them all. We can. You're a pretty good friend of Frank if you can help him a lot if you want to. You maybe youngsters don't realize it with the policy of the department is to stay on your side. Especially when we know someone higher up is a real car you're getting on. Okay, I have a couple ideas for ways we can make this more interesting. Here's one. Pull that up. Just a hair I'm thinking of is shifting this by two beats so that we get cord, piano note, chord, piano note and it and Ah, the piano note doesn't hit the same time as the cords were gonna offset him just by a little bit. Just to make, um, a little less predictable. Your rocket can change. Yeah. You know Frankie Clinton in pretty serious trouble. We're trying to help him all we can. Now, I should point out there's piano note thing here is just something I like to do. I like an isolated piano note just by itself, floating around for atmosphere, maybe even up and active. Let's try bumping that up. Inactive your rocket? Yeah. You know, Frankie Clinton in pretty serious trouble. We're trying another thing we could do with this That would really help. It is to additonal reverb to it. Um, reverb is really good for atmosphere. Let's just crank up the reverb on that. Your rocket can change. Yeah, So that let's also put a reverb on the strings. That won't be as noticeable because we don't really have much attacks there. But now let's take our strings. Let's go down to our pad. Let's see what we can do here. That's where it starts. Yes. Okay. Now, let's find a pad that that really works well here. Um, I didn't go out of the analog here and into a different instrument. Ah, and look for a pad that might work. Well, Paddison instrument called Operator. It has some really nice ones. Ah, I got a nice couple. To which motion? No, Uh, that's kind of what I'm looking for. So let's try that. Okay? Let's see what we've got here. Try to blend these a little bit. You rock again. Change? Yeah. You know, Frank in very serious trouble. We're trying to help him all we can. You're a pretty good friends, right? You can help him a lot if you want. You. Maybe youngsters don't realize it with policy of the department of to stay on your side. Especially when we know someone higher up is a real car. You're getting into trouble. Okay, I think we're getting somewhere here. Let me just extend this last one. Hoops were set to loop. Okay, Let's So let's duplicate this out and this out. So it's gonna duplicate those to make him longer. You know what I'm gonna do? For now, I'm gonna mute this piano part. I'm just gonna let the cord. It's kind of go and just be there. And we're just going to kind of work around this dorie and stuff for a little while now. Another thing I did here is I stretched out all of these chords that they blend into each other like a lot. Um, that's going to create some dissidents, some tension, some a little bit of release in there, too. Uh, so let's just see what we've got. Now your rocket can change. Yeah. You know Frankie Clinton in pretty serious trouble. We're trying to help him all we can. You're a pretty good friend of Frank, if you can help him a lot if you want to. You maybe youngsters don't realize it with policy of the department is to stay on your side . Especially when we know someone higher up is a real car. You're getting into trouble. Yeah, I'd like to help him if I could, but I don't know nothing about it. I haven't seen Frankie much lately. You know, a lot of people that try, you know you. I guess you just tell me one of these people. Meaning Brad Smith? No, I never heard again that around a pool hall on the street once in a while around there? No, I never did. All right, Bob. Letter. Yeah, I know him. He used to live in our neighborhood, but he's all right. He's a nice fella. You never got no trouble, Okay? Oh, no. Like that. He work in a cafeteria piano part in no anymore on. But I never had anything to do with it. What did he look like? Kind? I don't know. Kind of. Nice dresser call? No, not very tall. Short kind of medium, I guess. Kind of. You never had nothing to do with. Why was that? Do you like him or what? No, I never know him very well. Hasn't homes got a knuckle? Yeah. Simmons. Thank you. Lives over in Magnolia. Traveled around? Sure. Just the piano part Going for a second on Umberto. Scaly. No, I never heard of him. Sure. Now this is important to Frankie. No, honest. I never heard of him. All right, son. You've helped More than you think you can nose clean. Now you're up. That cross is looking worse. Oh, I don't mind it. Ending were there. That cross is looking worse every day. Mr. Okay, I don't love this queue, but it kind of serves our purpose. What I'd want to do is fill out this orchestra a little bit more, Which is something we're gonna talk about in the next chunk, which is really kind of orchestrating something to sound a lot better, given the tools we have and how working with the orchestra can work, so that will be in the next section. So maybe we'll come back to this one in that section For now, I'm gonna kind of leave it where it is. Ah and ah, college. Did ah buried atmosphere? 12. 12 AnalysisOfThisCue: okay. We kind of already did our analysis as we went in this section. But ah, let's just look at it one more time here. What we're doing here is we're in. Ah, we're using the scale of C. Dorian and Dorian is a minor scale. So it's a minor scale with a raised six. So we've been in C minor. Now we're in, See Dorian, which is like a very close cousin to see minor. And what we're doing is just kind of playing around. We could go through and analyse each one of these chords that happens here, but that kind of defeats the purpose of the sound that we're doing. We're not really hearing these all as individual cords. What we're hearing is a bunch of see Dorian. It's almost like if we were in jazz, we might call it. It's like a motile vamp, right? We don't really start to hear these as cords until we have a bass note. If we had a bass note in here, we would start to hear these as cords. But since everything's kind of in the mid range, it's a little low, but it's still kind of mid range we hear it as just kind of motile meandering, so we don't really need to call these anything other than than than that than motile meandering. Um, so you know, I'm pretty content with that being our analysis. Our piano notes are just the same notes, but as a single note, still just kind of moving around inside the sea Dorian mode. So it's kind of all we really need to think about for this. Think about modes when you're working, that could be really valuable, um, for coming up with atmosphere. Also coming up for with Austin Oddo's modes is a very powerful thing you could do. 13. 13 WorkingWithStringHarmonies: All right, up next. Let's talk about working with strings. Ah, little more. A little more detail. Um, this is one of the things that when someone gets into composition, especially film scoring, they I I see that they latch onto first, um, and with the most vigor people really associate. Ah, big lush orchestra with film soundtracks. And that could be true. Um, and not true. It's true in the big budget Hollywood stuff like it has to have a big orchestra. Um, mostly because historically, you can kind of all draw that back to Holst, the composer. Holst, the planets. Ah, lot of film scoring. That big Hollywood sound of film scoring is, um, influenced by the whole planets pieces. That's why you get those big horns and all that other stuff. But I won't go into that tomb in too much. That's very opinionated. Statement. Well, not super opinionated, but pretty opinionated statement. But I encourage you to check out that piece. The planet's is the name of the piece by Holst anyway, So when we hear these big Hollywood movie soundtracks, we associate this big string section. I've already talked about doing that digitally with sampled strings. And one thing we could go into is how to convert your sampled string orchestra into a real string orchestra. That's something that can be done. Um, it's tricky because there's a lot that goes into that. First, you have to know Tate everything in traditional note notation. Um, that's not extremely difficult, but then you have to make parts. You have to make sure everything is notated in a very clear way. Um, you have to make a different part for each player. You have to make a score for the conductor, and then the hardest part, you have to get in orchestra. So we're not gonna go into huge mother of details on how to do that. That's a whole separate class. Um, but I will. While we're on the topic, I will tell you that what a lot of people end up doing is you can't just take a nor Kustra peace, whether it's for a film or just, um, music on its own, you can't just take it to your local neighborhood orchestra and say Play it. If there are professional orchestra, they schedule their rehearsals and everything to three years ahead of time, so they don't just do that. Um, but what you can do is if you have some money, you can go to somewhere like Prague. There is an orchestra in Prague. I can't remember the name of it if it's the Czech Philharmonic or what, but you can just hire them for not an insane amount of money. I mean, it's expensive, but relative to hiring in American orchestra, it's fairly cheap. I want to say it's in the ballpark of, like, $5000 to do a full recording session. Um, that's really cheap. Ah, as compared to what it would cost you here in the U. S. So that's something that a lot of people do, so keep that in mind. But for now, let's focus on how to actually write for strings. Well, so what I'm talking about in this section is let's say we have a melody like a lush melody that we love. And we want to add orchestra to accompany that melody to fill it out, you know, to make it bigger and thicker. Um, there's a couple different ways we do that. I'm gonna kind of boil this down into three different techniques. We can use to fill out that sound. Um, and those techniques are polyrhythmic, mon arrhythmic and a company mental. Let's go over those three terms in a little more detail in the next video, and then we'll dive into, ah, some examples and working on a piece that uses this technique of of building a big, lush orchestra sound. 14. 14 PolyrhythmicMonoAndAccompaniment: Okay, Three techniques. Polyrhythmic, Monta, rhythmic and a company mental. So what? All three of these refer to you is what the orchestra is doing in relation to a soloist. So the soloist is going to be playing the melody, So let's just call it a melody. So we've got a melody and an orchestra. Two different things. Even if the orchestra is playing the melody, Uh, for the purposes of understanding this concept, think of it as two different things. Melody and orchestra. So in poly rhythmic, what that means is that imagine the rhythm of the melody. Fact. Let's just do something on the screen here so that you can understand what I'm talking about. A little bit better. Um, let's just go here and make something. Okay, Let's just look here, just move this out of our way. So let's say my melody is Ah, let's stick to C minor. So I have some. Okay, let's say that's my melody. I have this nice long melody here. Ah, let's just hear it. Let me mute the dialogue in the film for a minute because I just kind of randomly placed the somewhere. In fact, let's take the film just off the screen for you. So we're not distracted by it. Um, and let's make sure we have some volume. Yes, we do. Let's hear it. Oh, except I put it on the staccato woodwinds. It's the problem of having too many tracks. Um, llegado strings. I give myself a little more volume here. Okay. Nice lush melody. No, um, back to our three techniques. So polyrhythmic mono rhythmic and accompany mental. Let's start with mono Rhythmic, actually. So what model rhythmic means is that the accompaniment the orchestra stuff is going to be moving in the exact same rhythm as the melody. So my orchestra stuff might do something like this. Every note in the melody has a corresponding chord with it, so this can be a good way to do it Sometimes. I'm not saying this is a good idea or a bad idea. Just saying it's an idea. Okay, Lets just do those 1st 3 So this is mono rhythmic, meaning one rhythm. There's one big rhythm that's gonna come out of all of this. Now, let's see if my chords that I just kind of blindly through on their sound any good that's actually quite nice except for this cord. But I do D B G. I mean that a G major record, which I don't really love. Let's make it a G minor chord. Try that one more time. Okay, so that is mono rhythmic. Now let's do something polyrhythmic the other way. Polyrhythmic means that Ah, there's the melody and then the cords are moving in a different rhythm. Then the melody. So one way to do this would be, let's just, um, delete every other core just for a quick way to do this. Just do that. That and that is gonna be able dissonant. But now you see is the melody is still happening. I haven't changed that. But the accompaniment. The orchestra is going to move in a little bit. Different rhythm. In fact, let's do a little bit more here. Let's do that. That works. So there's multiple rhythms happening here, right? Not just the one rhythm of the melody. There's other things happening here. It makes it can make a more dense sound. It can also distract from the melody. Sometimes it depends on what you're doing. Ah, what you want toe happen, right? So it's another good technique. It has its place, just like mono rhythmic. Now let's go back to accompany mental a company. Mental is the more sparse, the sparse ist of them all. So that might be like, um, you might have a rhythm and you might not Let's do something like this. So it's like polyphonic where we have multiple rhythms happening. We can, but it's not necessarily a 1 to 1. With the melody, it's not not a 1 to 1. It's usually simpler. So in this one, I'm just gonna give them quarter notes all the way through here and just see what happens. It's designed to stay out of the way of the melody. So your orchestra really kind of matters less here. Okay, let's hear. That sounds okay. And it doesn't need to be just quarter notes. Like what? I did like this pulse. They could be long. Um, you know, it could be this, but this starts to sound a little bit like the mon arrhythmic idea that we were talking about a minute ago. So we want something that really separates the orchestra and the melody. Right. Um, so a company mental is a little strange in that way. But imagine that what we're really trying to do is have an accompaniment that is that separates itself from the melody. We don't hear it as moderate, Mick. We don't hear it is polyrhythmic polyrhythmic. We really want to. It sound like the orchestra's all tangled up in the melody. Ah mahn algorithmic. We want the orchestra to sound like it's part of the melody and the company mental. We wanted to sound like it's separate from the melody. That's kind of the main distinguishing things. OK, uh, let's let's jump to a new video and do some examples. Let me show you some real world examples of seventies. 