Soundtrack Composer Masterclass: Score Films and Video Games

1. Trailer: welcome to the soundtrack Composure, masterclass, the course that's going to show you how to make music, full films and video games. Essentially, a soundtrack is what separates just a series of images on the screen from a story that gives the audience emotion gold, this force to show you how to use software to come up with a musical idea from nothing. Develop that, and you can make an entire orchestral score using just software. Then you can use that to make a soundtrack for your film. Your video game and trailers. Making soundtracks is one of the most fun things you can dio. Everyone should get the chance to do it. This is a soundtrack composer. Masterclass. Let's start making music. 2. Course Overview: welcome to the soundtrack scoring master class. This is the course is going to show you how to create professional sounding music for your films and video games. This course is for musicians or composers for those who want to actually apply musical theory rather than just memorize stuff for filmmakers or game designers who are curious about how the music is made for their products or just anyone is curious about how do you score film with video game? There's a lot of topics that we will covering this course, and we start with the basics of musical theory, but from a practical perspective. So we will look at how music is used in industry in films and video games. What are they doing when you want to create an emotion? How do you do that with music? Then we'll take that and we will develop musical ideas. Using software will go into creating orchestral music. So how do you create realistic sounding strings, brass and woodwinds? We'll do the same thing for percussion so that your drum sound sound realistic will go into some time management so that you can compose as efficiently as possible. We'll take a look at a trailer and break it down into its pieces so that you can come up with a trailer that people will actually then want to buy your video game or go see your film. And finally, we will dive into the meeting with the directoral game designer. What is the planning process going to be? How do you prepare for these meetings? What is the budgeting like? What do you need to know ahead of time? So there's a lot of topics that we will cover, but I assume that you know nothing coming to into this course, so you don't have to have anything. You don't have to have the background. I will cover from step one all the way to the end, and in the very beginning I will get you started with learning how a digital audio workstation works. If you're interested in that and we'll go into musical theory where you don't have to have a musical background, but if you do, this will cover it developing musical ideas, orchestration, tips and tricks, scoring trailers and working with the director and game designer. In order to get the most out of this course, I recommend that you have a video clip or video game that you can use as a reference, and then you can pretend that you're actually scoring for this. And when you learn a lesson in this course, you can apply that to your own situation. So this is the soundtrack scoring masterclass, and when you come out of this course, you will be able to score a film, a video game, and that's pretty cool. So let's get started and start making music. 3. Course Resources: This course has several resources which you'll want to take advantage of. First of all, there's the recommended course textbook, which for this course is the music producers Ultimate Guide to FL Studio 20. This textbook will give you information on how to use FL Studio, what the plugins are in the software and how to use them, how they work. It'll cover chord progressions, mixing and mastering techniques, vocal processing, vocoders. It covers how to sell your music on online stores and also advice for promoting your own artist's career. So check this book out. These, the Facebook music producer and composer community. And this Facebook loop is for you to share your music with other students, to collaborate, get feedback. So anything that you come up with in the course that you want to share, this is the place to do it. There's a few other Facebook pages we want to recommend is a music producer club. In this Facebook page, they post interviews, techniques by featured music artists, whatever kinda thing as of the day, the genre, how to do specific genres and so on. There's lots of techniques and resources on this Facebook page. Here's another Facebook page called the filmmakers club. So for those of you who are into soundtracks, composing of filmmaking, you'll game design is page lists, lots of resources for that. And finally, of course, there's the Chester sky Facebook page, which will any kind of course updates or new content will be released onto this Facebook page. So check out those resources, the textbook, share your music on the music production and composer community and resources on the music producer club, diploma medical club, and the Chester Skype Facebook page. 4. Recommended Book on Soundtrack Composing: Music for Film and Game Soundtracks with FL Studio: But those of you who are interested in becoming composers, There's a new book out called music for film and game soundtracks with fl Studio. You learn music production, composed orchestral music, and launched your music career. This book covers a variety of topics. It talks about the business of soundtrack composing. For example, if you're trying to learn how to get into the industry, how do you land gigs? Have you pitch a client? How do you organize the entire score from beginning to end and do that in a professional way. Well, this book's got tips for you. It talks about the physics of sound. How does music actually come from sound, and how does that relate to scales, modes? Has that connected to the chord theory? We'll all of those things, how is all of that fit in with one another? And how to use that for practical purposes. It talks about sound design, talks about orchestral music. So if you want to be scoring using live instruments such as string instruments, and you need to arrange all these different parts together. How do you do that? It talks about creating sheet music for live musicians so that you can just export your FL Studio project and it'll turn out into a entire sheet. Score tells you how to score videos side-by-side with music. And it also shows you how to create a variety of emotions that commonly come up with films or video games. Speaking of video games, it talks about how to create interactive music. If you want to make a video game where the music changes depending on one scene to the next. Well, this book will show you how you can create music that adapts to the players actual gameplay. There's lots of topics that are covered in this book and it's a useful resource for composers. So if you're trying to get into composing, check out this book. 5. Film Music With Just Two Chords: Let's learn how to make music. That sounds like the sounds you hear in films. So the easiest way that I've heard is from the pressure Scott Murphy from the University of Kansas. And he is this idea that you can make most film music using just two courts. You don't actually need to know much music theory. It also uses, and it's a very robust and quick way to get generating musical soundtracks. So let's take a look at this. The idea is a few steps. First of all, you need to know what a court is. A major chord, a mine accord, how to transition between two chords, and that's it. That's all you need, Which is ridiculous when you think of how many years some people spend trying to come up composing music, and it could be distilled down into this simple idea. So let's take a look at this. So let's learn how to make music using just two chords. So, first of all, you need to learn what is a major court. A major chord has the following properties. You have a tone that goes up four semi tones get to your major third and then from there you go up three semi tones on and then you're perfect. Fifth, you do that. You get a major chord. What if you want to make a minor chord, how do you do that? Well, you start off with a thing One again. Except in this time, instead of going up four semi tones things time, we only go up three semi tones on them. From there we go. 1234 And you get to your perfect fifth again. And that's how you get to your minor. Try it. So Major tried on a minor. The only difference between them is just the distances between the third. Now, you can do this for any note that you want to start on. Any tonic. Note any first note you could start on in F. For example on Do you gonna have a perfect fifth in both cases. But the difference between the major and the minor it's just going to be whether the middle note that the third is on major third with a minor certain So now we know what a major Courtis and we know what a minor court is. What happens if we were to structure them such a way that we end up with a major court transitioning into a minor chord. Well, this has an interesting flavor to it. It has a sound that we might be able to use. We were using this in the court come court progression and leading into something so done in a lot of films is we've noticed that a lot of films use certain court combinations competitively and using this. We've created a list in this video, and you can use these court combinations that appeared films all the time with a certain association. So now I want to give this a name so that we can refer to this easily. So I'm going to call this a major court major with a capital M. And then I'm going to say the distance between the first court and the second cord has a number. So if I'm going from here to here Capital and Major lower case and for minor, I'm going to say the distance between the the first note the tonic notes, I'm going to say that distance between them as a number, and in this case I'm going to say the number of semi tones between them, in this case, five. So I'm going to call this a major five minor major five minor. Using that we can then give you a list of different chord combinations. And these have associates to them, which are very convenient because this is a way to use them in film music. Sen. Alice give you some examples of what these look like in film, and you'll be able to take this tool out and start composing straight out the box. - Oh yeah , So another thing that's worth mentioning is that thes course can be rearranged with inversions. So if I had a cord such as this major court in G, I can take any note of these three, and I can move it up. Either eight whole tone tire or eight told homes lower, and the court will still be fundamentally the same. Aiken take, for example, his G. And instead of playing in the bottom, I can play at the top, and I could take this note that's a teen, and I could move it all the way down here, so this is still a G major court, but I completely spread it out throughout the keyboard, and it actually sounds a lot better because the notes and so scrunched up with amongst each other so you can take any chord and you can rearrange the notes so that it's an inversion throughout your keyboard just by moving one of the notes higher or lower. Eight notes. Now we can let the Bianna role to a lot of the work for us when we're trying to find if in court progressions, especially when we're dealing with moments, we don't actually have to worry about thinking this because of the piano. Wilken dual workforce. So remember all we need to know is what a major chord and my record is. A major court is just a one, a major third, which is four semi tones, 1234 and then a perfect fifth, which is three semi challenge from the major 3rd 1 Too sweet. If we have that way, always have a major court, no matter what key we start on. And now remember what we have a earlier example, we were using a major five minor, so this is exactly five semi tones in the beginning, So if this is a major five semi tones minor. We could grab this and we can move to a new key on the structure. Essentially be the same thing. This is a way to take your court progression and explore different modes. Explore different keys quite easily just by using your piano to do all the work for you. So this is a useful tool to come up with music. Cool cords for an emotion that you need essentially to cheat sheet, where you can say I have this scene and it has a protagonist in it and I need something happy or something that's likable. And what kind of music would work well with that? Well, I don't know should have the bat, but I know some chords that are useful to start off with, and that I can then expand into a court progression. Had this is a useful way to do that. You can just know that I need this kind of characteristic, and I can build upon that so this is useful. And on this left hand side is what you just covered in the video where essentially I just had the cords and the description on your right hand side over here is the exact same information. It's just phrased in a way that those in music theory will understand and be clear. It's saying the same thing, though the first major try, according the scale, moving to the second major Try accord in scale. And if those of you don't understand this, that's fine. This is the same. Information is just a way that those in music theory will appreciate, so hopefully this is helpful and you'll be able to use this to come up with some musical emotions that you need for your scenes. 6. Motifs, Themes, and Analysis of Time (Inception Theme song): Let's talk about the most important part of a soundtrack for film of the new game, and that is the themes and motifs. The motif is the smallest amount of music that you can make meaningful. It is the group or phrase of notes that one play together conveys some kind of idea, and this idea can be repeated throughout the game or film throughout. And each time it might have different meanings, depending on with Sina's. But you keep coming back to it, and when you keep expanding this motif, it can turn into a theme, which is the recognizable melody and is the part that the whole composition is based on. When you think of a popular film that might be a theme song that comes to mind and seems you hear it, you know what the film wants. Even though you might not be seeing the film, you just hear the sound. Recognize it? Okay, that's from that movie. So this is what a motif developed into, and the difference between them is that motive is a small idea or a symbol that helps to explain the theme well. The theme is the central idea of message So let's take a look at a few motifs and themes in some popular films and video games, and then you'll understand what they are. Fallis One of the clips that I just played view was the song Time from Inception By Hand Zimmer. It's at a beach permitted of around 60 and is in the key of a minor. And it's a fantastic example of how a motif is developed into a theme. And the reason why is because it's really simple. This particular song is made out of four courts. It has an a minor chord, and he mine accord a G and then a d chord. And this cordial slowly developed throughout the song as well as throughout the film we have in just looking at a sheet music. Here we have the introduction of the cords that slowly progress. Then they add in a secondary note to the cord. In the lowest section, we start to add a rhythmic pattern in the left hand, the bass clef, and then we start to add in a counter melody around this points around the 40 or the 49th bar, I suppose, and then around the 65th bar we start to add in the ostinato, which is playing alongside. And then we gradually return back to our counter melody and then closing off with just a single notes that we were introduced to in the beginning. So it's a very short piece, actually. It's very straightforward, simple piece, but it has a lot of emotion when you hear it, and the reason is because of how its utilized throughout the film. It's utilized the different parts it's utilized in the love sequences. It's utilizing the action sequences when he's remembering things when there's emotional stress, when there is belief you hear these. The song played at many different parts. It's actually throughout. The entire film s mostly is just 11 song for the film, with key different elements played in different scenes. So let's take a look at the notes in our sequence, right? This is the song entirely played, and we can start with just looking at the introduction of the courts. So here we have a in the sea in the in the G, the G and the B and the tea and the shirt, and you can see this is repeats a few times. At least you can visually see it, especially when it's played