15. 15 ExampleAccompanimental: Okay, let's start with a company. Mental. Um, this is going to be one that remember, we have the kind of the melody and in the orchestra separated. So let's do an example from the village. This has a beautiful score by James Howard and what we're gonna here in this is a melody playing on a few different instruments and then the accompaniment in the orchestra, but kind of separated. So let's hear it. Then we'll talk about it a little bit. We're not gonna here the whole thing because it turns into something else. But, ah, it's the opening couple minutes that I really want to hear hear? Okay, What I'm really focused on is right around here. What we heard is the melody and the orchestra just kind of playing long notes and just really, um, supporting the melody without getting in its way really at all. There's the orchestra just holding that long cord lewd emotion on its own here without the melody, that's a good sign of the right. So with that, that's another good sign that, um, we're kind of using this accompaniment technique is that the orchestra can move on its own independent of the melody, um, is a really beautiful soundtrack. I I encourage you to check it out with that being said, let's look, at example of something a little bit more moderate Nick next. 16. 16 Monorhythmic: Okay. Next. An example from Harry Potter, one of the last Harry Potter wound. I think this is Deathly Hallows. This is by Alexandre Desplat, which, um, I can never pronounce his name right and is probably one of the, in my opinion, most unsung heroes of composers in films. He's an at someone whose name you hear all the time. Ah, but you should, um he should be up there with John, William and stuff. He does really beautiful music. It's a little more adventurous, I think then some of the other well known composers. But anyway, um, in this, we're going to hear a couple different techniques. But right when we get to about the one minute mark of this example and this is from Harry Potter, I believe we're going to hear the melody fully fleshed out with string accompaniment. So the entire orchestra is gonna be moving in unison with the melody, But in rhythmic unison they'll be playing different notes. But all the rhythms are the same. I'll point that out when we get there, but I want to hear the beginning. Just we get it in our head. So here we go. - That okay? Here comes this melody. - Okay . Uh, did you hear it? Did you hear how throughout that statement of the melody right there, there was a lot of notes moving, but only one rhythm, Really? Every now and then, you know, there was a note that that hung around a little bit longer to tie it into the next chord, but more or less, all the orchestra was moving is one unified rhythm, and that is called mano rhythmic, So one rhythm. 17. 17 Polyrhythmic: Okay, let's look at a polyrhythmic example Now, Now, this is one where the melody and the orchestra are all tangled up together and there are multiple lines moving hopefully and well, sometimes we still hear the melody come to the top. And sometimes we don't even need to. Sometimes we're just trying to create this mesh of lush string sound in a more atmospheric things, so that can collide sometimes. So, um, one of my favorite examples of this, um, is this odd piece from the Tron Legacy soundtrack. So this is a soundtrack by daft punk with some other people in there, too. Um, but this is all strings, and this is ah, we're going to talk more about this piece of the next video because we're gonna talk about the obvious influence of this piece and a lot of pieces like this. But let's just hear it now. What you're gonna hear is multiple. It might sound like multiple melodies. Kind of happening at the same time and making this kind of tangled web of melody. Uh, so let's hear it 18. 18 BarberAdagio: okay after hearing that I would be a failure if I didn't point out one very important thing . And that's that This piece that we're about to hear it's by the composer Samuel Barber. Ah, and it's called Addazio for Strings. Now, this was not written for a film, but it has had a huge influence over film, and in fact, it's been used in many films since it's been written. What's interesting about this piece is that you can hear it in action scenes. You can hear it in very sentimental scenes. You can hear it in video games. I've heard it in several video games. Actually, um, you can hear it in TV shows. I think actually, family got used this once. Um, it is sometimes called the saddest piece of music ever written. It's a sad piece. It's a really sad piece. Um, Barber wrote this as the middle movement of a string quartet, so just force strings. That's two violins, viola and cello. Later, someone asked him if they could perform it with an orchestra, and so he took it out of the string quartet and rewrote it just for orchestra. So it's for string orchestra That means there's no winds, no brass, no percussion, just strings. A lot of pieces, including definitely that one. We just heard Theodora Geo for Tron was obviously not only because of the title, but because of the sound of it super heavily influenced by this piece. So, um, I I urge you to get familiar with this piece, get to know it, maybe even get to score to its study. It, um because whenever you're asked to write a piece of music for a very sad scene, this is it is possibly what? What the director specifically has in mind is this piece. It's used as temp cues all the time. Very often, you'll find attempt you where they put this in. And they say we want it to sound like that. It's very hard to deal without just copying it, because it's become so distinctive of apiece. So I want you to hear this piece you confined millions of recordings of this, including, like, versions of it require for Oregon, um, tons of different stuff. This is the original string orchestra version, not the original string quartet version, but the version that everybody knows. So I want to play for you this entire piece because I really want you to hear it. So just get comfortable and listen to this piece. It's about eight minutes. Trust me. You'll thank me for it, Um, and you've probably heard it before. If this sounds familiar to you, it's because you've heard it put into a movie before, or a game or a TV show or something. So, um, when it gets to kind of its big climactic moments, it might be a little familiar, but this is the piece. Here we go. Oh, and I should point out really quick. Uh, it's sometimes referred to as Barber's Adagio meeting like Ah, the Addazio that Barber wrote. But the full name of it is a dodgy oh for strings by the composer Samuel Barber. So if someone's talking about Barber's Adagio, this is the piece they're talking about, and 19. 19 FindingAGoodCueForStrings: Okay, let's go back to our film and see if we can incorporate this kind of a queue somewhere. You know, again, I scan through here and I found this scene and I think it will work for us because it it already had its. It's like I was sentimental moment between the mom, who is also the judge and the daughter. So they're having a little sentimental moment, and there's actually some music in this scene already. Ah, and it's it's, ah, kind of slower string kind of thing. Let's just hear what we've got. Oh, there. I didn't hear you come in. Quite. You had dinner, hamburger getting a base, that he died with you way have a vegetable or too much in the world. You know, I guess I forgot anything new happened today. So something's always popping in my department. I don't know what's come over you Children. My court's in session loan before the other Magistrates or even awake error margin. What's the matter? You know what the matter is? Okay, so they're going to get into this kind of emotional thing. Ah, and that's cool. So in order to score this, we need to pull the volume out of the film because that music that's already in it is gonna conflict with what we write. Ideally, we could leave the dialogue in and pull the music out. But we can't in this kind of a situation. It's just there. So let's pull all the sound out so that we can work with this. Um, as though, um, it was a blank slate. So with that, um, let's dive in and try to create this kind of like a data geo like texture using strings in this section here. 20. 20 WritingWithStringHarmonies: Okay, so I put a marker here so that we know where it is. Now, I'm gonna go back and find, um, that string thing that I row as an example early in this section because I kind of liked it , actually, here it is. And a copy that delete it and then go back up to that cue that I had found. Not that one. That one. Okay. And let's put that in. What I want to do here is I'm gonna go back to the mano phonic approach. Montel rhythmic sorry approach that we had come up with. I think with this, let's start with that. And then Ah, well, play with it a little bit. So let me just get that back for us here, okay? Now, one thing we could do is take our melody first couple notes of our melody and push everything over. I gotta remember what note we started on here. Probably see, there we go and put the melody by itself in. So what I'm gonna have here now is just the melody just the first part of the melody and then it's going to come in. The accompaniment is going to come in. Let's just hear what that does for us right now. Okay? That's kind of nice. So remember, we'll do an analysis of this after, so I'm just going to try to throw some chords in here. That's kind of a weird one. Ah, and I'm gonna go with the mono phonic thing. Just using triads here Mostly. That's not Triad, but I'm gonna leave it. I'm gonna go with my get same thing there. Let's extend this out a little bit longer. Get to that whole melody. That's kind of a big stretch. Okay. All right. Let's hear what we got. So now I've just added accord to every note, and we have our first part of the melody at the beginning. Okay, Uh, it's pretty nice. Think everything works pretty well there. Um now, what would be common? One thing we hear a lot in soundtracks, and so I'm gonna do it. Let's take this and let's put it again here. But let's add an upper active. So I'm gonna move everything up inactive, and we'll see how long that holds until we need to add something new. So let's hear it from back here. Okay. Um I didn't love just adding that upper active. So here's what we're gonna do. Check this out. We're gonna add an upper active and a lower active. So we're going to keep the same active we've been doing. But at another one's not gonna have six notes per accord. Okay, Now let's see if we can take this part here and turn it into, Ah, more polyrhythmic thing. There's kind of an easy trick to this. If you want Teoh, watch this. We've already got a harmony we like. So I'm gonna do is get rid of any duplicate notes like this. When a note follows another note, get rid of the 2nd 1 Tie it over. Same thing here. So now we're gonna have some kind of independent lines moving. There's nothing in common between those two chords. There's something in common for a long way, so let's just let that go all the way. There's another one. There's another one. This process is going to get us and 1/2 way there. Toe what I want. Oops, There. There's one. There's one. Okay, this one. I'm gonna leave because it's kind of to melody notes. So let's leave that. Okay, that I get him all. I think so. Okay, let's just hear that. Then we're gonna do one more thing that's going to kind of make it a little bit better. This will be a very subtle difference. Okay, Now let's go over the top. Now, here's what we're gonna do now. Now we're gonna take some notes, and we're gonna stretch him out to be go even farther. I've got kind of a dense texture here, so