in your sequence where you can see these notes. It's actually the same notes throughout the entire piece to see their repeating, but the difference is that he starts Lee at the start to add in different rhythmic patterns in the left hand. When we get to this section in slowly here, it gets introduced. I'll play. You can see that the pattern gets introduced, the left hand and this is a nice way to see it, because this is what you'll be doing. When you're composing, your own motif is you'll start. The courts start to add in a rhythmic pattern, and then you'll gradually add in the counter melody, which is what happens around this bar. So then they introduced the counter melody, and later on you'll start to see. He introduces off scenarios at the later section entire section that skips that. And then he returns back to the here, and then he comes back to the courts again. The very end. I find that looking at the notes in your sequencer, the Midi notes, is sometimes a good way to understand how music was actually composed ground up When you see it in sheet music, sometimes it's hard to visualize, but in a sequencer you can move around the nose and you can take a look. So I find if you want to analyze a musical score, if you understand how to read sheet music, that's great. But it's also useful to break it up into the sequencers well, to see how it could be you created, because this is usually easier way to hear the notes, whereas when you're just looking at a musical story, you can only see it unless you have a piano, right? So let me just recap how this school is essentially composed here. We started off with their cords way, then added in some rhythmic patterns. Enough left side, we added. In some Austin Altos, we introduced different counter melodies, which are played at different parts throughout the song. And what then Hans Zimmer does is he breaks it up into different instruments, electronic instruments, brass instruments into what he feels would be appropriate for the scene that he's listening , that he's watching and when you play these at different key points in the film, with different speeds with different instruments with difference um, counter melody parts. You'll introduce different feelings of emotion and you do this throughout the entire film, which he doesn't inception. This song is continuously played in almost every scene In the film, you can create a really powerful theme, which is what people remember when they see the film. 7. Leitmotifs: Now let's introduce the concept of a leitmotif. First of all, a little bit of a recap. What is a motive? A motive is a small musical idea that is not represented. Something in a narrative. What's the theme? A theme is a complete musical idea. So think of Beethoven's fifth, where you have a motive and that gets developed into the theme. Now a leitmotif is a little bit different. It's the idea that a musical idea represents something concrete in an airship, something specific. So if you were to think of Peter and the Wolf where you have a story that's told with every single character represented by instrument, you have the cat having an instrument. We have the duck with an instrument. You have the grandfather with a specific instrument. Now Leitmotif came from William Richard Wagner, who came up with this idea because he believed in Gaza. Const. Work, which is combining musical elements together to create something bigger than its individual parts. And he had these operas where everything he wanted to micromanage every single action, all the characters on stage, they all had to hurt their own musical ideas. And what came out of this is that we can ask sign different characters, different actions, different places amends their own musical concept. So let's think of the fume close encounters. Well, you have this musical idea that shown throughout the film, and you understand what the meaning is by the end of the film, it means hello. But the idea of the music has its own specific meaning. Behind it, the meaning is hello. I mean, you see these notes, you realize what the meaning of the music is over time. So this is what your leitmotif is. It has a complete specific meaning. Now let's think about some other examples. Let's think about the Darth Vader theme. Every time you see Darth Vader, you hear these notes, you know it's Dorthe. Bait is a specific meaning. Behind it, they have. Each time you hear these notes, you know what the character is going to be on stage. It's gonna be dark lightspeed too close to a system. He felt surprised was Wijers Clumsy. Aziz Way would be honored if you would join us not true way. Ah, once again, a leitmotif is a musical idea that represents something concrete in a narrative and It's a way to tell the story through sound. Okay, so we have our motif, we have our theme and we have our leitmotif. What do I do with this information? Well, let's think about what's gonna happen to you. Someone's going to come to you, and they're going to say I have this film and I have this video game and make a soundtrack for me and then they're going to expect you to be able to know what to do with that information. And your job is to take that and to come up with pieces that you can put together into a soundtrack. And in the beginning, it might feel like an overwhelming burden because you're not sure how everything is going to come together, but you have some tools at your disposal, and this is one of those tools that you're gonna have available to you. You can say I have these characters thes events, these actions that are happening in the film or video game, and I'm going to associate them with some kind of sound, and then you can come up with this list of leitmotifs that you're going to come up with one of its character one for this scene. One for this environment, this event, and you can keep reusing those elements every time you come back to them in the story of the film of the video game. So rather than thinking of it as a great massive chunk of information, you can think of it as individual pieces that you are going to be scoring for. And this is one of those tools that you can use from break it up into different motifs and themes and like motives, and you can keep using these throughout the story at least time. Use them. They might have a little bit different, meaning depending on what's going on for the viewer at the time. Some kind of action is slightly different, but you're playing the same music. It might have different meaning associated with it, but this is how you can come up with a soundtrack. It's just by breaking it up into individual pieces, such as one of these tools of a motive theme in leitmotif, and you can use these to out your story to build a full soundtrack. 8. Major and Minor: Let's give you a little bit of music theory here. This is the a minor scale. It folks is just on the white notes of a piano. And this is called you A one thing is called you to is called Your three is the culture of four. This is called your five This ecology six times called to 1/7 thing. This is called you one again. You actually turned to the one at the end of the scale and you'll notice it's the same case for all scales. Now, when we say return, what do you mean by return? You mean that if we were to repeat this information, eat whole tones higher, you would get the exact same melody. So now what can we do with this? Well, let's start to make a court out of this. So this is a corgis did. Looking at the first note on 1/5? Why do we call this 1/5? Well, this is 123455 notes high. Remember? We're just looking at the white notes of the A minor scale. So he was your first. We call that a route, and this is called a Fox. Now, essentially, this is another way of saying this is the power court. It doesn't have a major or minor element to it. It's just a chord using a first in the fifth eyes on a minor scale. But this chord doesn't have a gender yet. It's just a court. So what we have here, what we have, this is 1/4 and this has a special name called us a sub dominance, and this is the fifth. We call this a dominant, and the reason we call it this is they come up a lot when we're dealing with music theory. So just remember, 1/4 is always called sub dominance, and a fit is always called a dominant. If you hear that in future, you don't know what those are. Let's make thes into major minor courts, though, so that they're no longer genderless that they have a characteristic, some kind of sound nuanced two of them. So now we're turning cords into major or minor chords. You can have a minor scales, a minor scale, but the chords themselves cannot be major and minor as well. So here in the beginning, we have a minor sounding chord minor, meaning it has its dark sound to it. And what distinguishes a minor chord is that the third is dictating whether the court is in major minor, and what dictates whether it's major a minor is how far it is from the first note. So this is always three semi tones, apart from the first or the root note to make it a minor third. 123 semi toes. If it's three semi tones, it's a minor chord. Then you have your first and a minor third benefits. If you were to make this four semi tones, it's now a major court major. Now, a few things you'll notice is that some of the courts in the scale are major and some of the cords in scale are minor. So the distance between in the first chord is three semi tones from the first of thirds. That's minor minor, but now all of a sudden we have a major court has this happy property to it? I returned your minor on, then major again minor, so it's interesting to note how some of the cords in the scale will be happier sounding cords and some of them will be miners Sattar darker sounding courts, And this is something you can take advantage of. Whether you want to emphasize a happy parts in your song or a darker element in your song, depending on which cords you focus on, are you focusing on and spending a long time on the major chord elements of it? Minor elements of it. So on. So just looking at the notation, we have the eyes and V's and you'll see lower case eyes and you see capitalize. And the lower case indicates minor. Where's the capital? Indicates major. You're probably also noticing that's the court over here, has a little circle and says Dim. That's just indicating it's a diminished chord. So it's saying, instead of a regular minor chord way, have a diminish minor chord that just means that the fit is flooded. And that's not something for this video, but just pointing that out for you. Okay, let's also identify what is an inversion. So this is a chord on an aversion just means that you can rearrange the notes in this, try it in accord in any manner that you like, as long as you're using the same three notes. I can move a note higher eyes, just an inversion, meaning that we now have using the same notes in the tri accord just in a difference combination. But we're using the same notes so I can be arranged anywhere like on It's still with the same court is just an inversion off the court. So that's when inversion is. Sometimes that's confusing to people. If they don't understand, it's just rearranging the court into a different combination, but using the same. So let's look at a relative minor, a relative major and essentially, What we're saying here is that we can use the notes in the same scale but using them, starting on a different note, and it will have a happier property t to it if we're looking at a relative major. So earlier we looked at the minor way were to start on the sea. Um, no way, no how this happier sound, and essentially a relative minor relative major is a scale that uses the exact same notes, and every miner has a relative major. Every major has a relative minor, and the interesting property between them is that we're focusing more on the major thirds rather than the minor thirds. If we looked in their beginning here, when we were looking at the minor a minor, you'll see that the third is a minor 3rd 123 semi tones apart. Whereas if we were to look at the major scale, we noticed that the third is now four semi tones apart. So now this is interesting. If we were to focus on the minor third elements, we're going to get a sad sound. But if we focus on the major, third elements were going to get a happier sound. So here have a little example. Let's have a listen to it in the A minor scale, and it sounds quite sad. Why is it sound? Said Well, let's look at the court's first of all, the's air minor courts. How do I know they're minor because of the distance between the roots and the third is three semi tones, So that's gonna sounds. That's treatable. And now, in the melody side, we're focusing on the minor third elements again because we're moving up to a minor third relationship them we keep going around these notes, so that's why it's going to sound set What if we wanted to make this sound happier? How could we do this? Well, we could have a melody that's gonna focus around the major third set of the minor Third. That's interesting. All we've done is choose notes within the same scale. Still only white notes. But the difference is that we now are focusing on the major third relationships and set up the minor third relationships. And we have this interesting flavor of a major melody over a minor chord. What if we made the court themselves, major? So now we have major in both sides. So this is just an example of show that you can mix and match major and minor, even at the same time. You can have a major melody over minor chords, and you can do the opposite is well, you can have a minor melody over major courts, and this is really easy to flip and flop between major and minor. All we have to do is identify the cords that you want to focus on. Do you want to have 1/2 of your sounding sound? Why, Sattar sounding sound So this is an overview to get you started understanding how the major and minor relationship works at an easy way to start implementing it, just identifying the thirds in your try accord and choosing which ones you want to focus on . 9. Which DAW Should I Use: In order to do film scoring, you need to have a digital audio workstation. Now, which one do you need? It doesn't matter. You can use whatever digital audio workstation that Do you have a background in whichever one you're comfortable in, you can use that. You do not have to use Apple Studio, which is the one I'm using. So if you are not using fo studio this section, of course, you can skip this section and move on to the next section where we will dive into the film's going aspects. For those of you that want to use several studio this coming section, what I've done is I've taken a few lectures from my other course on music producing, which you're welcome to take if you want to go into depth of advanced features of FL Studio and I've taken a few of those lectures and I've stuck them in here just to give a few of you a quick refresher course just to get up and running with FL Studio for film scoring. So, once again, if you're not using, did Fl Studio skip this section entirely? Move onto the next one. If you are using fl Studio and you just want a little refresher. This next section of the course will provide you all you need to know. Okay, let's get into it. 10. Using Modes: so you might know what a major and a minor scale is. But there's actually tons of different scales out there, and the major and minor scale are actually just two off a selection of seven scales and these seven scales air called Moz. Now these modes are something that are used at least a few from are in a lot of soundtracks in films and video games. So it's worth at least identifying what they are and how you can use them in your own compositions. So in this video will describe First of all, what are modes and where did they come from? Then we'll show you some examples of how their use in films and then how you can implement modes for your own compositions. So where did the modes actually come from? Well, they stem from the major scale. First of all, let's recount what a major scale is. If we look at the simplest major scale, the C major scale is made up of the following distances between notes, it has a hold on whole tone, half tone, whole tone. When I say a whole tone, I mean two semi tones combined, so this is 1/2 tone. And here here's a hold zone from here to here is I have to from here to here is 1/2 tone. So the C major scale asshole tones. Now, if I were to change the distance between any of these notes, we no longer have a C major scale. If I were to do instead of whole tone going to another holds own, I went only 1/2. This is no longer a C major scale, and you can actually hear that. But the key thing is that we have created a new scale by changing these distances between the notes. So what happens if we were to have all the notes in the C major scale? But I were somehow to change the distances between them without changing the notes. Let me show you what I mean. If I were to start instead of on the first note. See, Major, if I started on the second note on, I went way notes in the C major scale, but I've started on the 2nd 1 Now, the distances between notes are no longer the exact same order as what they were previously . Now it's instead of a hold on Hold on. Now it's a whole tone half, so it's subtle, but we've actually changed the scale because we've changed the distances between the notes . We've changed the order of whole tones and half tones, and by doing that, we have something new. So when you start on a different tonic note, that's the name we give for the first note way. Start on the second. Ah, in the major scale instead of the first started on the second, we have a new scale. We can do this exactly seven times before we end up back at sea again so we can create seven different scales just by using the same notes in the major scale by starting on a different first tonic notes. So I know this. That will take a little time to wrap your mind amount, but it will get easier once I show you the quick shortcut later on in this video. So for now realize that this is the C major scale, and we have a name for each of these scales that we can create by starting on different tonic notes. So if we start in the first note in the major scale way. Call this a mode. The first mode and the name we've given This is Ionian. So whenever you hear Ionian, it's identical to Major. You can think of him is the same, but we start in the second tonic notes of a major scale. We have the name Dorian. If we start in the third way, call this the fridge in way. Start in the fourth. We call this the Lydian. If we start in the fifth, we call this than mix a leading mix O Lydian. This is the A Olean, and this is actually the same as the natural minor scale. So whenever you hear the term natural minor, this is the relative minor to a major scale. Uses all the same notes C major scale, except it's minor. So uses all the same notes, but it's the minor, and the last one is called the locally in. So the interesting part is that although we use the same notes as a major scale, they sound different. This sounds significantly different thin that one's major ones minor, but they using the same notes in the scale, and yet they have such a different flavor such a different emotion that we get out of them . And even though they're the same notes, we can come up with different chord progressions by saying things is gonna be our first chord. Oh, this is gonna be a first court. And by changing what we determined to be our cords in a progression, we come up with different melodies, even know we're using the same notes in the scale. So what we've done in a lot of soundtracks is we've discovered that by adjusting the scale from one mode, toe another mode waken get completely different emotion. Well, let's think about how these air actually used in soundtracks. First of all, I think about the sound. A Ionian mode is essentially just a major mode. It's just the major scale. The Dorian is essentially a minor scale with a raised six Freedy and is quite different. The Lydian is essentially just the major scale, with a raced fourth, so it sounds mostly major, but with a raised fourth. The mix of leading is a major, but with a lowered seventh. The alien is minor, so that's gonna be a sadder, darker soundings scale. And then the low creen is a little bit of a wild hat all over the place. So how are these actually used in films? Well, Ionian is used, obviously, for happy tune Cesaire. Happy Sounds. The Dorian is more of a jazzy sound. The fridge ing is tends to be used for dark emotional songs. The Lydian is tends to be a jazzy, worldly, triumphant sound mix. A leading is great for a triumphant sounds with brass and strings. Alien is the minor scale, so this is usually something beautiful, something darker, sadder and then no one will uses the locally in very often because it's a little bit odd sounding. So now I have a few examples for you off where these scales are actually used in films, and this is a just a can of a example way to get wrap your head around. How mine I'd be using these modes could save time in a bottle. The first thing that I'd like todo to say every day t tenancy way just to spend them with you way one great website that's useful in case you ever forget what the modes are, what notes they are and you have a keyboard. Nearby is to think of the piano scales dot warg, and this is a great website because it just breaks it down extremely simply, it shows you that seven modes, and if you would click into one of the modes, it'll show you the exact notes that you have in the keyboard starting on each individual note. So if you were to start with a tonic, note your first note being see these, the notes that you will be using. We started with de no de these air the notes that you will be using so piano scales the organs really helpful. Check that out now if you using FL Studio your works even easier for you because they built in the scales for you. If you go into a piano roll, you'll see a little button here that's called the Stamp Tool. You can select that, and you can see the different scales already built in for you. There the door in. They have the Aeolian. They have major Lydian Fridge in mix led in, and you can select one of these. Choose a note to be a tonic. Note your first note and you can see all the notes that are going to be within that scale. And then you know that any note that you choose a song, it hits a note. Thats within that scale, it will sound based on these qualities that we gave you earlier. So you'll know that anything Aeolian is going to sound beautiful, dark as long as you stay within the notes of that scale. So this is how you use modes is where they came from and how you can use them. 11. How To Make Scary Music: how to make scary music so we'll talk. About a few things will discuss how to do jump scares will discuss creepy music. What kind of effects can be used to make creepy music? And, of course, what kind of no combinations can you use? So the first thing comes to mind, of course, is the jump scare, and there's a right way and a wrong way to do Jump scares. People think it's just silence and then a loud noise, but there's actually more to it if you want to do it right. Otherwise, you end up with a really cheesy kind of jump scare that people aren't scared by. And this way you have these really bad movies, so the right way to do it is where you have built up first. Then you have your sides and loud noise. But what goes into the buildup? Well, you have to think about what makes scary music, and that's what makes things scary in the first place. Well, that's where your brain is trying to tell you. You need to do something to avoid danger. If you're running around in the woods and there's something out there that could harm you. You need to be alerted to that, especially if you're sleeping. Or if it's dark hair and you can't see where you're going or what is lurking out there, you're years need to pick up those sounds, so if it is some kind of small animal, it's usually makes a higher pitch sound. So you don't have to worry so much about danger. If it's a higher sound, usually comes from a small thing less likely to eat you. On the other hand, if you have a really large animal that could eat you, that's probably gonna have a deeper sound. So that's going to be a more dangerous sound. Now that's part of the equation. But it's not everything that isn't explain why things are creepy. It because you can have things at a like baby music and you place those in certain contexts and that Syl becomes extremely creepy. So there's one other element, and that's the cognitive dissonance. This is where your mind isn't sure what that sound is. This is This is the part that if you can use this, you can come up with creepy sounds so tense scene plus innocent music, your mind is trying to interpret two different things. On the other hand, you can flip that equation around. And you, if you haven't innocents, scene with tens music that comes a cost. It's funny. So if you have a high sound and a low sound and nothing in between, your mind will be unsure what those are because it's not normally from the same kind of animal. Usually an animal makes a low or a high, not both. So let's show you how to create a jump scare from scratch. Here we have our high sound in a low sound, high sounding a low sound, and I'm gonna play these in isolation, first of all. So here's the high sound. Theo. What is that sound? It doesn't really matter as long as it's something unnatural. And then you can add in something like reverb or delay, which is what you're hearing. And the idea is that is just some kind of should be a safe sound cause it's high pitched, but it's a little unfamiliar. So your things maybe there's something odd about that, and then we have our low sound. So once again, a lower sound is something that's a larger creature, so potentially a little more danger. And it's an odd sound, so we don't know what that is, either. Now, when you combine those two, you have a high sound. You have a low sound. You have nothing in between. Nothing in the middle kind of frequency range, sure years, trying to figure out what kind of creature that is. But it doesn't know what it is. So when you play them at the same time, you're here, gets a little creeped out. Now the next thing I like to do is add in some volume automation, which is all that this is. So I'm gradually getting louder to a moment of climax and at that point, your ears thinking this creature is getting closer and closer to me, so the danger is getting higher, and then we give your mind a little moment of release when we say, Oh, it's going away because it's getting quieter. I can relax for a moment and then you have your surprise with your jump scare at the very end. So you add these things together and here's what it sounds like. So the sounds that are going to be useful for that loud jump scare are going to be frequency jumps, nonstandard harmonies, some kind of noise or chaos. Anything that's beyond the normal range of that sound. For example, if you have a so this is for creepy music. If you have a a violin that's playing at a really high pitch higher than normally plays your ears going to say that's a little bit odd or anything similar to his scream, Which is why you hear those violins that's very soon mature. Scream your ear instantly picks it up. Is something potentially dangerous as well? So thes this this list here can be used for anything creepy or anything kind of unnerve ing all of these sounds. Biologically, your ears are saying these are dangerous sounds. These are not natural sounds. I need to watch out for this. So this is the first key piece in what can make something scary. Now, in order to do that with software, we can come up with some effects and uses to our advantage to come up with a natural sounds . So here are some of things you can do. You can reverse the music. You can slow it down speeded up changes speeds as you go along. All of these are unnatural sounds. You can de tune the music. You can abruptly change the key halfway through. Or, of course, you can add in reverb or glitch effects. And some kind of delay echoes. Any of thes sounds in combination can be used to make your music a little bit creepier. So let me show you this. In practice, let's find something that is not creepy at all. That's not scary. Now let's reverse it. Now I'm going to slow it down. Now I'm going to add clinching effects that this is a little stuttering sounds in combination, of course, with the reverse and slowing down. And finally, I've added in some reverb and delay. Reverb is just the sound, an effect that makes things sound further away in a larger space. And delay is just essentially, echoes were repeated sounds, um, in Tenneco essentially realize that came from this theme. All we did was re reversed it we slowed it down, which also decreases the pitch to make that lower and added in some stuttering effects and you ending up with once you've added reverb delay with something like that s so you can use . You don't use all of these all the time, but you can use a few of these and you can end up with some very interesting creepy noises . Well, what else can you do? What kind of music theory can be applied to this? Well, there's some note choices that often work quite well. And, of course, the obvious. One is the minor key. Use a minor key. It's often associated with scary music, and this is where clashing comes in at root note and the note three whole tones away is a clashing sound. Also, any two notes that are a semi tone apart are when playing in combination at same time. Com across is clashing if you also. If you play wrong notes that will come across as a little unnerve ing. And if you're just using whole tones on Lee, that can come across as a little bit unnerving. So let me show you some examples of these. So first of all, I'll show you what I mean if I just have three whole tones apart. I have a note, and I have a note that exactly three whole tones away from it. Remember, this is one whole tone. Two whole tones, semi tone, Colton. Whole tone, whole tone. Holton. So three whole tones apart creates this clashing sound. Now that could be higher. Three tones that could be lowest, three semi tones works. And if you're alive, done here is I've increased the the volume over time, and also you have this sense just a little unnerving. Now what I did with those violins earlier was the same thing. All I did waas have a note and the note that's exactly three whole tones away. And that's how we got this sound Eyes is a violin playing a clashing notes combination, So that's the three whole tone apart method. Ah, you can have clashing notes, of course, as well, which is where you have a note that is exactly a semi tone away from another note and is playing at the same time. So I have in this case a C and they be, and I am. I'm playing these at the same time, and this note is just exactly a B as well. So it's just an octave higher this'll nasty sound for years, and that sounds unpleasant and it's unnatural. So I would plays again. I'm just increasing the volume as well. Also unnerve ing a little bit creepy. You can use wrong notes. Wrong notes, of course. A little bit unusual for your ears to hear. So I'm just gonna take these notes, make some randomness out of it. Just if you're using FL Studio, you can go to tools and randomize and you can just do you send me like that and finally, we have the whole tones on Lee. So when I use a whole tone once again, note hold on whole time, whole town and you can pick this with any key. It doesn't matter. I can just move these around. So any of these methods will come up with little melodies that will be unnerve ing two years. So here's your cheat sheet. To make a jump scare, you have a buildup of a creepy high sound combined with a creepy low sound with nothing in between. You rise up of intensity over time, which is tricking your ears to think that something is getting closer, but it doesn't know what that sound is. You have a moment of release followed by a loud sound that is clashing. So that's how you make your jump scare correctly. Now what kind of scary sounds are frequency jumps, some kind of non standard harmony, noise, chaos, something that's beyond his normal sound register something that's playing at a A really high sound of really low sound is where you change the pitching that will work. You can create creepy music by using on natural sounds, which is those scary sounds I just said. Also, the effects you can use or reversing the music, slowing down, speeding it up, changing speed as you go along d tuning the music, changing the key as you go along. All these are going to sound a little bit odd to your ears. You can combine reverb, glitch ing effects and delay to any of these above things, and these will all serve to enhance the effect. And if you want to do something, that's going to be a little bit odd to your your audience, if there'll actually looking at the screen, do you have a tense scene? But you have innocent music that can come across creepy and finally, the note combinations. The music theory part is you can hear the use a minor key, you kind of clashing notes as the root note and a note that is three whole tones away. You can use any two notes that are semi torn apart. You can use wrong notes, and you can use just whole tones. So this is your cheat sheet. You can use this to construct terrifying music on its own, and you'll find that if you do this, the music itself, even without any visual aid, will come across as creepy and unnerve ing. So here is how you make scary music. 