I don't know if it's gonna work by dense. I mean, I've got a lot of, um notes going, um, So let's take this, See? And let's drag it all the way to their We're gonna cut right through this chord of which there is not a c and do it for the lower active as well. Um, in the next chord, let's take this d pull it all the way through there. It's doing the lower active. I want something even more dramatic. Let's take this B flat and pull it all the way through to their in the sea. To there. This g across this is gonna make a nice dissonance. Hopefully, let's do that. Let's bridge that gap right there. That's go all the way. Let's go all the way here, Okay? I don't know if that was enough. I feel like I should do more. Um, let's tie this off all the way across this f all the way across. Um, I think this f all the way across kind of arbitrarily just creating non chord tones, right? I'm creating tones that are not in the cords by carrying notes across and through chords. Let's see how that works. It still sounds pretty mono rhythmic. Um, let's see if we can do some changes by going taking a gesture like this one were going like that going up and up. But let's keep going up. Don't do anything out of key. Yes, that in that. So now we're gonna have a little sub motive here that's going to kind of separate the melody from the harmony pulling. Okay, that was nice. It's starting to get all tangled up, right? That's that's what I kind of want to happen just because I'm trying to make something ah, little more. Ah, poly rhythmic. It's getting there. Um, let's take our smaller one and put it here. Let's get rid of the opening melody by itself. Let's see if we can tangle this one up. This might work a little bit better, so I'm going to stretch out some notes. Was going to kind of get silly with this one. Let's go like that. Go like that, Actually, take this note all the way across. Let's get rid of that low note. Let's do that and get rid of that note. Makesem kind of playing. Connect the dots here a little bit. Let's try that. Let's see how that works. I think I'm getting a little too money now. But, um, think back here was my best shot at it because we got a whole kind of different sense of that kind of tangled. Ah, feel, um, So let's get rid of this one and just put back in the non tangled the mano a rhythmic Or sometimes we say Hama with may see if that gets us to the end of this typically super long queue that we have in this film. If it doesn't do it again, but maybe get rid of our melody does our top voice. Usually the melodies and top voice sending go all the way back to the beginning. Okay, that's good. I'm gonna leave it there. I'm not going to score this whole que because it goes on forever. Maybe it's ending here. No, nothing's air getting emotional. Now it's ending. Well, maybe not. She's going to cry, and it's still going. So these are super long queues, but, um, I think I achieved what I wanted to hear. So Ah, let's do a quick analysis of what I wrote here on the move on and talk about fight scenes. Something much more interesting. Well, I shouldn't say that sometimes were interesting. 21. 21 AnalysisOfThisCue: Okay, let's do a little analysis here of my harmony. So we started off with this beginning of this melody. All just C minor. I'm just walking around and c minor now here it starts over again. So let's look at what we have here. That's kind of minimize or movies. We don't care about it at the moment. Okay. F a c You know, where I started here is really interesting. Instead of starting on C minor, I started on the four chord, and I actually start on a major full record. That should be a flat if we're going to totally stay in key. Ah, but I put it as a major cause. I thought it would sound kind of good. Ah, and it did. I liked how it sounded. So we have an F major, which, in the key of seem minor, is a major four. That's something that we do sometimes in minor key. It's not all that strange to put a major four chord, um, in there, but it's just in route position F A C. Next, we went to a G C and e flat, so that's not in root position. But if we did this. We put this G on the top. It would be C E flat G. That's our one chord. So it's inverted because the fifth is on the bottom. But it's just a one chord C minor. That's Tran to move next, we have a a D efforts. Another inverted chord. D is the root here d F a to d minor chord in the key of C minor. That's too Ah, and again this should be in a flat, which would give us the actual diminished to cord in that key of C minor. But we don't want a diminished chord. I didn't want a diminished chord, so I cheated that one up to in a natural, and that got us a d minor chord up. Next we have another one chord C E. Flat G. So that's just a C minor tonic chord. Here we have G B flat de aza root position, G minor chord, and that's or five. So it's a minor five chord, and the five court is minor in the key of C minor. So it's a diatonic minor accord. Nothing strange there. And then here we're back down to a one chord uh, inverted, though. C e flat G. So another one chord move on to the second half Here here we have e flat G B flat inverted , but it's an e flat chords. That's a three chord. We have f a flat and see. So that is, interestingly, that is a four chord, but it's the correct four chord. Now it's a minor four chord. So back here we got a major four chord F a C. Here we have F a flat. See? Giving us the minor. Three. We are Sorry, minor. Four chord Here we have G, B, flat and D So another inverted cord where G is the root. Ah, this would be another five chord and it's minor because that's what we expect. And here we have an interesting one. C D and F. Now, this is not going to be a triad because we have a C and the D that are, and those are a whole step apart, right? So it can't be a triad. Can't have a whole step in. There could be 1/7 chord, though. If I called the route de it could be D f. A flat is the missing note. But it's the one we would expect and then see would be the seventh. That would be a to seven chord. Um, and B minor, uh, would be about what we would expect actually be diminished if it was a flat. But if we put in a natural in it, it would be a minor chord. So I'm gonna call that one just a two chord with D as the route that gets safe to do it has . And it has his minor seventh in it. Next we have G B flat D. It's another five chord inverted with a G is the root here we have f a flat C So another four chord a minor for record this time here, another weird one C e flat B flat. So if we call this 1/7 it would be G would be the missing note. Our court would look like this. That would be our triad en route position. C E flat G. That's the triad. Those three notes and in the seventh is B flat. So that would be, ah, 17 chord. And I think we can call it that. Um, I think that's kind of how it's functioning. Um, so 17 chord down to another four chord are out. Actually, not a four chord B f B flat d So this one, we could call it a d chord d f b flat B flat. Let's call the route B D f. There we go. So this is a B flat chord. So this is gonna be a seven chord in this key because the route is B flat. Um, but it's all in key seventh chords air good and minor. Remember, if you're thinking oh, some, of course are dangerous and hard to use. That's true in Major and Minor, not so much. And miners are great. And now here we have back to our tonic chord C e flat, G R. One chord root of C and again are one Corbett's route of C. So that's the core progression we used here. And the way I came up with it is I wrote the melody, um, just kind of poking around in C minor, looking for stuff that sounded good. I thought, uh and then I just kind of harmonized the melody by adding triads to it. Ah, and then kind of putting them in order of the path of least resistance, right? Using inversions so that these notes only went up a little bit. Ah, and didn't move around a ton. Um, you try to keep steps to be small. That's why we didn't go like this. Because then this step would be big. The lowest note would be a big step. We want to avoid those really big steps if we want it to sound nice and good. If that's confusing to you, go back to the theory class. Check out the section on inversions and using inversions because that's what we've done here to make this sound really homogeneous and, like, really kind of tight together as we've used our inversions to create this kind of path of least resistance kind of model on. That's how you get really nice sounding chords in ah, string section. Cool. Um, okay, let's move on. Ah, and talk about the fight and chase scenes and some special thing to consider with those 22. 22 TheChaseScene: now So far in this class, we focused on, uh, different techniques for different scenes. But not so much a style of seen like, Ah, you know, the different kinds of scenes you can come up with. But the chase scene, ah, requires or warrants, I should say, a little bit of special attention. Um, So what do I mean by a chase scene? Really? What I mean is, in general, a very high intensity scene. Ah, it's most transparent in, like a car chase. So, um, that's kind of the archetype that we use when we're talking about this. So imagine the car chase scene. They tend to be a little long. Um, they tend to be really intense. Um, and what's tricky about it is that you don't wanna have music. That's just, like going, going, going, going, going, going, going full blast for the entire scene because you've got nowhere to go. Um, you need to have some ebb and flow in it, some intense, a little bit of pull back, so that you've got a little bit more to give. We're gonna talk about that in a minute. So, uh, car chases fight scenes also often fall in this category, although they tend to be a little slower paced. But, um, not always. It depends. It totally depends. Um, any other scene when you've got a lot of intense stuff going really fast, Um, sometimes even like a montage scene. If it's a really kind of intense woman, a robbery scene, Um, I could imagine a lot of different situations where you'd want to do something like this. Um, but I like car chase scenes just for an example, because, ah, if you can get a car chase scene figured out really well, then, um then you can do the kind of intense thing. They're kind of the most intense scene that we typically come across. I'm sure you'll be working on something that has another, more intense, more driving scene. But, um, it's not typical. Typically, we find car chase scenes are the kind of height of the movie in terms of the intensity of the music. So let's look at a few. And while we're looking at them, I want to dissect a couple things, so I'm gonna point out some stuff. Ah, and then we're gonna go into some different techniques that you use in these kinds of scenes. Ah, and then we're going to score one. Um, so let's dive into our first example in the next video. 23. 23 Example TheMatrix: okay. In this first example, I wanna look at Ah, clip from The Matrix. The Matrix reloaded one of the Sequels. Um, that the last one or the second ever the middle one. I can remember. It doesn't matter. I think it's the middle one. Um, so ah, in this scene, they are stuck in the Matrix. They're trying to escape, and they're being chased by, Ah, the dreadlocked dudes. I can't remember what their names were if they even had names anyway, you'll get it once we see it here. What I want you to pay attention to in this seem is the rhythm and the general pulse. That's what I'm most concerned with right away. This soundtrack uses a couple different elements that we haven't been looking at in that it's there's a lot of electronic stuff in here, but it's also ah, lot of more papa electronic stuff. So more beat based music is in this, but in ah, lot of chase scenes, even orchestral ones, you'll find a beat based, um, chasing meaning there's a beat. There's a drumbeat in it. Um, so in this one, keep track of that pulse. The drums that are going and anything else contributing to the pulse. And then we're gonna talk about it a little bit after the scene. So let's watch it and then we'll talk about it. Ah, after. Get us out of here. Look, I know we're inside the core network exit. I got near you. Wins over half off the freeway. Yes, sir. Fine. Going by? No, really. Are you watching this? Yes, sir. There's no point when you have eight units headed your way. Right now. Now, the next benches at a connecting tunnel to the 101 Got it. Sir, Are you sure about this freeway? I mean, it's dangerous. In 14 years of operating, I've never split. What did I tell you? Yes, sir, I do. So wins. Overpass. I'll be ready for you. You always told me to stay off the freeway. Yes, that's true. Said it was suicide. Let us hope I was wrong. Blankets Nairobi. We've been sent to bring you in. I need to talk to Morpheus. You know you need you. Where is he? Just filed way. Have them now. The exiles Primary target. This YouTube clip stops there, and that's okay. So what's happening there? What are we hearing? There's a lot of different elements in that, right? It's very complicated. Que let's talk about the beat first. So we heard at least three different beats. Ah, one at the beginning and then one when they got on the highway and then one when they were inside the car, they were roughly the same tempo except the one in the car. Ah was subdivided more so instead of don't don't don't don't done. We felt decadent and decadence a decade decade, decade, like a decade take a decade it so it had a little bit more intensity to it. But it was just 1/16 note that we were getting because it was in the strings were getting tech Attack, attack, attack, attack, attack, Attack In the strings. But the beat was still just cruising. Ah, at the same speed. So, um, what I want you to take away from this is that Ah, we had a pulse. Whether it was a beat or the strings, the subdivision, whatever. We had a pulse going throughout almost all of that scene, and it was taken away at key points. So at key dramatic moments, we took it away, and that helped us focus. It's kind of opposite of how you would expect, right. What you would expect is you would do something musically big at the key moment. But here what we're doing is we're taking something away at the key moment, and that's kind of you can think of it like it's creating space for that important moment toe happen. Give you an example. Case another hearing ticket ticket ticket ticket ticket ticket again right there. Beats gone, sustaining, sustaining. Now he's gonna get in the car in the fight back on its back. So for that key moment to kind of create that sense of just like floating for a second, we stop the beat. We still have some other musical elements going, but it's just like a suspension of the beat to cool Effect s. So keep that in mind. We're gonna talk about rhythm a little bit more in just a minute, but I want to give you another example first 24. 24 Example JasonBorne: Okay, let's look at another one. Um, this is from the Jason Bourne movie. Ah, this is what I'm the in the sequence of born movies. I think this is the newest one. Um, and I think it's just called Jason born, actually. Um, so in this scene there, they're ripping through Vegas and, ah, it's ah, car chasing. This one's rather short. So let's watch it and then we'll talk about it, - okay ? So really similar elements in that one, right? You can almost sense a formula starting, and it's not a formula. There's not, like a formula for the chasing, like do this and then do this and then do this. But, um, you can get a sense of this feeling of rhythm and pulse, Right? Says something we haven't really seen in our other techniques yet. And if there was one technique that I was that I would emphasize with the chasing, it would be rhythm. So ah, rhythm. A fast driving rhythm. It's just a really good way to keep a chase scene active and then pulling it away at those key moments. Um, other things we heard in this one and that will will be working with as we dive into our other things is short little phrases. You know, there's a lot of short little phrases. There's not big lush melodies in these, right? We have short little winds brass other things that come and go strings. They're quiet strings moving around inside there now Melody not even harmony. Really No baseline drums here have strings climbing up, and that's about it. You know, there's these little nuggets of sound that come and go, but no melody, no baselines, no harmony, even, really? You know, like, you probably couldn't get any kind of sense of a core progression in that or even the matrix one. Even though the music was much more in your face in the Matrix one, there was really no sense of, like, a core progression by any means. Right? So Ah, interesting examples, Right? Very little harmony. Okay, uh, let's dive in and start talking about some of these techniques on. And let's start with focusing on how we can build rhythm in a scene 25. 25 RhythmInChaseScenes: Okay, so after looking at those two cues, we know we need rhythm. Right? Uh, so let's look at how we could create that sense of rhythm. The starting point is going to be some kind of drumbeat. That's kind of the easiest way to get it. Um, And when I'm working on a scene like this, I'm gonna start with a drumbeat. If it makes sense for it to be in there, you know, if I'm working on something like, ah, that that project that was off require that I'm not gonna put a drumbeat in it. Um, luckily, that didn't have a chasing. So for that, I'm probably gonna use a loop. So let's just go and look at loops. So here are ah, ridiculous amount of drum loops that I've collected over the years. Um, well, it's just randomly I thought I want a complete loop. Military drones that might actually work really interesting. So I'm gonna throw that on something here. Now, In order to do this, I'm gonna need to make a new track, a couple of new tracks, this military drums idea that could work. Okay, let's use that as one element. Let's start something like a more straight upbeat on it like that. And I'm gonna overlap those two if they are in the same tempo or if I can make them in the same tempo. So let's see if they are. Now, what I'm doing here, this is like getting the computer stuff again. But, um, I want to be sure that the computer knows the tempo of this. So the fastest way to find out is to turn on the Metrodome and then played a loop and see if it's in sync. Nope. Let's try it for the other beat that I did. Yep. That one didn't sink. This one isn't so I need to get this in sync and able to. And I do that with these little warp markers. They're called. So let's see each. This is kind of tedious to do, So I'm probably gonna cut the video here, but OK, okay. I think I got this, uh, in a way that works well for me. Okay, so let's hear these two at the same time and see if they work. And I'm gonna turn the military one down quite a bit. Yeah, it certainly creates a lot of motion. Let's roll with that for a minute. I think that'll work. So what I can do here having two layers? In fact, I might even add 1/3 layer, but I can deal with that later. Um, well, let's actually do it. Let's have 1/3 layer. What I'm gonna do for this third layer is I'm gonna take this beat, but I'm gonna pull out all of the high stuff. And to do that, I'm just going to use an e Que Just do that. So that one sounds like this. So here's why. That's useful. Watch this. Let's say my cue is rockin I need to do one of those moments where I'm taking away, right to let the energy focus on the scene for a second. So now we're going to hear this full thing here, and then here we're gonna do that, taking away thing by going to this other more subdued beat, and then we're gonna go back. So check this out. Right? So all this is is the same beat that I had appear. Except I put an e que on it. I pulled out the high frequency, so we just get the low stuff and that that's gonna kind of help that, like, kind of take away emotion, it's gonna clean it up for just a minute. Then we're gonna go back to the big, chaotic stuff. Now, if you don't have access to a huge archive of beats that you've collected, let me show you something you can do free sound dot or GTA. This is if you took my sampling class. You know this website, um, this is a website where I've got ah, lot of my samples from, um, What you can do is just search for, like, drum loop, and all of the samples that you'll find on this website are free and royalty free. More importantly, meaning that you can use them in your stuff and you don't have to worry about getting sued . That's an okay, wine skull swing to it. That's like a whole track. E could work for something. Um, let's look at this one that could work. You know, that could work really well for what we're doing. That's a good one. So lots stuff here, all you have to do is click on it and then you can download it. You have to log in to download, but it's free to make a log in so highly recommend. Set up an account on this websites. Totally free. Ah, and start building a library of stuff like I have this sample library. Um, I have a whole hard drive devoted to just audio samples of stuff, so Ah, check that out. Okay. Now that we've got a little little groove going here, let's move on and talk about one of the other elements. Ah, brass swells. I thought we devote a little extra time just to brass wells because it's worth devoting time to 26. 26 BrassSwells: okay. When we looked at the Matrix soundtrack in particular, we heard these brass swells. Brass swells are a great ah effect to use in chase scenes. All it is is brass section like trumpets, trombones. Um, just going. Ah, and then stopping. Right. Um, let's try to throw that in. Let's keep using samples here. Um, so I have a bunch of, ah, brass stuff. Brass samples? No, let's find a good one here. This'll Ah, let's throw that in. I want to make a new track for it. Okay, let's say right here, right? Building into the change is a great place to put this in. So as it is right now, it's not gonna be particularly awesome. Let's hear it right. That's not brilliant. But let's make it swell. So to do that, what's really just volume like that? But we want to have in a swell you want to have a little bit of a lip on it, so you don't just wanted to get louder. You want it to kind of curve like this? I mean, not that dramatic. You're right about there. Let's make sure it's totally out at the beginning. Okay, let's hear that maybe a little less dramatic. Let's give it a little bit of all in right there to try that. Okay? It's not bad. We can use another one to get out of this section, right? Not bad. Let's put a little reverb on that. I think it'll sound a little bit better. Is that little echo at the end of it? Okay, that's not bad. Let's see if I have a better Ah, sample. Nice. Uh, this one actually could be useful. What? It's basically a bebop sample, but let's take this spot right here. Going dual audio magic on this. Let's look at this sample. So let's go. I want just that. So I gotta zoom in a little bit more here, okay? I don't want that lift. Okay, Now I'm going to, like, super stretch it out, and I'm gonna improve the quality of it. Kind of, um Now it's getting pretty gnarly, but I kind of like it. Okay. You see how it ramps in at the beginning, but not at the end. So let's reverse it. It's kind of interesting. And then we can do our swell with our audio with our volume. Ah, Hoops that was the river from out. I kind of like that. Right. So that's basically a brass sample. Let's try replacing one of the ones that we made with this one. Try doing that. No, it's a little quiet. Let's just boost the volume of that whole thing. Nice and gnarly. That's not bad. And then this one is something different to get out of this, right? Creepy, Really creepy, because this is a really dissident harmony. So, um, that makes it nice and creepy. But those brass swells could really help you get in and out of stuff all the time, and we can reuse those. We'll try that when we put together our scene. Um, now, speaking of our scene Ah, I just want to show you something. So I'm still in our ah kind of crummy movie that we've been working on because I just opened that session. So this is Ah, the scene. I've been cutting this, too. And just to show you something funny, uh, I'm gonna play what we've written to this scene of these two women talking. Ah, it's totally not gonna work, right? That's kind of silly. So there is no good chase scene in this movie. So what we're gonna do to actually put this into practice is I'm gonna jump over to a different movie. Um, toe actually put this chase scene together, and I'm going to use one of my favorite movies that I've always wanted to try to put some music on. Um, so ah, let's jump over to a new video and then I'll tell you about that. 27. 27 CetaitUneRendevous: Okay, let's take a little little breather from our techniques. And let me just tell you about ah, this just super cool film that you should know about, Um this is a short French film. Ah, it was made. And I'm unsure. Probably the early 70 maybe mid seventies. I think, Um, it is called Satya Own Rendezvous. That means this is I rendezvous or this is Ah, meet up. This is a meeting or something like that. This is a very kind of famous movie and kind of art circles. I guess what happens in this movie is, um, the director whose name is Claude Lellouche. He made this film, and what he did is he got in a car. Ah, in Paris. And he just ripped through Paris just went really fast through Ah, the entire of Paris with a camera strapped to the hood of his very fast car. So you can read all kinds of stuff about this. There have been people that have tried to recreate this and they've gone to jail. Um, I heard once that he they tried to arrest him after this movie came out. They didn't catch him when they made it, but like they tried toe, prosecute him for things that he does in this movie, like speeding and running like hundreds of red lights. Um, I don't know if that's true or not. That might just have been a rumor. Um, he So there's kind of there's not really a plot to the movie, but there kind of is at the very end, there is, like, kind of something that happens. And you're like, Oh, that's cute. Um, but really, I think the motivation for this movie, my guess is that he just kind of want to see if he could do it, see if you could get away with it. So Ah, it's very early in the morning. So the traffic is low, pedestrians are low. Um, and also the light is low. It's kind of hard to see some of what's going on because the sun has just come up. And I'm assuming that he has done that so that ah, he has the least chance of hurting anyone, including himself. But, um, he does it, he gets away with, it s so he's just ripping through the streets of Paris. Now, the sound in this movie is awesome. I love it. Um, what you're going to hear is no music. There is a version of this floating around on the internet that has, like, a jazz soundtrack. And I hate it. Um, the music, the sound that you hear in this is just the sound of his engine just going, um, it's it's so cool because you can just hear every gear shift. And is that this really loud engine? People know what kind of car he was using. I don't know anything about cars, so I'm not gonna try to say, but you can find that out. Um, it's just really intense. So I really wouldn't want to put a soundtrack on this because I think the sound of just his engine is perfect. But for the purposes of this class, let's try to put a soundtrack on it, because it's all just him ripping through the streets, going really fast. And what we're working on would work really well in this. So, um, I think what I'll do is I'm gonna play you this whole thing all the way through just because you should see it. It's just really cool. Um, so, uh, it's called today when rendezvous. It's by cloud the lush, Um, the very beginning. You see this plate that we're seeing here on the screen, and what this says is, Ah, this film has been created without ah any without shortening or accelerating it. Meaning it's it's been made in real time. He didn't speed anything up. Um, he didn't do any edits. It's all one take. So ah, think about that while you're watching this and promise me you will not try to recreate this in your city, Um, you can read a lot more about this film. There's been tons of stuff written on it. There's another film just about this film, Um, being made. Ah, it's only about eight minutes, Um, and it's really wild. So turn your your ah, put on some headphones, crank it up and just listen to this engine sound, and then we'll try to put a score on it. So let's break through a new foot, new, uh, video and that I was gonna play this whole thing and then we'll get back to working on writing the music for it. 28. 