12. Getting FL Studio: So for this course, you're going to need FL Studio. You can download a free version at this website, www dot image line dot com slash fl studio. Go to downloads and you can get a trial demo version. This will allow you to use all of the plug ins with a few limitations. For example, you can save, but you won't be able to open your safe projects until you've actually purchased a full version of the software. And some of the plug ins will be demos. If you do choose the purchase Good Apple Studio and several different addition additions with different features between them, you can check out all of the comparisons. One of the key differences is that between the Food Edition and the Producer Edition, where the producer edition will let you accord with your microphone and record audio into your software. So you might want to consider that once you've downloaded the free version or purchased than open up FL Studio and we can begin 13. First Song In FL Studio: in this video, we're going to create your very first song in FL Studio. We're going to create a very simple trap, beats and introduce you to the channel rack and the playlist in FL Studio. So hopefully when you've opened a federal studio, you're seeing something similar to this screen that I'm looking at right here. Just in case that your screen looked a little bit different. Go to file. You're from templates. Minimal basic with limiter. Make sure you can see this channel rack. You can open that by clicking this button, and the channel back will appear. Okay, So what is a channel wreck, exactly? Well, it contains a bunch of instruments or sounds or automation, and it shows you a slight snapshot of the notes that are being pressed by the instrument. So what we have here is four different instruments. We have kick drum, they're supportive and sounds a kick drum, a clap sound, a hat and a snare. And we can create notes to be pressed by left clicking, and we can lead them by right clicking with your mouse. So what I'm going to do is create a trap beats which you can either copy or create your own , and then we're going to export thes song to play the sound. Make sure that this button is pressed, which tells FL Studio to play the pattern. Okay, you get the general idea, you can add notes, and you can make interesting melodies just by playing around with the channel. Lack really easy way to do this Now that you have your melody, let's add this pattern to the playlist, which is this year. If you don't see this, you can bring up the playlist by pressing this button to add the, uh, the pattern right click on this button that looks like a piano left click on pattern, and then you can add the pattern to the playlist. What you're going to be doing in future videos is we're going to be stacking different elements together and playing them at the same time, and that will help create a full sounding song to play the playlist. Make sure this is un selected, and you'll see this little arrow is now. This arrow cursor is now appeared, and you can play sound theme, so you get the idea. Now let's save our song. If you purchased the full version. If you only purchased the demo version, you'll have to, uh, skip this step house. You can go to export and wave file, save it wherever you want. I'm putting on my desktop and these settings, okay, for now, so you can just hit start, and that's it. So we've created our very first drumbeats NFL studio, and that's all for this video. We'll see if it in the next one. 14. Channel Rack: in this video, we're going to explore the channel rack much more in depth. We're gonna talk about all the different features involved in the channel wreck. Starting from the left hand side, you can see the ability to mutant on mute channels. So let's play these. And if you left, click on any of these less here, can you? That section if you down control and then you left click allows you to focus on just one specific sound following that have the ability to pen. That's what this little not does here. Following that, the volume this is the mixer tells you which channeling you're gonna put to the mixer and we'll deal with that another video. Then we have the samples or the instruments you can click on the sound, and it will bring up more options. In this case, since it's the sample, you can see the way form right here, and there's a bunch of options that will probably explorers later on. Following that, we have to step sequencer where you can left click to add notes, and you can right click to remove notes. Over here, we have the ability to view either the step sequencer or just the piano notes because essentially, when you're adding to a step sequencer your adding notes, which could be viewed in the piano roll, and you can actually see that by clicking on this button Here. You can see this in the piano goal view. This here is the swing. What it does. Is it at a slight delay between start time of be playing a note? But what if you wanted to? I only have the swing affecting one of these sounds instead of everything in this pattern, which this does well. What you would have to do is you would have to go to your sound or your instrument, and by clicking on this button with the wrench, you can see there's an option to handle the swing just for this particular sound. This button here is the pause button. Over here. We have some more options where you can. It's just a menu with a bunch of features. Here's how you this plus button down here allows you to add different instruments of different sounds. This is the ability to create groups. So let's say I wanted to group the clap and they had together. Well, how would I do that? Well, first of all, I would need to select several different sounds, and I could do that by left clicking and then holding shifts and in clicking another sound . And then what you can do is you can group them by either clicking on this drop down there on going to group selected or you compress all G in a press Ulchi and it's called his hat and hats and clock. So now you can see we only see two of these things happen, clap. And the reason is because we've created a group called Hats and Clap. We can always see everything if we picked all. But if we want to see just these groups now, we can go with a hand clap and it'll just show us the two of these. This is a more useful when you have dozens and dozens of instruments all lined up, and you just need to see a few of these at a time. Next is the renaming where what you can do is you could be named your sounds and instruments. Let's say I wanted to rename the clip the kick or I wanted to identify this in some way that I can pick this out well, you can right click and go to rename color and icon, and there's a bunch of options here. Let's say I want to give it a Nikon. Let's give it a thumb's up back on and we call this awesome kick and our color. That's something by left clicking on red so you can now see that this is indicated it stands out from the way it used to. If you just want to do is by default, you can write, you can right click. We name Color Nikon, and there's a drop down button here and there's a bunch of defaults. Let's say I can't click here. You can see it automatically just picks one for me. Okay, let's talk about the really important items here, and that's the ability to copy and delete. You're gonna be using this a ton. One ways to right click and click Clone Clone is essentially copy and FL Studio, and you can see it's made a copy of that. The other way is to press control our ultimate and then see, and you can see that everything is highlighted has been copied just by holding down, alter and impressing the sea on the keyboard, you can copy. What if I want to delete this while I can either right, click and delete? Well, the alternative is to highlight the ones I want. Once again, you can. I, um, select molten thin, one by left clicking and then holding downshifts and clicking again. And you can delete by right clicking and pressing delete or by pressing, also holding that down and then clicking delete on the keyboard. It's gonna warn you that you're about to delete the clip, so make sure that your 100 isn't sure about this because there's no undue when you're deleting in this sense, in general, when you want to undo something, let's say I have some notes. Here. You can press control and said, And what controls that does is controls that is the undo button. But if you want to read you something, you want to keep on doing something you have to press control Altman set, and that's undue. Whereas redo is controls that Okay, let's talk about shifting shifting that say you want to move these kicks down to the bottom . How do we do that? Well, first of all, you select all of these. Then you hold down bolt and you press the arrow keys down. So old and them down her off. What if I wanted to move a few these notes here? Let's say I wanted to move the's over here. There's a way to do that, and that's to press control down and then left or rights with your arrow keys on your keyboard. I don't use this feature too often, but the downwards I use quite often open down. So that's Alton Arrow keys. Okay, the final thing that I want to mention here I know there's been quite a bit in this video is just the colored radiant. So one way is to constantly be changing the colors of all of these items, and I can get quite tedious. How much better way is to select all of the instruments and sounds and then click on the drop down arrow, go to color selected and an either greedy int or random. If you click greedy int, you select the first color that's going to be here, and then you're going to select the final color, which will be down here and you can see that it's nicely selected. A range of colors that you can see on alternative is to go to color selected and then random, and that's probably the coolest way to do it. Okay, that's it for this video. Now you pretty much an expert with the channel wreck, and we'll see in the next video. 15. Piano Roll Overview: and this video, we're going to be exploring the Piano Bowl NFL studio, which is where you're going to be composing most of your melodies in order to open up the piano. Well, first of all, you have to have an instrument to be composing with. So here's the channel rack, and I need to add an instrument to the channel back, so I'm going to right click on it, replace with Let's Go with FL Keys. Generic sounding measurement. Okay, now I'm going to right click and go to piano Roll. That's how you open it up. So this is the piano goal. If you're is a smaller, just click on the every size, and that should make this full screen. So this is the Piano Bowl. This is what you're going to be looking at a lot of time. You can add notes by left clicking. You can remove notes by right clicking and dragging across the note. If you need to cut the note in half is a feature here, right here. This is the slice tool, and it allows you to chop notes up in half. If you need your mutes a note, you can double right click and that will meet the note. So now if we would have played this and you can bring it back by do things the exact same thing. So double right clicking. Okay, let's talk about how to copy you learn at a copy knows. So if I go see here opening up the edits and you can see that there's a bunch of similar controls that you might have seen before in a word document. So example. To cut its control x a copy, control, see paste and duplicates the one that I'm used the most of the time that's controlled. Be so, first of all, I guess we need to learn how to select the notes. So to select the note, you hold down Control left Click, and that will select a note. If I want us like more than one note, let's say I've selected these two notes on any of the select another one. I go control shift and then click on the note I want to add. It's also the same way to de select, so I can once again hit control shift and then click on a note, and that's going to de select the note. Okay. How do you zoom in and out? Well, let's say I have a bunch of notes all over the place and I want to see what it looks like from a larger view. I can hit control and then right click with my mouse and I will zoom out to provide the optimal view. If I've gone down and I hit control and right click. Once again, it'll readjust to finding the optimal view. If you want to see a larger scale, you can also play around with this. Snap up here and it will a just of you. But I don't really play with that. I just hit control, right click, and it'll find everything for me. Also. You can hit control and then all a and I'll select everything. Sometimes I do this. What if I want to play just a small section off these notes? So I want to play from here to here. How do I do that? Well, I left click. Sorry. I hope I'm control and then left. Click on this timeline and I can drag however long I want to be playing for. So now if I hit play It's only gonna play within this section here, and then it'll look back to the beginning. Okay, what's this thing down here? Well, this is the velocity, and it's similar to volume, but it's a little bit different, and I'm going to illustrate that in a second. So it's at some notes here. Groups. So this is the velocity. Aiken. Decrease the velocity or increase it. The reason is different than volume. You can click here and you can see there's several different options is that when you're playing with certain instruments, the velocity might actually change the way the instrument sounds. For example, it might be more intense. If you're playing a violin, then a velocity that's lower, whereas volume is on Lee. How loud and quiet against. All right, let's talk about some of the other options up in the buff. So at the top, you also have the ability to look at scales by clicking this button. Here, you can see all the different scales that you could ever want, and there's a lot to choose from. Let's say I want a blue scale see, So if I click on that and I cook on any of these notes, it will find the blue scale for that. So these air knows that are in the blue scale for one active, - not the greatest. But you get the idea. It's a really handy way just to see what Notre in the scale right away. Something else that you're going to want to know about is the magnet here, and this is how big and how zoomed in Are you going to be able to interact with the notes? So let's say I want to make a no. But I want to make it in between this beat here. How do I do that? Well, you played this magnet here, and it allows you to make changes to smaller increments. So now I can make any commit halfway. And I think you can even go smaller than that. Yes, so that's available to you. Sometimes I choose none as well. If I want to have some random variation just to play around with it, then you can this really choose any points? All right, and the last thing that I want to mention is something called ghost notes, and this is extremely useful. Once you get the hang of using piano bowl and using Montel Instruments. So first of all, you have to enable that ghost notes. So go to here and click on view. Make sure that Oh, no. If you help us cross yet helpers and here's goats notes, make sure that you have this available edibles up to you whether you want that or not. So now if I have another instrument, I'm going to bring up the channel back. And I'm going to I'll just call this for now. Actually, no. Let's make this a different instrument. Let's make this a boo bass. Sounds like a Seinfeld instrument going to right. Click. Going to be a novel of the base. Stop. Uh uh uh uh uh. So if I'm playing this, uh, but if I go into the piano now away from my bass instrument, I can actually see the bass notes, and it's really helpful timing similar. If you do choose to use none for your magnet, you all over the place. And then you change your mind about the scaling or your recording with the midi keyboard or something else, and you don't have precise timing. Sometimes you'll see that this is actually slightly out of the beat. So we What you can do is you can select all the notes or the notes that you want to. I just I'm just gonna just a few of these and you can go to file and it a site tools. And then there's Qantas, and what it will do is it will lock the note toothy start time of the step that you choose , So you'll see what I mean when I hit this. So you see, it's automatically adjusted. Yeah, right there. And if you're wondering how I'm doing this right here, I'm just doing undo and redo. So read it. Here, you can see undo is control, is he? And redo is control. Ultra easy, but undoes usually all you need. Actually, no, I use both. Okay, so we've covered quite a bit in this video. We've talked about how to get into the piano roll, how to move notes around shift notes and looked at some of the features above on top, how to snip parties, the magnet tool, how to view scales. And finally, how to use ghost knows. All right, that's enough of this video. We'll see in the next one 16. First Song With the Piano Roll: In the last video, we explored the piano bowl. Now we're going to make our very first song, and it will help you really ingrained the idea of how to use P animal. So I've just loaded up to a different instruments the FL Keys and blue base case. You don't remember you just right click, insert or replace. And then there's FL Keys here, and hopefully you see the boot base up here. If you don't see the blue base, you can add it by going to more plug ins. And you should just find the boob a somewhere around here. And then if it's not checked, just make sure it's checked. Then you can go for a click insert, and the booby should be up there. Okay, so I'm gonna make sure he's about selected. Going to go into my blue base by right clicking piano goal and remember, week add notes by left clicking. So I'm gonna make a simple melody here. Uh uh uh oh. In order to play, I have to make sure that pattern selected so that it will play the pattern to copy. Select the notes by heading control on, then left looking I can copy by control. See, I'm gonna duplicated by pressing control and me Sokoto . Now, if I want to go into my other instrument channel wreck now, I can see that the base has some notes in the hole. I'm gonna go into my piano instrument now by right clicking Now I can see there's some notes here. The's air, the ghost notes. In case you don't remember how to get these, you go into the option. Go to the tools. Sorry. The helpers on ghost notes. Make sure these air viewable, so help you with timing. All right, I'm going to copy this Aiken shift to the other instrument by a double, right clicking on the ghost note, and it will take me back to whatever this instrument is in this case. Is the blue base gonna copy this? Duplicate that. I'm gonna go back to my piano keys. Another way you can copy is by holding shift and then left clicking on the notes and dragging. I can choose to play just this section by left clicking and then dragging. - We owe holding sounds. Okay, so that's it for creating your first song inside a piano roll Now this is a pattern, and this is only within a single pattern. So it's good practice to put this into the playlist. So I'm going to come out of the piano roll and this is all within pattern one, and you could have multiple patterns and you can add those to the placed. So let's do that. I'm gonna open up the playlist now. I have to choose which pattern in this case, we only have one. But if you had more than one, how would you add it? Well, there's one good way to add patterns to with the panel, and that's to right. Click on this button here. Then you can see you a list of all of the patterns that you have. This case, we just one, and then you can add it to you playlist. If you play is going to play the playlist, that is not gonna play. Side is gonna play the pattern, but we actually want to play the playlist now the terms a little bit confusing at first, but once you play around, you'll understand. So now we can play this part. Okay, so you get idea of how you can use the piano bowl to create songs and melodies. Feel free to create your own song and share, and hopefully we'll be able compare with some of your peers, and they might like the song as well. So hopefully this video is helpful and we'll see in the next one. 17. Mixing Overview: mixing is the process where you choose which instruments and sounds will stand out up off the other instruments in the zone. So you're going to choose that the main melody stands out in terms of being able to be heard clearly and is allowed a volume than the lesser elements that are less important in terms of the melody. So it's about carefully deciding which sounds will sound good and which one sound bad and need to be minimalized. This is also the point where you start adding effects to carefully craft your sounds. So in this video, what I'm going to do is over a few all of the features that come with the mixer, and after that, I will quickly do a mix of this song right here. So the first thing that we do is at the instruments to the mixer. There's a few ways to do this. One is to open up whatever instrumental sounds and select the button under track. If you don't see that button, make sure you get the settings and then you'll be able to see this so you can hit this track button and it will add the instrument will sound toothy mixer as well as the colors and the naming on alternative to doing this is to select everything. I just double left clicked, and now I can select a channel in the mixer. Hold down Control Shift and the letter L, and that will add any instruments and sounds that are in the Channel lech to the mixer, including the colors and the names. Once in the mixer, you can change positions by holding shifts and schooling with your mouths, and this will move them around. Alternatively, you can just school down on the actual instrument with your mouse on your schooling. Or you can do that with any instrument. They all do the same thing, just changing the position. Okay, so now we've added our instruments to the mixer. Let's take a look at what the mixture has. There's a few ways to look at the mixture. Different views you can zoom out to meet a bit more, you zoom. Zoom wide two or three. Then you can actually see the numbers in the volume. Stick with wide, too. It's good for now. First of all, this is the peak level, so this is going to show the volume. So if I were to play this next is the mute and a Knute button. So this is how you commute by left clicking you can solo, meaning that you play that instrument on its own and everything else becomes YouTube by holding now control and then left clicking so you can see everything else muted, a muted. If you hold down shift and left click that will walk the track so that when you solo or do other global changes, those locked tracks will not be affected below. That is the panning. So this is going to choose whether the speakers on the left or the right I'm going to be receiving the sound at any time. You can right click and resets to put the instrument control back to the default value. This is the volume below that is the face separator and the left and right channel, which you won't be using too much in the beginning. This is the mono and stereo control all the way, writes his mono all the way left the stereo. I cover stereo wit than another video. This is telling you that is going to be recording and receiving all of the audio signal if that selected, so that's dealing with recording audio. After that, we have the ability to route channels to other channels. So if I want to send the sound from this signal to another channel that, say, Channel 10 that's what this area is for. I can right click on a drop down arrow and select a route to the track or side change of this track. If I route to this track, all of the audio signal and input will be sent to this channel. If I select side chain to this track, what the differences between reality and side chain is, it determines whether this is dry or wet. So dry means that it's on the value zero and what it means that it's on value 100 so well or in room between. The idea is that this is completely off, and this is completely on. So when something is dry, it's off. And when something is wet, it's on, um, 100% eso side chain. In this case, it just means you're going to start in the off position in the dry position and route is just in the on position. So this is to say, only send it to this trek. There are alternative ways of doing this. For example, you can right click and say select and then routed to another track. But I find the easiest way is just to use the zeros. Let's say I have routed to this track and I changed my mind, so I d selected. What happens now? If I play, I no longer hear it. He sound and the reason is because all of the signal was sent to Channel 10 and then I cut off that signal. So now there's no output for this sound. What I need to do in this case is to wrap it back to the Master Channel so I can select the channel right click. Perhaps this trick way have the volume back on the right hand side is the effects, So if I select a channel, I can apply effects to it. I can select a slot by left clicking and choosing any of these effects that I like. FL Studio comes with a large number of a high quality effects. Let's pick something like delay. So if I have this delay now, if I would've plays waken See that the delay effect now being applied to that channel. If I select that and I want to remove the effect, I can hit the place and then go to none l've of movie effect. Another thing to consider is that the's slots are actually order important. So if I have a delay and then I had a fever, the delay will be affected on the channel first, and the river will include everything beforehand, So it will include the delay. So the order that these things are a position is important. You can also copy these effects by left clicking and then save priests as And you can drag that to another channel like So. So I've copied the foodie delay from my fl keys to the boo base if you want to remove a channel. So let's say this boo based channel I want to delete everything on it. I don't like the settle. So what I can do is select an empty channel, right click select file, save mixer, track, State ass, and I could drag it onto the channel I want to delete that will now completely empty that channel. However, we take a look at the blue base, we'll see that it's still routed to channel to. All we've done is remove all of the effects, something to keep in mind. Once again, I'm just gonna bring it back. Channel two was gonna sign a free channel which happens to be the free one. Number two Docking docking is the ability to ensure that you can see one of these channels while your school into the mixer so I can select a channel such as, Let's say, I felt blue base and I could right click select Doc to I can choose Left Middle, right. If I choose the left, I can now school through the mixer and it will retain the position off the channel on Let over here we have a very simple e que automation automation is the ability to control some of these. Some of these features novice automatically throughout the song. You can add automation by right clicking on any feature. In this case, I'm gonna choose the volume, and you can select creates automation clip. You can select the region that you want to create automation for by left holding down shift and left clicking and then right clicking at automation, and that will add automation just for that duration. However, there is a warning and a danger with doing this. If I want to change the volume after the automation, I may run into issues, so let me show you. So I'm gonna play that's just sold being here. If I hit play again, you'll notice that it jumps back to the original position. The reason is because the automation overrides anything else that I might do with volume. So you need to be careful about what automation you have. And sometimes even when that automation ends, you still might be affected. So what I usually recommend is just allow the automation for long as the song is, or just be really careful toe when you endure automation when you beginning. If you hit, create automation clipped by default, it just lasts the entire song duration. So you don't have to deal with not knowing when the volume or other non is gonna be changing, because you can always see it to give a little example. Automation. I'm going to decrease the volume and then just slowly rise involving. Let's hear that sense and you'll see the knob slowly rises. Okay, so those are the main features off the mixer. You can do a lot of things with these, especially once you start exploring the effects. For now, let's mix this track that I have here, So this is just a very simple There's a piano, a bass guitar, bass, plucked instrument sound and some basic percussion. So let's hear what this sounds like without any mixing, and then we'll mix it. I thought. OK, so this is obviously very simple, nothing too special happening here. So what I want to do is make sure that the main melody stands out and everything else is supporting rather than overpowering it. So I believe that the main melody is actually the plucked section. So I want to make sure the pluck section stands out the most. So this will probably be one of my higher volume areas and everything else I may reduce around that this is just the guideline is not a general, not a complete rule. One thing that is a little more close to rule is deciding whether to increase the volume on your mixer or to decrease the volume and The recommendation is usually to decrease the volume rather than increase the volume off, for example, plucks in this case, and the reason comes down to the next stage that will do will cover later in the course, which is mastering. Mastering is when you increase the overall volume of your song and its individual parts. In order to increase the volume, you have to actually have a low volume to begin with. So if you are rising raising the volume to the max in the beginning, there's nowhere for the volume to increase. So rather than making the main melody stand out by increasing the volume, what you should do is decrease the volume of everything else around it. That way this will be relatively louder, and you can still increase the volume later. Okay, so let's take a look at this and identify the main zones. When I was listening to it, I believe that the boot base was a little bit weak. He wasn't quite loud enough. The plucked was was the main melody says okay, but the effort he seemed to be a little bit loud. At the same time, I might reduce the keys a little bit notice months again. I can't just change this here because I have an automation. So I actually have to change the automation volume. - Okay , so in my impression, that's a little bit more balanced than what I'm hoping for. I have the main ability, it stands out. I can hear the drums clearly without anything directly overpowering. So that's your overview off the mixture. You now understand the features that are involved with the mixer, how to use them and the overall purpose of mixing. 