28 CetaitUneRendevous: 29. 29 ScoringRendevous: OK, so that's our movie. Um, isn't that just awesome? I just love that I Whenever I'm in, like, a theater and like, checking a sound system or something, I cue that up and ice, crank it up, and then I turn all the lights off and I pretend him in the car because of a nerd. Um, OK, so, um, I'm gonna leave our our movie here behind, because it just is not gonna work for this. So I'm going to a copy of this session. Okay, Now I'm in the copy. Ah, the reason I copied it is because I'm gonna get rid of our movie and ah, add a different one. Go down here and delete that. That I'm gonna take rendezvous and put it in here. Okay, that's in. I'm going to set that aside for a minute because I'm gonna delete all of this stuff that I'm gonna find that ah que that we already started, which I think is right here. Yep. Here's our drum stuff. Gonna take that and put it in here. Okay, so now what I need to do is figure out where in this film I want to score you could score the entire thing, right. Let's just arbitrarily jump in on a spot with our drum loop and just see how it works. Okay, that actually works pretty great. So let's keep going with right there. The difference is I liked where this, um, the secondary beat came in the the one with all the high stuff removed. I liked where that came in, but I didn't like where it came out. Um, so let's make this swell a little more dramatic here, so it's a lot more obvious. And then let's delay this coming back in for another time. I think probably another two times. I want something to happen. I like that this comes in when he's just going down this street and there's nothing major happened. See if it's out. I need something happened that light way. That could be good. Okay, that works. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna have that be the spot that the full beat comes back in, and then I'm going to keep this going all the way to their So now we've got this as a transition. It gives us a little bit more energy. Now I've got a problem, though. We've got this long stretch of this low energy stuff, so I need to do something else here. Let's play around with his brass stuff a little bit more. What I need is just to do something that's going to give me a little bit of energy, bursts of energy here and there throughout this. So let's see what we've got. They're all I could just put some grass in it. Let's try that. Let's go to a sampled thing and add some notes. So that's good. Orchestral. A brass press low sustained, sustained octopus. That's cool. Put this here and replace my piano ethics. I'm not gonna use piano in this section. Okay, let's create a clip and see if we can just create some stuff. Maybe your own. Here, we need a 1st 1 So I'm basically just writing filler here. Um, what key are last one was all about C minor. We could stay in C minor. We're in a different film now. It doesn't really matter, but let's do Let's do like a G thing, because I'm feeling G. Um, I love the dissonance of G to F sharp and brass. I don't know why? It's just something I like. So let's do something like this. It's too short. Little hits here. Let's make him get progressively louder. Are Oops to do that. See how that sounds. Give me some volume. Let's ramp it up quite loud enough. Solo, these See? Why not hearing him? Okay. All right. Ah, I wrote it in the octave. That was too high. So now I'm inactive That this instrument actually has. Okay, let's hear that in context. Okay? Never interesting. Um, let's double it up. Okay, None of that. If we did a swell on, it might be kind of fun and made it longer. You know, another thing we could do here is mess with the panning. Panting is the left to right? Ah, sound. We could go like that. It's gonna make it feel like it's moving from one side to the other. It's kind of cool. Um okay, so that's a good one. Um, let's do another one. Something kind of high and long. I don't know if I have this active, but I don't know if this sample is gonna work on it through a single note. No. So I'm gonna need a new instrument here. Let's do brass on Samels Fort Sound. No, Rotondo is good. Sort Sando means loud and quiet and then swell up. So, uh, like that. So let's put this one and I don't know right there. See what I got for volume here No much. I don't really have to swell manually in this one because it's already there in the sample . And, you know, we could do here is we could do one of these matrix like things. Watch this boom. Let's go up 1/5. Two D. This is like a total of matrix riff I'm gonna do right here than 1/2 step than 1/5. They like that going bone, bone, bone bum. Fifth half step. Fifth half step 5th 1 of my own Here. Be so f sharp. Okay? I lied on my timing wrong. Well, let's try it. That's cool. I still overly dramatic for just driving down the street, but that's a total matrix riff. It sounds totally cool, right? Just the fifth and then 1/2 step, and then 1/5 and 1/2 step benefit. Um, that's here in context. I kind of wanted that to happen. here, but let's try. Okay, that's kind of neat. Let's leave it. I don't know. It kind of works. Kind of doesn't, but I like the that. I got to talk about the Matrix riff. Um, put another one of these in, Maybe again. But the second time, let's move it up to ah, do you sharpen an E? Oh, man, I don't have those. Then it's either in the sample. And then let's add another one of these. Let's see what noticed this on. This is on Ah, a sharp and a bean natural. So let's put this on a be natural. Maybe up inactive. Oops. Went down active. That's really high. Let's get that starting point. Just right. Be natural. So now this is gonna ramp up, and then this is gonna take over, and then maybe at the end here, we can move him up to a C. That's kind of cool. See what happens there. All right, we're killing some time. This is good. Let's take these two. Let's put them over there. I don't like this repeating that much to do that. Maybe take our matrix riff again, but let's change it up a little bit here, do that. Except this time, let's start a little bit lower. I don't really care about my keys right now. I'm just gonna trance and then let's take this and tie it into that last note that we heard . So that would be this one. It is a G sharp. Let's get this happening on. So one of those two notes is a G sharp right there. My lowest note is a G sharp. Let's make that go a little bit longer this time a lot longer. This time it's Ramp it up a little bit more, slide it back a little bit. Come back down and be a nice sound. How much longer I got to go here? Not very much longer. I wanna line one of these up to be the end to accompany that brass swell. So let's see what else we got. Let's try throwing this back in somewhere around there and then this right here. But let's make it high again. Okay. And then one of these right there. But let's do this woman a little bit lower. Okay, Let's try that. Okay. Lets see how we did through this whole middle section. Theo. Okay, Not bad. Um, two things that I would fix one is this matrix rift doesn't really work. It's just too dramatic for this. That's like something ethereal and crazy and mysterious is happening in this intense thing . I like the sound of it, but I don't really think it works in this context. Very well. The other thing is this swelling one that goes up and down, that's longer. That doesn't really work. So let's tighten that off right there so that it goes down really fast. Hoops. That wasn't volume. That's what I wanted. Something like that. Maybe a little bit work through river about that. It will be nice. Okay, that kind of thing. Great. Okay. But, um, I think you get the point of this kind of constant intensity and these little bits here and there of the chasing that's breaking. Do another little analysis of this. Ah, and just kind of pick apart what I did. And then we'll move on to something new 30. 30 AnalysisOfThisCue: Okay, I've gotten in the habit of doing this analysis of these as I go, because I know people have asked me to do them. There's not a ton to analyze here, but let's go through it. So we've got to beat going here. We took the beat and just pulled out the high stuff with an e que. Let me show you that one more time. So how many key works really quick is this is low stuff. This is high stuff, and this is what's getting through. So here the IKI wasn't doing anything. Everything's getting through now. I'm cutting off some of the high stuff, a lot of the high stuff, all the high stuff, and just this stuff is getting through. That's how many key works I added this brass sample just for effect. What pitches they are doesn't really matter. At this point here I added a minor second brass sample on just faded it in, Um, just two notes side by side for that minor second sound here I did this matrix riff that I like, um, it's just a root and then 1/5 above it, and then 1/2 step above that and then 1/5 above that, then 1/2 step above that and then 1/5 above that. You keep doing that all day long for as long as you want it to happen. I don't know if that falls into a scale or a key. Let's see you were in G. That's in G. That's not in G. Or that would be in G minor. I guess we could be in G minor here. B Flat would be in G minor. Be natural, would not be in G minor, so it doesn't really fall into any key. We might be able to call it an exotic scale, maybe, like Octa tonic based scale or something like that. But it doesn't really matter. It's like a riff. Um, it sounds cool and creepy and mysterious and doesn't really fit in our Q. But that's OK here. I had another minor second pattern, and then I went up a little bit with it. Just something a little higher, as long as it's a minor second, doesn't really matter what notes were doing righted some long notes, another just half step. This is all really based on half steps and minor seconds more minor seconds. Matrix riff, Minor seconds, minor seconds Matrix riff are no. This is just long tones, but by going up 1/2 step and in The Matrix rift. So that's kind of it. There's not a lot to it. It's really like sound effect, kind of stuff that I'm using the brass for. It could just as easily use winds, even strings to some extent. Like what we saw in the Born example. Um, if we were using strings, we might do something longer, kind of filling in some of the sounds, and you could even actually add strings to this Teoh live underneath all this brass stuff just to thicken it out a little bit. But we don't think it out too much because, um, we want this to kind of be a break from this bigger beat with all the sounds so really simple with harmony, no core progression, no relieving key, just kind of doing a lot of spooky minor second stuff for dramatic effect. That's kind of it 31. 