18. Installing External Plugins: If you've purchased an external plug in or instrument, how do you bring them into FL Studio? Well, the first thing you do is install it using whatever software installation is you're using, whether it's download or using a CD, then go to your channel wreck, right click, Go To insert. In this case, I have installed massive and I want to bring massive into my fl studio and I don't see it listed here. Get. So I'm gonna go to more plug ins, manage plug ins, and here is where all of the plug ins will be sent by default. You can select start scanning. Your computer should be able to find it straight away. And then I just have to locate massive somewhere around here that there it is, it is not shown up. You might have to go to locate your plug ins by finding a studio folder and adding it through this button Here. Once you've located your plug in to select check, you can x out, and now I can go into insert and there is massive. It's shown up now 19. Recording Audio and Midi: Let's talk about how to record audio and midi into that full studio. I'm gonna show you three ways the first way using Edison as the audio editor the second way as using an audio clip, which is usually the quickest way. And then I'm going to show you how to record Midi and automation into Apple Studio. So the first way you go to you, make sure I slept in this to bring up the mixer. Make sure you can see the effect section by clicking this button, and you're going to want to choose and highlight a select channel. Then choose the microphone that you want to be recording into. In this case, I'm going to choose a my phone that's given by default, which is model because I only have a model recording microphone. If you don't have a stereo microphone, you won't be able to choose that Most microphones was just one single input, so this is gonna be the one for most of you. Then I'm going to go to a record, so I think that it isn't so according Edison and saying so this is the audio. There's a lot of editing tools in here and you may want to explore. It isn't on your own, but for now I'm just going to drag it in by clicking this button and dragging into the playlist. Let's hear what that sounds like. So now I'm recording into Edison, and everything I'm saying is being recorded. Okay, so that's the first way. Let's look at recording into an audio clip. You'll also notice that this button turns red when Audio Channel is being courted into All right. So I'm going to sex and you Channel and the court. So we're second quarter dangers. Let's hear that sense. So here is the second recording using the audio clip method. Okay, Now let's check out how to accord. Maybe so, you know, to record maybe you actually have to have a mini instrument. So you think made a piano or drum pad or something like that? I've shown you how to do that and connects it in another video. If you have that, I'm going to right click select inserts, have l keys or whatever instrument you choose. And I'm gonna want to make sure that in my channel wreck, this is the channel that is going to be recording. There's also options if you have multiple instruments of which ones you want to record, and then you can choose how you want to receive the notes to what instruments do you want? For now, I'm just I only have one connected. So it's just gonna be recording through my MIDI keyboard, which is what I want, then go up to here selected Accord. So like notes and automation. And once it's going to count down because I've chosen the countdown timer and then it's going to start recording. Let's hear that sound that sounds. I go into my piano roll. We can see in more detail how the notes have been recorded. We can see that has just been recording them based on the piano notes here, and is added in some velocity because my piano keyboard can take in velocity. So that's how hard I've been pressing, how much emphasis I've been using, and in this case, philosophy for the keyboard is just volume, so that's you have. It sounds if I change the velocity, you'll also notice that if we zoom in on some of the keys that the notes aren't exactly starting at the beginning of the bars. And the reason is because I haven't turned the snaps on to, uh, to the bar, so it's only being snapped to each step. You can change this and play around this depending on what kind of recording you want to have. If you're playing with piano, he might actually only want to snap to none or two, maybe every half step. Okay, so that gives you a basic idea of how it of a court using a three different methods into Edison as an audio clip or as Mitty. 20. Exporting Your Song: Okay, you've created a song. Now you need to get this song out of FL Studio. How do you do that? Well, there's a bunch of ways you can explode your song. Here's one way Go to file export and then choose the file format that you want to export it as name your song. I'll call this song for fun. I'll just put this on my desktop for now. And here's the different formats that you can choose can choose away. File MP 30 g f l a c Immediate etcetera. The way file in general is the highest quality. Sound is it also is the largest file size. If I choose MP three, you'll see that these file size is significantly smaller and compressed. However, this can affect the sound quality of the song. It may be lower if using wave. You want to make sure that you're in the highest, at least when you're doing the final export, as well as in the sampling and the highest number. If you're using MP three, you'll want to play around with the bit rate lower higher. You can see the file size again depends on how much you're compressing, but this is a higher quality sound. Supposedly, MP threes and wave files are going to be close in quality sound when they're at their maximum strength. But that's really up to you to decide whether that's true or not. Um, so once you've decided that you can hit export and your song will be sent out of FL Studio What if you want to send the mini notes from yourself to someone else or to use in another project, how do you do that? Go to the item that's going to be exported. So in this case, I want to export these keys. Your go to the drop down menu, Select file export as many file. Then you can choose the section in at the name of the song in this castle is called Midi Notes Help with this on my desktop. Now, if I would add an instrument, I'm going to say at a new pattern. So this doesn't have any notes yet, and I'm just gonna add some notes to my eval. Keys can find my MIDI notes and drag that into the instrument and you can see the notes of now being added and I can play those notes. What if I want to send this song to a instrument player or I want to send this know this song as sheet music so that other people can read them who are not using FL Studio at all. You can go to the drop down menu, select file export as sheet music, then name your piece choosing name for your piece. Choose the time signature and the scale and hit start, and here you can see it's actually converted all of those mini notes into a piano score. Yeah, into some sheet music. It is limited in the extent that you can't manually control these. You will have to use an external software if you want to be using even more refined touches to controlling when you want the spacing in the trouble claps and bass clubs. But that's for people not using Apple Studio. That's for if you want to get another software. So those are the three ways that you can export. Your song has just going to the file and exporting them in different file formats as many notes or as sheet music. When we get to the mastering part of this course, you will also learn how to send out the individual stems of your song so that you can send your song to a mixture or mastering engineer. But we'll come to that in the mastering section. 21. Recommended Orchestral Plugins: Let's get you some plug ins so you can start scoring your soundtracks. First of all, check out your digital audio workstation. You might already have some with whichever one you're using. Assuming those aren't good enough, you're a few recommendations. First of all is the Blake Robinson Synthetic Orchestra. Free open source. Blufgan has some great articulations and instruments. Definitely. Check that one out. We have the Brazilian Chamber Orchestra is another free and open source instrument buggin with a lot of different instruments you can check out and the virtual playing orchestra also free and open source. So check out any of these 31 of them is fine. And if you just grab one, you're good for this Course you don't need anything else. You don't have to pay any more money if you don't want to. These will be fine if you are willing to part with a little bit of cash. Here are a few other recommendations, but not required for the scores. Just recommendations. If you already own the serum plug in. This is a preset pack by a cashmere and seven skies, where they recorded a bunch of different instruments and they did a great job of it. So it's a preset for certain that you can then manipulate within the plug in. And this is a good one. If you're looking to actually get into the professional, you can start spending quite a bit of money. And this is probably where you're looking to spend all of your cash, and this is East West. So this is the the big guys where they ah actually using these plug ins for a lot of Hollywood films lately. So you condemn innately check these out. And finally, ominous. Fear is, well, is not great for orchestral, but they have a lot of instruments, which are really good for other kinds of soundtracks. So they have metallic objects and just some really interesting instruments that you went expect. And these air also really useful for film scoring or video game scoring. So these over my recommendations for plug ins you can use when you're scoring your soundtracks 22. String Arranging: Now let's dive induced twin arranging. And this is how you're going to be creating a full sounding orchestra sound Most of the time, it comes from how you arrange and create a melodies within your main melody. So this is gonna be broken down into several parts. First of all, we're going to be discussing adjusting your voicings part, writing parsing notes, had encounter melodies, having Austin autos, adding space, adding runs and then breaking the parts up for each instrument. Do all of those things, you know, have a very interesting string arrangement. So the first thing I want to do is take a look at this simple court progression we have here and we're going to use this as a benchmark where we're starting up from, and we're gonna turn this into a much more interesting milady. This is just eight bars. Right now it's in the key of G major. You can replicate. This is if you like. I'll send you the Midi notes as well so you can play around with this. And now let's have a listen to it. And then most start heading in all of these other tools. Okay, so the first thing that I want to to go into is part writing. And that's how court progressions are set up in the first place. It's that each note, in a chord should make a satisfying step towards the next notes in the court. So the easiest way to do it is the isolate the the individual sections. For example, if I would just listen to the highest note in the court, does this sound like it's leading to the next note? So let's have a listen to that. So it sounds like in this section will be here. It's just repeating. So perhaps we could make this a little more interesting by having something mawr. And we can do this by perhaps adding an inversion. So an inversion is just taking, for example, the lowest note and putting on the top of the top note putting on the bottom, just rearranging the structure of the court itself. So in this case, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take the note on the bottom, which is a before on. I'm gonna put that in the top, see if that sounds better. Well, perhaps this one sounds like it could also be leading towards something a little bit closer . And this is, it turns out, is also just an inversion on the bottom note. So let's hear that the next thing that we want to go into is creating some kind of parsing notes. And this is steps between the main cords to create some kind of movement. Yes, I can go from anywhere that I have within the scale, and I could just add in a leading note that's going to go from one position to the next. Fortunately to listen to your ears and make sure this sounds right, but in general, that's here can also do that within the same court as well. Just making sure that there's some space of that is noticeable. But the general idea is you just want to add some steps between the main chords. That's a movement between each court. Okay, now this is going to tie in with the next step, which is to create a counter melody and you're using notes from the same key and trying to create a melody that's also going to Bork and is a little bit different than the main melody so we can hear that this is a kind of low swooping up, and then it swoops down and we're gonna have a counter melody that's going to be doing something different than that. So I'm gonna find somewhere that doesn't have too much movement yet. Perhaps this court over here on, we'll see what notes Aiken mix up with in here That will have accountability. I could do that in several places, but you get the general idea next, we'll add some Austin at does, and we're gonna have some movement between the on and off notes from within the main cord. So once again, we're gonna find somewhere that doesn't have too much movement yet. Don't forget that a certain point is going to get too cluttered and you're not gonna notice . Any difference is just going to be a bit of a mess. So you're just gonna be doing this with areas that aren't too busy already? So perhaps over here, we'll see what we can do with this. What kind of movements can we have on and off? No, just add some rhythm within this Now, granted, this isn't perhaps the greatest use of this, but I just want to provide. This is an example. Okay, Next, we're gonna add some space to come down to a single note at parts, so this will make it more noticeable. And you'll have some movement coming, getting wider in the notes and spreading them out as well as coming in so that you're paying more attention to that. So what we'll do is we'll find cords here, multi, actually subtract and said of early weakening, just adding notes. Now we're gonna take notes away so that you'll be paying attention. Mawr to start in parts. So just to reiterate this again, what we're doing is we're actually taking notes away from certain parts act in space so that the notes that do exist will be more noticeable because, what silence? You'll pay attention to more where there is sound and so on. Okay, now what we can do is you can add some runs if you like, And what I mean by run is just really you know, fast pace is the rhythm of notes. Usually this is moving upwards in scale, and this is often done at the end of a phrase. So what we can do here is take a look at this ending part and turn this into a run once again, we're just staying within the key for the most part. So what we've done is overall, we have broken down the string chords, first of all into part writing, so each note should be a satisfying step from one note to the next note. Then we'll be adding some voicing. Doing. This is part of that, and you're just adding versions, moving some notes higher or lower. We're adding some parsing notes, which are steps between the main courts. That's what we did over here. Then we added counter melodies using notes from the same key. Again, we had it ostinato such a movement between the on notes and the often notes. So just adding some rhythm within your cords. We added some space, taking some notes away from in certain parts. You'll pay attention more to the sounds that do exist. Then we added some runs at the ends, and the final thing that I want to do is talk about how you can break this up into different instruments into its own patterns. For example, in our main melody here we have several different parts here, for example, we have our key chords. We have some awesome battles. We have a counter melodies. We have our runs. All of these could be using different instruments, so weaken. Emulate that and use different instruments within our digital audio workstation. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to break this up into different sections. For example, right now, I'm just using a viola, but I could have a violin for the higher notes. I could have a cello for the lower notes. I could if you have a difference. Articulation, For example, I'm using East West Instruments over here, and East West comes with different articulations for the same instrument. For example, in my viola, I have an option that says runs and with this runs here. What it will do is it will make the run much more noticeable because it's an instrument designed specifically with samples for a run. So let's take out these individual parts. First of all, I will look at the high section in the high section to me means that it's probably a violin playing this, so I'm going to take out these notes and I'm going to move them to a different instrument. Let's stick them in the violin, have created a violin sample instrument, and I'm just going to stick them there and I'll do the same thing for the bottom. To me, that sounds like it would be a lower instrument, So perhaps that would be a cello. Take those out. Stick that in a Chilo. No, I also have an instrument that specifically designed for runs. So I will take up this run at the very end, and I will stick that in its own section. All right, let's have a listen to how everything sounds. First of all will play the beginning. This is the original courts where we haven't changed anything yet, and they're all just statically laid without any movement of pattern and rhythm within it. And then we'll have our second version where you can see all of the different combinations that are happening. So let's hear the beginning 23. Case Study: Now it's time for a case study. So this is a song that I created recently, and I'm going to play it for you in this video and in the next few videos I'm going to refer to this song is an example and some of the elements that were used in creating this song. I will then deconstruct and explain that you can do this using this tip and so on. So I haven't listened to the song and enjoy, and then in the next three videos, we will break it down. 24. Making Realistic Strings: How do you make realistic sanding strings in your scores? We're diving deeper into the orchestration elements here, and this is where people think of its Hollywood score for Fillmore for video game. And they have this great big idea of a whole orchestra playing. So let's identify how to do that. First of all, let's think of what's going on and be a life. If you were to go see a concert of a great big symphony playing, what would that be All? You'll have a bunch of people laid out on the stage playing different instruments arranged in different section, and you'll have this composer who's come up with these parts for them old to be playing together. So if you're looking at just the string section, if you're looking at the traditional definition of a standard chamber strings band, you'll have first violins, second violins, the Ola's Bases and Tello's. Now traditionally that number in a standard chamber strings band is eight violins, five second violins, four villas, two bases and four Tello's. If you were to goes to see a standard symphonic strings band, that means you're going to probably have 18 violins. 14 2nd violence 10 villas, eight pieces and tench ellos. And when you see a huge band like this, that's a really big sound because there's a lot of people playing these instruments now. That's not convenient for software, because a that's a lot to write for and be your computer probably can't handle that many instruments, or at least not easily, unless you've spent a lot of money. So what we've found is some shortcuts here over experimentation and that the minimum number of instruments to get a full sounding strings band is the following. Usually four violins is enough. Three second violins to reveal as three bases and three chills. Do you get that number? It sounds pretty full, and most people won't be able to tell the difference that you using MAWR or using this number. This is a pretty full sounding I'm out so you can stick with this as your guideline. So now we know how many instruments to use if you wanted to make a full sounding string band, but how do I make those sound like someone's actually playing them rather than just the software's making it since sound? Well, this is where articulations are going to come into play. And this is something that the musician who actually does play the instrument will know everything about this. But as someone who might not play the violin or viola over the bass cello and so on, you will have to play around with different articulations to get the hang off. What sounds realistic and what doesn't. So this is something that's going to acquire some practice, but the idea is quite straightforward. Whenever a musician is playing an instrument, she can choose to apply a certain amount of pressure to the strengths she going to press it . Longs are really short sound. She going to press it hard to get a lot more sound out. The volume is going to be louder or really softly and quietly, and all of these different sounds and expression that she can apply to it will give different feeling to this music. This is where we can say one musician is better in another, because they were able to apply more articulations in a way that was more impactful to the audience. Now software's come a long way, and what they've done is they've recorded all the different kind of articulations that you can make with these instruments, and those air now sample sounds that you can use. So what we're going to do is show you how you can use these circulations and software. So now let's dive into how you can actually use these articulations. So if I were to load up a plug in of a violin, often they come with different articulations building. In this case, I have some short sounds. For example, I have speak. Oddo's the Caddo. I have llegado sounds, and so what? So what I can do is first of all, there's a few ways you could actually have a different instrument for each type of articulation. This is how you might have to do it if there's no other way where you could load in a staccato sound like Adul sound and so on. This is not very convenient, is not based super you, uh, efficient. So that's the worst casing out. You can do that. There's another way. Sometimes a plug in comes with key switch abilities, so that's what you see down here. I have a certain key for a different articulation, and if I hit that key and I changed the articulation. I'll get a different kind of sound and see this sounds a lot low, a shorter and that's actually the articulation playing. So sometimes, for example, of using contact, you can actually assign certain keys for key switching. So that's one way you can do that. And that's something that you can explore. Now there is 1/3 way that some plug ins have built in, which is the easiest way, in my opinion. So what I have here is I have three different articulations loaded in. I was the Caddo. I have three different kinds and what I've done is I will have my first articulation routed to a certain midi out. In this case, I've sent it to Media one, my second channel. Second articulation. I've routed to many Channel five and my third articulation. I've routed to Midi Channel 10 For this plug in three articulations who out is two different midi channels. You will notice that I have not routed any of them Tau omni Well, any tau omni Everything that is ready to omni will always be affected together. This will sometimes cause you issues. If you I want to change one thing you change everything at once, so I recommend routing them to different midi out channels. Now that they're routed, what can I do with this? I can go into my instrument. I can then access the MIDI out channel. At least this is how you do NFL Studio. Using your own digital audio workstation is different. He might have to find a completely different way where you may not be able to. I don't know that's up to your dog. But NFL Studio Aiken Select my MIDI Out channel and I can get a certain articulation if I select my MIDI out Channel five now, which I assigned. I get a different articulation and I assigned another 1 to 10 so I can get my third articulation and I can actually play them all within my same piano. So this is an extremely convenient way without having to swap channels without having to swap instruments. I could do that all within my same instrument. Now, this is not limited to just orchestral instruments. For example, if I have, I'm this feel be here, I can actually a sign and instrument to a different media channel. For example, in my Amity. Channel one has one instrument. My mini channel two has a another instrument by many channels. Three has another instrument. So if I were to go into my piano, but my first instrument now my second instrument and my third instrument, so you can see how this is really useful for not only for orchestral instruments, but this tool can be applied for any kind of instrument that allows you to do midi routing . The other benefit of this is that it's a lot more convenient for your CPU rather than having 20 different articulations, you can just have one instrument old articulations combined. And if using something like that's really CPU intensive like atmosphere, then this is another way to use less CPU. You can just have one instance of atmosphere created with all of your different instruments loaded in with only having to have one instance of ominous fear, though, so this is the overall idea. Off articulations is a You can use different articulations for each channel, staccato, llegado and so on. B. You can use key switching, which is what this is, or see if you're plugging allows each to do meaty routing. You can load in your articulations within a single plug in. So this is how you can use articulations to create realistic sounding instruments. 25. Articulations and Expression For Strings, Woodwinds, and Brass Instruments: Now, let's give you a little example of how I make my strings realistic. So this is the song that I showed you earlier on in the course. And I'm just going to play the string section this time. So let's have a listen to this. - So the first thing is theoretical ations which I mentioned earlier on, and I do a few things here, at least key switches wise. See if I can find that for you. Here we go. So down here I changed my key switches. So when I have this lower note, then I can get this sustained sound. But if I change my key switch to this note, I get more of a shorter sound. See, it dies off of the end. So I do that whenever I am encountering a faster melody that with shorter notes. So I switched to my shorter sounds and then when I got want my longer note, I go back and change Mikey switch and I do that several times to other solidly so there. I think I do it later on. It's well over here, so I have these faster notes. So I change my articulation once again Now I have said that these articulations of the strings but these articulations air for all your orchestral instruments, especially for your brass and your woodwinds as well. So definitely consider using articulations for all of these three. So that's the first thing now. The second thing, which is extremely important to make your strings sound good, is expression. And that's what these things are at the bottom. This is my expression, and you can see I have quite a bit off expression that I've done throughout my piece. Here we go. So this everything here is rising and falling. Um, it's essentially getting louder and then getting quieter and louder and quieter. If I were to play some of these pieces with expression, let me see if I can find one of these for you. Contrast that if I had no expression doesn't sound nearly as good. So this is how expression can be used to make your pieces sounds better, and you can have similar expression across all the instruments of playing at the same time . So my, um, my violins, my celli, my bases, my villas, they can have similar rises at the same time and falls at the same time in combination with each other. So that's one thing to do, expression wise. Now, how do you actually automate this? Will you just go into your plug in and you're going to want to take a look at your automation features? Now you're plugging will probably look different. And if you're not using FL Studio, it's will look very different. But essentially, the idea is you're going to find the no that you can automate. And in this case in FL Studio, I just go to press parameters. Look down here for one called expression, and here I can then right click and select edit events in piano roll. And when I do that, I get this and then I can change this as I school of a mouse. So this is one way to do it, and you can just draw it in when you get ah, higher peak. This is a louder when it gets lower than it's quieter, and you can play around with this now. You don't have to do it in apparent role. You can do it outside of it as well. You get to say, create automation clip and if I look, now, I have this automation clip over here, and I could actually draw it in as well. I find this is a little less flexible because if you want to have a gradual rise, you have to actually move this around. But you can do it this way if you choose to and then you'll be able to get these exact perfect curves if you wanted them. Eso Yeah. So this is how you can get realistic sounding strings. You can use articulations and you can use expression. 26. Orchestral Percussion: how to do orchestral percussion. How to make your drum sound realistic and interesting when scoring. So, first of all, what do you use drums for? Well, when you think about what is a drum in its most basic form, it's just one surfaced hitting another surface. And if that would happen in real life, that means that something has changed. Some kind of action occurred and is going to often divert your attention to look in the direction of whatever just got hit. So realize that drums can be used to grab the attention of the listener, so they're great for a few things that good for adding movement. The useful for adding some kind of dizziness to the noise. So if you have an action scene or a montage or transition, and you need to change from one atmosphere to another, this is what drums air traditionally used for. And they're great for that. You're not often dancing when you're listening or watching some kind of film a video games so often you don't need to have necessarily a beat that's going to be completely repetitive that you'd have in traditional pop music. So keep that in mind and secondly, drums will be distracting if there's some kind of dialogue going on that you need to be paying attention to. So if someone is saying something on the screen in the video game, you need to be paying attention to what they're saying. Then you probably might want to either reduce the volume or not have drums, because drums can be distracting from that. So just keep all these things in mind. But now this focus on how do you actually make the drums? So a few things, first of all, add syncopated rhythms. So this is going to be rhythms that are slightly off the beaten, and this is gonna be adding some kind of rhythm that's going to be interesting for the listener. Secondly, add varying velocities, so the word velocity is similar to volume. But it's a little different because it can have a different emphasis, whereas volume is just loud or quiet. But velocity can also have some other nuances as well, and these just come with the plug in that you using and third is to stacked layers. So if you want accent, it beats accent, some kind off drum that's occurring instead of just raising the volume of that drum. You can have several drums playing that note at the same time, So you're just stacking layers in that sense. So this is that song that I was showing you earlier in the example, and this is two different drum sections that occur in this song. So, first of all, I'm going to point out what I mean when I say have syncopated rhythm. So if I were to look at these notes over here, and I can see how my grid is dividing them up into bars and it also shows the beets put bar . So in this case, I'm looking at 44 times, so I have a bar, and then I have 1234 beats per bar. If I had my drum, every single beat of the bar, it would be a very dull government rhythm. So let's hear that sounds not particularly interesting, but if I were to add in slight differences in timing, you can come up with something a lot more interesting than that. So that's the first thing syncopated with him. The second thing you'll note is that I have different ring velocities So what do I mean by philosophy? I mean, over here when I note I can change how loud or quiet that the note is occurring and I can vary this up so I can accent certain notes. Certain notes will be louder. Certain knows will be quieter and they have a lot more emphasis towards them. So if I were to play this without any velocities at all compared to so that's useful if you're doing a repetitive rhythm, what if you want to have some kind of build up so you'll have a section early later on in this song where I've actually got some velocities that I'm using to create a slight change over time. So let's take a look at that. Over here I have this buildup, which is essentially just a ground rule, and I'm changing the velocity to get louder over time. So if I were just to focus on this, if I didn't have that velocity again, it wouldn't sound bigot. Not very interesting. You definitely want to add some velocity to make your dramas more realistic. And then the third thing, of course, is the stacking of layers. So earlier, I said you can emphasize certain notes by having a different velocity for it, but you can also add in other drums that are playing at the exact same time as well. This crash sounds so here I have a bunch of crash sounds occurring on at the end. I want have a lot of crash sounds because that's my conclusion. So this is the crash sounds part of it and the drums itself. I have jumped from notes playing here at the same time. To emphasize certain notes as well is down here. So if you play everything together, she have it here. This sounds so that sounds a lot more interesting. And when you played together with all the other instruments combined. 