31 TensionCues: Okay, Next, let's talk about another popular type of Q that you come across. And this is the tension que these are fun. I love writing tension cues because you can put in a lot of nonsense. Ah, and as long as you pace it correctly than you have Ah, something really dramatic and scary. Basically. So what are we talking about? With tension, queues were kind of talking about, ah, suspense, building a lot of suspense and most commonly used in like a horror movie, but also a lot in television stuff. Um, if you imagine television show in which something, ah, scary is about to happen. The lead up to that. The quiet before the big, um scary thing is attention Q. So attention cues are typically pretty quiet. Um, we typically use a lot of low stuff because low stuff builds tension. We typically have a couple things that jump out. Eso inattention. Q. You might have, like a lot of low, growly sounds and then out of nowhere, just like a box, you know, kind of thing. And then but it being really isolated. We also use a lot of dissonance. Intention Queues. This is another reason that they're fun to write because you can just kind of throw some notes, even samples. You can just kind of throw samples together. Um, and if you mix it right, then it'll be a lot of tension because you want a lot of dissonance. So it's really about pacing with tension cues. You want it to be very slow. It's like somebody breathing like you almost want to get in the head of the person that's about to be scared and think, Okay, you know, like this is the pulse that we're breathing. Every little thing becomes a big thing. So these, like outbursts of sound become really pronounced. Ah, let me look at a couple. Let me show you a couple things, one in particular. I think there's this cue from the ring that I like, um, kind of the big moment. But it's not a shocking moment. It's not like a boo scare you. It's like a slow evolution. You can hear these low, growly strings in it. Let's break through a new video, and then let's look at the ring, and then we're going to talk about what goes into making attention. Q. Then we'll look at some of my own 32. 32 TensionExample TheRing: So this is the movie The Ring. It was a very popular horror movie. What we're going to hear in the scene is ah, lot of low growly strings, really dissonant, especially as it builds up near the end. You're going to hear just where are just this roar of stuff? Um, a lot of Chromatis ism, no core progression, no melody, mostly music as sound effect here. Um, we don't really care what notes the musicians are playing. Um, as long as they're dissident. Really? So you'll see what I mean in this cube. So this is when the kind of monster crawls out of the TV thing. So and the music is not overpowering. Theme music is very quiet. It's very subtle. So listen close to this low string stuff. Here we go. - Cool , right. What we have here is low strings. There was a couple piano hits. Lopiano is another good thing to hear. You can hear kind of right away. These little outbursts of sound, right? That's kind of what this is all about. So we've got this low bed almost like a pad of dissonant, creepy stuff. And then these little outbursts. Let's let me point out one that happens pretty much right away here. So we've got the low stuff right there. Those winds was that winds a little bit of strings. Just a dissonant kind of ah, burst of stuff. And you can also hear is we keep going. Ah, Lopiano note that pops out right There was our Lopiano note to that again right there. So there are these little things, and what it's doing here is just really kind of adding to the creepiness of the scene. It's very environmental, right? So it could be really fun to make these. So let's look at another example in this next example I'm going to give you is one that I've made. 33. 33 DissectionOfTensionCue1: Okay, This is a cue that, um I had to make four. This was actually for a TV show, Scary TV show. So in this were primarily using strings. One of the techniques I used in this is repetition of a single note. I really like doing this for attention Queues. There's nothing in my mind more ominous than just one note repeating. It's like there's an element of frustration with it. Like we just hear this note over and over. And we're like, What is that? No gonna dio And it can create a lot of tension if you do it right. So what we have here is this repeating violin note. Sounds like that it's gonna happen a whole bunch throughout this whole que and then all of this weird, tremolo dissonant stuff happening throughout it. So just roaring strings got one synthesizer element. This is just a low note that's going to start after the first kind of actually after the second Ah, repeated note in that violin. This is going to start, and then it's gonna exit right on this first big boom. So it kind of creeps in and creeps out. Add a little suspense and then in this particular que it builds up to kind of a big climax . So we have just a lot of dissidents and scrapie strings and all this stuff, and then there's a big hit here, and then it goes down to nothing. There's kind of, Ah, switch in the scene here, and then it kind of starts to build up again. Um, and it has a smaller climax here. This is just kind of the architecture of the scene. So let's hear it. Then I'll talk you through a couple of elements, one in particular. - Okay , that's the end. So it's kind of two cues in one kind of really close together. So I put it together. OK, so there are kind of three elements that I'm using here that I'm using a lot. I talked about the repeated thing that that's an element, but not one of the three that I'm going to talk about. Um, I could get rid of that, and a lot of this would still be effective as attention. Que because remember attention, Q. Isn't the most interface thing. You know a lot of this just that sound of the scratchy base upright bass could be enough, depending on what's going on. Um, I like that repeated thing. And it worked in this scene pretty well, but I don't always do that. I'll show you another one in a bit. Where I don't do that. Eso the three elements are Ah, I'm going to use some kind of a technical terms. Ponta cello tremolo endless. So, uh, let's focus in on those and talk about those three elements. These are orchestration techniques. Um, and there are particular things you can do with the strings, but ah tremolo Inglis, You could do with just about any instrument. Um, Monticello is is specific to the strings. 34. 34 PonticelloTremeloGliss: okay, These three techniques that you ought to know. These are orchestration techniques on what that means is that these air specific things we can do with the instrument to change the sound. And I'm specifically talking about strings here. I should make a whole other class just on orchestration. It's a fascinating topic. It's about all the different colors you can get out of an orchestra, and by colors we mean different sounds. We tend to call those colors. Um, there is three that get used a lot in attention que that I want to draw your attention to. So for this, I'm going to uncharacteristically put myself on camera because I want to show you how these work. So I'm going to use the violin, is example. All three of these techniques work Justus well on any of our string instruments being the violin, viola, cello or bass, the 1st 1 is called Monticello. Now this is our kind of fancy musical term, for you can kind of think of it as adding a little bit of distortion. Acoustic distortion. What it means is that normally when we play a violin, we play back. We play right in between the end of the bridge, our end of the neck and the bridge and the fretboard in the bridge right there. That's where we want to play if you play closer to the bridge. So this is the bridge. If we played really close to that, that is Ponta Cello. So this is not Monticello. On this is Ponticelli. It gets a little grittier, a little more distortion. So it's soft, appear normal on Monticello. You get more overtones in it. It's a little gnarly. Er, that's what we're doing. Let's look it for an example of that. See what this is? No, that's It's probably Donatello. A little bit. That's a little pun. A cello. Let's try this one. That's Monticello. That's a couple different, uh, instruments doing it, but it gets a grittier sound. So if you're working with a real orchestra and you want this kind of really tense, gritty sound, you would ask for Ponta cello. Or, if you want to go crazy, ask for multiple Ponta cello, meaning like as much as you can give me like that, like Boeing, right on the bridge. Multiple Ponta cello. Here we're just asking for Monticello and really, I'm not asking for anything. I'm using a sample that has pond a cello in it, but that's what that's called thing number two tremolo Trouble was exactly what it sounds like, right? It just means rocking back and forth. It's great for tension cues. Um, in reality, if you're working with a really orchestra, one thing you have to keep in mind with tremolo is that you can't ask him to do it forever . There is a limit to how long a human being can do tremolo. It's quite taxing on your right arm. So these are things you have to think about when you're working with a real orchestra. But you don't have to think about when you're working with samples or even a, uh, sampled orchestra midi instrument. But normally this only so long. You can do that. Um, it's like a workout to your right arm, but you know, like it could be done really a minute at a time, Um, but even like a minute at a time, it's pretty taxing, so that would be tremolo. And then the last thing that I'm using a lot in this queue is ah, bliss. So a glimpse you can do on many instruments. But not all is just, you know, just slowly moving the pitch now. Ah, glimpse gives us an interesting situation because what happens in ah Gless particularly a slow bliss is that we are inherently creating a ton of dissonance because we're playing a lot of notes that are in between the notes that we know, right? We're not playing. Just see endless ing up to see Sharp were spending some time in between those two notes. That's going to make dissonance. Let's hear, Let's hear this track this sample. Okay, so that's a fast tremolo. And bliss here is just a glass, I think. Okay, so that's a glisten on a harmonic. Here's another one. So that's a glitz up and what we're hearing. And there is all kinds of notes in between the notes. So if you have two people doing a slow bliss, you're going to get tons of dissonance because there's all of these notes in between and they're not going to be perfectly in sync. So it's a great way to create a ridiculous amount of dissonance really fast. So those three techniques are incredibly good orchestration techniques for creating tension cues that they're also useful. Other places don't get me wrong, but especially intention cues. You can do all three of those at the same time. If you want, you could mark something Ponticelli so tremolo and have them do. Ah, glimpse, um, they can all be done at same time. And I think there's a lot of that in here. Stuff like this. That's a Ponta cello Galis tremolo right there on a double bass so it can grate create some great tension. Now let's focus in on a little bit more on this dissonance and what I'm talking about there . 35. 35 AnalysisDissonance: Okay, so this is when normally I would do an analysis of what's happening here. And, ah, there's not much to it analyze in this kind of a que if we had to analyze it, what we would probably do if we needed to, like, come up with, like, a lead sheet for this where we were like writing out the core progression. The best way to write the name of the cords that we're hearing in. This would be with N C letters and it and see, and it stands for no cord meeting. Technically, yes, we're hearing some chords because there are multiple notes happening at same time. But nowhere in that do we have unidentifiable route of the cord. Do we have a pitch center? You know, there's nothing there's You wouldn't listen to this and say, Oh, everything's built around. See, Major, now it's not. Doesn't matter. What we do have, however, is a couple pitch relationships. Let's hear it again and see if we can find any particular pitch relationships. Hoops. Okay, right there, we could say, Well, what is that pitch? That's a look and see if I paid attention to what that pitch actually is. I didn't transpose it. Well, let's figure it out. Okay? It's a G. So that pitch is G. This base note is a G. So maybe we're kind of centered around G. So we're hearing a lot of G here. Now we're hearing noise. Hard to put our figure out with this hit here. Largely percussion. Let's just hear one of those. It was a little bit of pitch in there, but I don't really care what it is. You know, I don't think you're hearing that. And I think this one is the same sample. Yeah, it's doubled it up to make it loud or noise. Sandy eyes mean these glass Sando. I wouldn't call any kind of pitch, so I think you get the point. We're not really focusing on any particular kind of pitch center even though you could, I guess. Say, this is built around G because we have this repeating note and it is a G. But for purposes of analysis, I wouldn't call this in G. I would call this Ah, dissident. I would call it non harmonic of a call it no cord. I would call it any number of things that basically means there is no core progression or harmonic center to this, right? So don't bother analyzing these kinds of things. More useful in this case would be analyzing the kinds of sounds were using, you know, looking for Monticello tremolo bliss, those kinds of sounds and seeing how they're layered. Ah, that would be more productive in this case than figuring out what the core progression is because there really isn't one. 36. 36 Braams: Okay, One more thing to point out here is kind of a fun, goofy thing that happens to be true. Um, one of the trends we see in film right now all over the place is this particular sound that different people call it different things. I've seen it called the Bois as or and but more commonly I see it called the Brams. Ah, like Brahms, the composer. But ah, not meaning the composer Brahms. Meaning something very different. The Brams, Um, this ah probably became popular most popular during the film inception and then was used and tons of other stuff. Ah, this is what it sounds like. This is kind of, ah, video that somebody made of mashing up a whole bunch of uses of this sound. But what it is is the big low sound. Probably on a trombone or a bass trombone. It's going bomb. And then with some percussion right on the hit of it. And, um, probably a double bass in there, too. Here's what it kind of sounds like. What's the most resilient parasite? An idea? Plenty of women. Let's go over the Oh, OK, you get the point. So it's this big, low sound, completely isolated completely by itself. So this is something you could make fairly easily, right? Like something low brass coupled with some strings and some kind of percussion. Probably a bass drum hit right at the start of it also, And it just holds for, like, 1/4 note. Brian. Ah, and that's it. Um, there's even a website you can go to. If you go to this site, you can get yourself the Brams button. It's just a button way. Click it. We get the inception sound. That's it. It's handy. I know some friends of mine have put this on their phone so that they could walk around. And when someone says, Um, hey, man, you want to go get ice cream? They can just turn and look really fast with big wide eyes and go, and it's funny anyway, popular thing to do. You know how to make these? So, um, just dissect that sound. Put it together. If you have a need to make one of those, there you go, the Brams 37. 37 DissectionOfAnotherCue: Okay, let's look at another tension. Q. This is another one of mine that I made. Um I went back through the film we were working on and ah, didn't really find in a great place to put attention. Que so I don't think I'm gonna skip trying to put something on that. But let's look at another one here. Ah, that's all. Put together this one Onley uses piano. This is all piano tension. Que eso. Let's hear it and then we'll talk about it. - Uh uh. Okay, So I was wrong. There's a couple little subtle string things in there as well. And a sound effect. Let's look at a couple things here. So most of this is piano. I did have this sound effect in it, which is just some noise. Just really quiet, very subtle. And then some string things just kind of outlining a chord here like that. Everything has a ton of reverb on it. So and these particular little piano notes have a bunch of delay on them to to give it a little extra, um, time to it, you know, so that it rings a little bit longer. Um, so let's look through what else we have here? Up here we have this this main hit that we hear a couple different times. Eyes just three notes, three piano notes. We've got the low one and then middle one and then high one. So this is actually a prepared piano sample. What that means is that it's a sample of someone kind of reaching into the piano and putting their hand on the piano string and then hitting the key. So it's a little bit different than a normal piano, but I really like the sound of it. It just makes it a lot more percussive of a piano. You know, makes it sound almost like a bell, but it definitely is a piano. So all three of those together like a nice, jarring, scary sound here. And one other thing I did here eyes this simple trick that I do a lot of the time You're just this top track what we're doing here, I have the same high piano note right here. Ah, except I copied it here and I reversed. It will show you. I'll delete that one. All I did here was take this. Put it right there. reverse that, sample said. It goes backwards and that's it, and that's what it sounds like. You gotta put him back to back. If I didn't put it having back to back, it would just sound like this, right? But if they're back to back, it sounds like this kind of ramps up into that adds a nice little subtle touch to it. That's about it, then just low notes. There's a reverse thing again. These two very subtle piano notes try tone apart. Try tones a great way just to create that little bit attention. Now, with this Q. There is actually some harmony. There's some strings happening here, and there's a cord happening here and there, so let's actually do a little harmonic analysis and see if we can pull anything out of it. 38. 38 CueAnalysis: Okay, let's see what we've got for harmony here. So what is this cord? Let's hear what it sounds like first just to remind ourselves. So it's something building up. Let's look at our notes we have and a sharp A C Sharp and a d Sharp. What would that be? So if we called D sharp the route, it would be root. 5th 7th of a D sharp chord. We wouldn't know if it's major. Miners were missing the third, but given the context probably minor, but it's really just root. Fifth, seventh, let's see what comes next here. We would have seventh route this and then seventh route, so we have root 5th 7th of a d sharp, something cord. Now it's interesting that we don't get the third because if we did, would it be a major third or a minor third? Here's what it would sound like. So here's what we have. If we put a major third in it, it sounds like this. If we put a minor third and it sounds like this, it's interesting because even the minor third makes a minor seventh chord, which is not particularly scary. It's more kind of mellow and sad, so I didn't use that when I wrote it. I just did without any third, because the major third obviously sounds too happy, Minor threatened. Sounds sad, new themselves. Scary. So I just used it to build up without 1/3. Ah, that works. You hear In this pattern, we have probably something based on a sharp again. So a sharp C sharp and then f sharp. So a sharp c sharp and f sharp we do it down the right active. So we have. So what would that be? A sharp c sharp in f sharp? Well, if we called f sharp the Route B f a see all sharps that would just be f sharp major. It's actually just an f major chord. Interesting, but it sounds kind of creepy. Let's hear it. Oh, but we didn't account for that note. It's going down to an F natural there. Now we've got something creepy so that f natural is moving us to a more diminished sound, getting us a little bit more of a diminished sound. So that's where we get a little bit more of that creepiness. And down here, we've got another big a sharp in the base coming in so we could say it's based around left sharp, maybe a sharp Um, I again with this one, wouldn't even venture to say it's based around really anything. It's more textural. Tambor role. Ah, attention. You know, it's designed to just create tension and not give you a harmonic sense of anything. Really? Okay, that being said, let's move on and do something a little more funny. 39. 39 MickeyMousing: okay for our last kind of cute technique. Let's talk about something called Mickey Mousing. This is a term you hear a lot and maybe you come across this already. Someone says, Don't Mickey Mouse it, man, Um, people say that all the time. This is what that means. Typically, if someone that says your Mickey Mousing something, it's bad. Um, it's not very fashionable to do. However, it can still be a useful technique, particularly in comedy. Because it comes across is funny. Um, What it means essentially, Mickey Mousing means that you are putting a musical gesture to nearly everything that's happening on screen. Um, if you imagine Old Mickey Mouse cartoon, that's kind of what they did right. They had, like, this really integrated score, where every gesture that they made that the cartoon character would make had a correlating musical sound. Um, it's actually really hard to do, so you don't really want to do it if you can avoid it, but it does come across as kind of funny, um, in modern film scores. We don't like to do it because we like things to be a little bit more abstract, so we might have a musical gesture that lines up with a particular point that's just called a sink point. And that's totally okay. But if you have musical gestures that lineup on every sink point of every gesture, then that's going to turn Mickey Mouse E. And it's gonna come across as being funny or ridiculous in some ways. So it's fallen out of fashion as something that gets done even in a comedy score. You wouldn't use Mickey Mousing a lot, Um, unless you wanted to be really kind of over the top with it. If it was like a really ridiculous comedy kind of scene, you might see it happening. So essentially, Mickey Mousing is a warning that you're you're using stuff too much here, lining up on too many sink points, and it's just becoming comical. But it can also have some useful elements. Let me show you here. Ah, an example. So this is an old 1929 Disney cartoon? Uh ah, yeah, I think so. I think your point right. Too many sink moments. Ah, and it becomes cartoonish. You know, this is a cartoon, so that's totally okay. That's why we call it Mickey mousing. Um at this period in time, that was what you did. Ah, we don't really do that anymore, though. So Ah, let's let me show you some examples of it being used in other contacts. A more modern context. Ah, and let's go to a new video and we'll look at some of those examples. 40. 40 MickeyMousingExamples: a lot of the time with Mickey Mousing it. It lines up with people's footsteps or the way they walk, where you put like a sound on every step they make or something like that. Here's one that happened in Ah, one of the Spider Man movies. I think is the first Spider Man movie, Um, and where he's climbing up the wall and there's like a musical sound for every step he takes climbing up the wall way so you can see that he's doing it. But it starts off very Mickey Mousing, but the beat kind of leaves them behind, and it starts to fall out of sync a little bit, so that makes it a little more. Uh, okay, I guess. Here's another one. This is just a short, um, animation that I found online, Um, with original music by this person. Somebody wrote it and posted it, but I think it's actually a pretty good example of Mickey Mousing in in animated context to kind of help with the comedy of it. Let's watch. It's really short. Yes, amigo. Yeah, that's it. Um, so you know it can it can work. It can be a good, useful technique in the right context. All things in the right context, I suppose 41. 41 GettingGigs: okay for our last kind of big topic in this class. I want to talk about how to get gigs, Uh, in the film music world. Now, I sadly don't have a silver bullet here or a secret weapon. But there are a few things you ca ndu Ah, that will hopefully lead Teoh some jobs, no promises, and it takes a lot of work. Um, remember that the thing about film scoring is that above pretty much all of the other professions in modern music making film scoring is the one that most people want to get into. Um, so there are a lot of people looking for these jobs. So there's two main things you can do that will set you apart from everyone else looking for these jobs. And they are number one. Build a portfolio number to, uh, get that portfolio in front of the right people. So that's what I'm gonna talk about in this section. I've had gigs come to me from, ah, me soliciting work by sending out my portfolio to people. I've done OK with that. Um, I've gotten a couple of jobs that way, but I have also got a couple of jobs that people have come to me for. Um, which was surprising. But I got lucky. I'm I got really lucky a couple times where people heard some of my music and they tracked me down and said, We want you to be part of this project. Um and it worked out really well. You can't count on that happening, but if you put out good music and you work hard at it, hopefully people will find you. But let's talk about how to make that more efficient and get you in front of people. So first thing, build a portfolio. Let's go to a new video. Let's talk about how you can build a portfolio Ah, without having any jobs yet. 42. 42 BuildAPortfolio: one of the great dichotomies and getting work is that you're not going to get work unless you have experience doing that work. And you're not going to get experience doing that work unless you can get work. So you're kind of in an infinite loop. So what you have to do is you have to make work for yourself, and that means building a portfolio of good stuff that you've done. Using some non traditional sources. You need to have films that you scored in your portfolio. If anyone's going to trust you to write the music for their film, so a couple things you can do. One of the most popular things to do for young composers is to score trailers for films, So all you have to do is search around for a trailer online, pull it into your sequencer, mute the audio and right to score yourself. You're gonna lose any dialogue and sound effects that are in it, but that's OK. This is, um, an interesting thing. So, technically, doing this is copyright infringement because you don't own that score or you don't own that film trailer. The movie studio does. So you're you know not supposed to do that, but because a lot of people get their start this way. I think it's kind of an unspoken thing that film studios kind of look the other way on that . So it's pretty common to do, you know. So go download Spider Man, the trailer for one of the Spider Man movies. A new one just came out from when I'm filming this and write your own soundtrack to that film to that film trailer. Don't score the whole film. Um, just the trailer and you might be able to get away with putting that back up online using your own score? Maybe not. If you can't, you've at least got a portfolio piece that you can show someone you can say you can put it on a DVD or on a private link on your website and say, Here is what my work sounds like when put to film, So film trailers are great ways to go. A lot of people do it. It's a great way to build a healthy portfolio of big budget Hollywood stuff, you know. Another thing you can do is those old and silent or just public domain movies like what we were doing in this class. Make some, find some of those and write the score to those movies. Isolate a couple scenes. Put that in your portfolio. Ah, third thing you can dio and probably the best thing you can possibly do for your portfolio is to track down friends of yours that are making films. You might have a friend who's really interested in making movies, and maybe they've wrangled up enough to make a very low budget little movie. That's fine. Right? To score for that film for them. Offer your services for free, um, and write the score to that I m so that you can use it in your portfolio. Now what does your portfolio actually look like? Um, like I said a minute ago, if you can put it on a DVD, that's one way to do it. Better is to put it online somewhere. Make a private link on your website so you don't even need to put it on YouTube or anything like that. Um, just make a website and make the URL like your website dot com slash um portfolio or something like that. You can put a password on it if you want to, you know, really need to, um so that you can send that link out to other people. And they can look at that page and be like, Hey, this person does some good work. You can make a simple website just using WordPress for whatever. Facebook doesn't really work for this. You need, like your own professional website. Lucky for you, I have another class, By the way, that teaches you how to make a website using WordPress specifically for artists. Um, search around for that. It's on this site. Tumbler. Um, it's called like Web design for artists or something like that. Um, walks through that it will teach you how to get this all set up so that you can have a portfolio on your website. Links are the best way to do it. Um, if you could just make a link that you consent to someone and say, Here's my portfolio. Check out my work and they can say they can sit at their desk and just watch and listen and say, This is good work. So to get those first couple things in your portfolio. Silent films, always good film trailers Even better, Um, and working on a really low budget project that some friend is making even best yet, Um, do those things. Find some things you can score. They're out there. Um, there are ways you can just build your portfolio, investigate those three things, and you'll have stuff to put in that portfolio that you will then put online that you can then send to people and say, This is what I do. I am good at it. Hire me. Do that. Um, okay. Thing number two. Getting yourself in front of filmmakers. Let's go to a new video and talk about that. 43. 43: okay, You need to get yourself in front of some people that make movies. That's the next thing you need to dio. You've got a portfolio. Now it's time to get it in the hands of the right people. So where can you go? What can you do? Have a couple ideas for places you can hang out, and they all require them for you to be a little bit bold. But that's okay. You're gonna if you are an introvert or a shy person. Uh, this might be awkward. You're gonna have to go to some places, shake hands and meet people. But let me tell you a trick. Because I am an introvert and a very awkward person. Here's what I do. What I do is I go to these things and I pretend that I'm an actor and I have this character , and this character that I play when I go to these things is a highly motivated, very successful film composer who is dashingly charismatic. So that kind of helps me get out of my shell and just go and work a room even though I hate doing it, and it's really awkward for me, But you got to do it. So where can you go? First place to look is your state country or region? Probably almost certainly has a state sponsored film board mine. Is this one that we're looking at the Minnesota film and TV board? What they do. Their primary role is to get film productions to come to your state and spend their money in that state, because that leads to more tax dollars for your state. Um, that's their main role. So they want to get, ah, like the next big movie to come and happen in your state. Um, but they have other things that they do as well. That first role might not pertain directly to you, but mine and many others. They have a directory where you can list yourself as a composer so that when people are coming to the state to film stuff, they can say, like, here is a list of composers and you're on that list. Be sure you're on that list. Other things that they do is they might have industry meetups, meaning I a gathering, a dinner party. Maybe it's just coffee. Maybe it's just a informal get together off people in the film industry getting together at some place just to talk shop. They do that all the time. So what you want to do is go to those. They're primarily going to be filmmakers, directors, maybe some actors, Um, but mostly behind the scenes people. There's not gonna be composers at them. Composers don't go to these things. Mostly, Um, very rarely have I run into another composer at one of these things, but that is what makes it so powerful. You're going to be the only composer in the room. That's perfect. Last place you want to be is where there's a bunch of composers hanging out right there, all competition. So what you do is you go to one of these things and someone's first thought that you meet is going to be Wow, that's weird that a composer came to this, but their second thought is gonna be ham. I need a composer, so you bring a card that has the link to your portfolio on it, and you hand out those cards so people have your contact info and your portfolio, and then you just meet people. That's the best way you can get gigs So look up your local film board. Also. Look in the nonprofit sector. You might have other organizations in your town that focus on community building for filmmakers. Meaning, um a getting together of people in the film industry. Just as a nonprofit, for example, I have one in my city called I f P Minnesota to his independent film Baker Project. And I believe this is a chain, and I believe that there's tons of these all over, But this is a non profit that does exactly what I was just saying that we hope your local film board does. They have, um, meetings, meet ups, gatherings, and mine has classes in some grants and stuff like that. Also for ah filmmakers, you should join this organization. You should join this organization, get to know them, go to their events because this is where independent filmmakers those are the ones you want to meet, hang out and get to know each other. Get in that scene. People will know you people will know your name, they'll know your work. And hopefully the higher you for a gig. So have a card ready to hand out with your portfolio on it at these things 44. 44 DontBeAfraidofFree: Okay. The last thing that I want to tell you about this is under normal circumstances, I would tell musicians, particularly musicians just getting started, you know, Don't don't play for free, Don't work for free. You know you deserve to be paid, however, in this industry, because you need to build a portfolio because you need to get some credits. Um, people need to know who you are, I would say, and this is maybe controversial. Maybe some other educators would say not to do this, but I would say, Do not be afraid to take a gig, Um, for really cheap or free, meaning you're not going to get paid anything. Be sure you don't go in the whole meaning. Like if you have to hire musicians to record it, be sure the film pays for that. But if an opportunity comes your way and you don't have any real credits yet, then and and they say, you know, we're a small budget thing and we don't have any money to pay you, but we'd love to have you do it, consider it, you know, consider doing it because you need some of those credits, because if you don't do it, somebody else is going to do it. So if it's a good project, if it looks like it's gonna have some legs on it and what that means is that it's gonna go places maybe it's gonna get into, Ah, Film Festival. Maybe it's gonna be shown at a couple theatres. Who knows? Maybe it's gonna be just in online distributed thing, but you're going to get a lot of attention from it. Consider doing it for free, because what you need more than anything is credits and a portfolio, and a credit just means, ah, line that says, you know, original soundtrack by you. Um, you need to build those up if you're going to make some money doing it. So I would say, Don't be afraid to work for free for your first couple projects. Once you can command money when someone comes to you and you've got enough on your plate that you need to scale something back in order to take that gig, that's when you can say OK. Ah, I need this much money to do this gig. But when you get started, don't run away from free projects. Um, you need that portfolio 45. 45 MoreYouCanDo: All right, we are nearing the end. I want to tell you one more thing before we go. And that is what else you conduce do to help your career in particular. Um, what else is coming in terms of my classes, you will notice throughout this class that there's a lot of music theory talk. If you haven't taken my music theory classes, I highly suggest you do that. They're gonna help you wildly. Also, I've got these composition classes that this ties in really well. Teoh, this is kind of Ah ah, third and fourth composition class. Ah, in my mind. So, uh, consider taking those. We talked about a lot of other techniques in the composition classes. If you haven't taken those, I'm still making more theory classes. So and more composition glasses. So there may be more. After this, there will almost certainly be, I should say. Also, we did talk a lot about the technical aspects of film composing, being the software, the hardware, the samples, all that stuff. Please check out some of my classes in that stuff. I have classes on sampling synthesizers and a whole bunch of classes on using able to live . Ah, that's the software I've been using in this class and knowing that will help you want hugely, um, as you build your film scoring career. So I highly encourage you to keep on learning. Learned some of the technical aspects of what's going on because it is important that you know that as well as the film composing side. So please look around for those other classes. Um, I think they will. They will help in your pursuit of being a film composer. 46. 46 ThanksBye: Okay, We've reached the end of this monster huge mega class by the biggest one I've ever made. We didn't completely finished the devil's sleep. Our movie here, But we did some good damage in it. Way scored. Quite a bit of it on. Then we scored a couple other things outside of it. So I hope you got out of this class what you wanted, Teoh. If you did, please leave a review. Let me know. I love reading those. If you didn't send me a message, let me know what wasn't here. Because I love Teoh. See if I can incorporate it into it. All of these classes air living classes. You know, I check in on them every day. So if you have something that you want me to include, let me know on. I will try to put it together and get it in. They're never really finished. Also, leave me questions. Let me comments whatever you want. Like I said, I check these classes every day. Thanks for hanging out. Thanks for being a part of this class. Thanks for being part of my student community here. I love doing this. I do it because I just love doing it, and it's fun. It's fun for me, and it's great to make a couple bucks doing it. So thanks for buying this class and any of my other classes that you may have taken. Um, please consider taking some my other classes. If you haven't yet. That's it. I am completely out of things to say. So let's just wrap it up there. I'm gonna give you one more thing here in this next little segment that comes after this, the very, very, very last one. Um, I'm gonna give you a link for some special offers and promo stuff. Ah, linked to get on my personal mailing list. Ah, where I send out some fun goodies. And also, ah, a bunch of Cuban links will be in that next thing that will get you into any of my other classes for about half off of their regular price. So please check that out and take advantage of those things. And thanks again for hanging out. Um, we'll see you in the next class 47. SkillshareFinalLectureV2: Hey, everyone want to learn more about what I'm up to? You can sign up for my email list here, and if you do that, I'll let you know about when new courses are released and when I make additions or changes to courses you're already enrolled in. Also check out on this site. I post a lot of stuff there and I check into it every day. So please come hang out with me and one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there.