27. Making Realistic Piano: composing with pianos how to make realistic sounding piano melodies. So a few steps you can do emphasize higher notes relative to low notes. Have a pattern when you're using articulations and accentuate notes sparingly. So this is more of a thing not to do. Don't accentuate every bar. Mix them up as you go along. So let's take a look at what I mean by all of this. We look at our piano roll and I were to play a melody. In real life. We'll see how it shows up, you know, software. So how does this show up here? We can see a few things. First of all, we see that since I was holding on the pedal, every single note has been dragged on. There's no actual spacings in between them, so that's one thing. Secondly, we can see that there's a velocity changes, and third, we can see that the spacing is not on every bar, not in every beat. So this is what the results of playing live into your MIDI gives you, and this is good and its bad at same time. It's good because it's realistic. It's bad because this is hard to combine with other instruments. The timings little bit off concedes not on every bar. If I wanted to have a violin accompany this, this is going to be hard to time map. I'm gonna have to change this to something else, because how are you going to play at the same time that this place, you have to keep getting faster and quieter as you go along? So there's. Here's some of these strengths and weaknesses of using software for composing. The strength is that you can combine notes really easily if you actually program them in. So let's look at a piano melody here. Five words. What I've done here is actually typed in the notes, had a melody in mind on and you can see. Now it's everything is linear. Everything is exactly on the beat, every bar, but this is slightly less realistic in some ways to this. But the benefit of this is that if I wanted to have a violin, I can have another instrument come in at exactly that same moment on, I know that it's going to be in time. Everything is exactly in place. So what can you use this for? Well, you can use it for reference. You can understand this is the melody I want, and I can see these notes generally in this timing. I'm going to have to fix it up, though, so I would take this melody and I would do something called Quanta Izing it. And that's essentially a tool that comes with any piano roll. Your software may look slightly different, but essentially there'll be a feature that says Quanta izing. And when you quiet ties it, it's going to shift the repositioning to being exactly on a timing beats rather than just randomly and see here. It's just random. Now it's exactly on a tight spot, and this is the first thing you can do. It's going to make it stand little more Robotti, because it's on every beat. But it will be easier to combine with other instruments, and once you do it with enough instruments, you don't really notice it so much. Oddly enough, so that's one thing. Um, you'll still have to move things around because it's not exactly perfect. Um, the second thing is velocities. So this is This is what distinguishes a realistic sounding piano from a fake one though, when you're combining it these notes for the most part or the melody. Because when I was playing in my right hand here, I was trying to emphasize these notes more than my left hand because this is what the melody is. So this is where I wanted your ears to be focusing on. Where is my left hand? I wanted to play that slightly quieter. The volume was lower. I was not accentuating this as much rather than I don't want this to be the focus. I want this to be the focus, so I'm making this slightly louder than this hand when I'm playing a life. So that's something we should try to do in the software, and that's very easy to do. We can take these notes that air in general higher. At least this is where the melody happens to be. So I'm going to raise the volume of these slightly, at least if I were to be typing in these notes, and I can do this just by schooling around with my efforts duty, at least by holding down the left, salt and schooling with my mouse, and I can raise the volume of the melody and I can reduce the volume off the courts. So that's one thing That's a really easy quick fix theseventies thing after we've emphasized higher notes, fellas with lower notes is that if you're dealing with the peg Geos, you can articulate with a pattern. So what have I done here with these articulations? Well, I've made sure that the higher notes are slightly louder. You can see these were lost these a little bit higher, then these lower notes, which are actually the same. I could vary these up a little bit as well. But the key thing is that I want to point out, is these higher knows a little bit louder, these middle notes a little bit lower somewhere in the middle, and the lower notes are the quietest. If I were to have all of these exact same articulation, uh, compared to so that's one thing you can do is try to create some kind of pattern in this case, since I'm going higher and then lower and then higher and the lower I'm doing the same things like volume higher and lower and higher and lower, and so on. So when you're doing arpeggio consider articulating in some kind of flow in some kind of sweeping motion, some kind of wavy change in volume where one note is leading to another and you're doing the same thing with the volume. So if I were had to have notes here, start louder. I have a gradual progression in volume rather than starting at one volume, and I'm progressing as I go along, and I can do the same thing in software. So that's the second tip is for a pet Geos articulate with a pattern, and the 3rd 1 is to accentuate notes sparingly. You don't want to accentuate every bar. You want to mix up the articulations as you go along. And this is something more along the lines of what a beginner pianist will do rather than someone who's been playing a long time. We were to be playing melodies, and I were to accentuate Every time I have a note versus not doing that. Let me let me give an example. This will be clear, so I'm going to first of all, played badly, you know, versus the way that is a little bit better sounding. What I'm making sure is I'm not accentuating every time the bar hits. So what? I mean, my bar, This is a bar. One bar, two bars, three bars, four bars, five bars, six bars. If I were to emphasize the first note of each bar meaning I make that note louder. How would that sound? Uh, that doesn't sound. Anyone near is good. As if we were not to accentuate that note as much. Uh, might even want to accentuate that less than it is. But my key focus is that you don't want to have an accent at every single bar. Don't accentuate every bar and mix up the articulations you go. So follow these three steps. Emphasize notes, higher wells that the lower notes. Your right hand, if you're playing a real piano, will be the melody in general. So that's the volume that you want to be a little bit higher than the lower notes. Feedings. Arpeggios, articulate with a pattern, have some kind of progression in volume. If you're having a progression in notes, you're going from higher to lower. Maybe started a high volume and progress to a low volume or vice versa, and finally accentuating notes sparingly so you don't want to be accentuating every single bar. You want to mix up the articulations as you go. And in general piano, you don't need to have allowed velocities. They don't need to be high. They could be quiet in general and that'll sound more realistic. So these three steps should help to make you pianos, more veal. 28. Make Interesting Bass Guitar Melodies: let's describe how to make bass guitar melodies more interesting. So the secret sauce works like this. You'll take a base melody that is pretty bland, pretty basic, and you add in these six elements you had in intervals, motifs, Syncopation, non route notes, octaves and rests. So you had a few of these. A combination of a few of these, and you'll be able to turn a boring base melody into something much more interesting. So here we have a bland bass guitar melody. It's not very interesting, and we're going to apply this secret sauce to it to make it sound interesting. So here's how it towns before we've done anything to it. So the first thing that we can do is we can add some melodic intervals to it. Those that are going to be interesting. So the way to do that is to avoid intervals that are not interesting. What intervals are not interesting? Well, those are going to be the perfect fourths and perfect fits thes air. Great records, but when you're doing an melodic progression with just single notes is not particularly interesting. You can remember this for whenever you're doing a melodic idea so a perfect fourth is going to be five semi tones I want to, for that's a perfect fourth. Perfect fifth is going to be seven semi tones, so anything that's a perfect fourth, you're going to want to avoid anything other than that should be okay. You also going to want to stay within the scale that you're using. In this case, it sounds like a C major scale because it's all the white notes and it's a happy sounding melody. So I'm going to want to stay with thin my scale, but also avoid perfect fourth and perfect fifth notes intervals. So let's look at these notes and see if we can identify any perfect fourths or fifths and if they are going to want to change those. So from this first note, I can see that not a perfect fourth or 5th 1 to 447 times, not a perfect fourth or perfect fifth. Well, good. What about from the next note? Well, that is a perfect fourth now. It might not look like it from here, but when you think about octaves, if I were to move this f up hate notes, that's now a perfect fourth. So we're going to want to change either this note or this note, so that is not a perfect force. So what I'll probably do is add in a notes lower. Let's see how that sounds, so that's a little bit better. And now let's go from here to here. Once again, that's a perfect fourth. So let's change that. And from here to here, that's not 1/4 or fifth. So that's fine. And from here to here, well, that's obviously less than perfect fourth or fifth. So we've done our first tool. We've added in melodic intervals. Now the next tools we can add in some motifs, which are dis melodic ideas, little little things, that we can have some kind of pattern. So whenever we can add a pattern that's good in this case, I'm going to add, so I'm gonna have high note. Low note, high note. Low note. Just a small little idea should make it more interesting. Something small, just a little motif, a tiny idea that you can add next. We'll add some Syncopation. Syncopation is just going to be adding some wisdom to your idea. Now, how do you know what's going to be an interesting rhythm and what's not. Well, you can identify what's going to be a bad rhythm. So here we have a bar. This is going to be your beat, your key item. So anything within this is going to be within your grid is going to be a very straight forward, boring straight beat. So you're going to want to find something that's not exactly on the bar. And if you can find something that's not exactly within half of that, then you can find something that's gonna be a little more rhythmic. Have some and routine into it. So if I start chopping up parts, that is not exactly halfway, and I can experiment with this because it is not it cut and dry method. But you can do something like this and we'll see that it should be a little interesting. It's next you're going to want to have non loot notes, so you're going to want to listen to what you use expecting and then change it. So in this case, it expects the melody to go. That's what it expects. So we were to anticipate this and see what could we do That's a little different in that. What if we didn't go to this numb? What if we want to? Something else, Maybe something like that. Now, I also have some repeated notes, and these are a great opportunity to mix and match a little bit so I could move thes somewhere. Mm, Theo, this sounds I don't like that combination. I might even rearranges a little bit differently. Uh, I like that combination a little better, just relying on my ears this time. But the idea, once again, is just to add in some combination of notes. That is not exactly what years expecting. No, The next thing is to add octaves. So any time you have notes that repeating this is an excellent opportunity to add a note that exactly eight notes higher. So this is a note that not actually moving, but it sounds like it's moving. So earlier I had these repeating notes. For example, um, here what I could do instead of having to see there, I could move the seat down, and the last thing that we can do to spices up is to add rests. Now rests have to be used sparingly. Otherwise, it will completely distort the timing of your song. So a useful reference points do is you can add it right before the bar. So this is one of those times that is a little bit straight forward. You can just identify where is the bar expecting, and you can have a break right before that. And if you think of how bass guitar is actually playing, they might have to move their fingers to get to a different position on the bass guitar. So this is also an opportunity to have a rest. So this is the melody that I've come up with for this example. Now let's hear how this sounded before and after. So this is the before, and this is the after. So this is the secret sauce you can add in melodic intervals. Motifs, Syncopation. Try to change the non routine notes. You can add octaves, and finally you can add rests. Do these things some of them or combination. A few of these and you should be able to come up with a much more interesting base lying group 29. Scoring Scene by Scene: Let's give you an idea of how you'll be scoring if you're scoring scene by scene. Now this it will be different. If you're scoring a video game and you have recurring music, that's repeating. But if you're doing a scene by scene, fetches the trailer like I have here, This is the example doing earlier, Um, you will actually be wanting to map it out specifically by the event that's occurring on the video. So, uh, first of all, whichever digital audio workstation you're doing doesn't have to be FL Studio. You'll have to load up a video player with the in your digital audio workstation, and you'll have to play around with it a bit. I've locked this little link button. I've checked this and that. Make sure that whenever I jump around in my timeline, the video will jump around to the exact same times here as the positioning. So that's the first useful purpose. And then what I'll do is I'll make sure that all of the videos are divided into manageable chunks, inju chapters or songs per se. So maybe the entire film will have 20 different songs that I'll need tohave. There'll be 20 different scenes that are slightly separate, and I'll be able to go through each of these and come up with a new song for them. So then I can save these as individual chapters. Also, Chapter one, Chapter two and I'll actually name my chapters by the time points. All it might say, My chapter one is from 0 to 2 minutes 21 seconds, and the event is something so that way have some reference points. Then I once I've actually broken up my video into chapters. I'll go in and I'll actually lay it out like this will make my video as long as the at my timeline as long as the video and then I'll actually go in and I'll take a look at the video piece by piece and say OK, at this point in the video, something happens. I'll make a little note of that, and I have made this little note by selecting NFO Studio Control T and I can give it a name and to find another and I don't know, note and so on. And this is useful because when I am coming up with more melodies and I have something going on. I'm going to need to jump back and forth, and this little marker is useful because I can visually plan it out with the rest of my song and so on. You can do this in the piano role as well. So inside of my piano roll, I can add little markers as well. It's by selecting control, T and so on. But that's pretty much the process is. You're going to have your video. You'll break it up into chapters. Then within each chapter, you'll add little markers. You'll score the song based on that, and that's pretty much it. You're just going to keep doing that over and over until the films done. So that's your day to day life when you're scoring a film. Is this Most of the time 30. Composing Efficiently: when you're making soundtracks for from a video game, you need to get in the habit of sitting down and being able to create music straight off the bat. You don't want to be wasting a lot of time with distractions because you have a lot of scenes to do, and when you do a scene, you might have to do several provisions, and you just need to manage your time appropriately. So here's a few tricks and tips to make this post us faster for you. So this video is going to focus on what you can do before you've actually started composing . What can you do within your dog? So here's what I do is First of all, I create an empty project. I don't have any notes yet, but what I do have is all of my instruments loaded. I've decided what instruments I could use in the scenes for this film or video game, and these are all ready to go. In this case I have loaded in orchestral instruments. You might be doing something else. You might not vocational, but this example will be clear for this, and what I have is my string section of my brass section, my percussion section and my woodwind section, and I have them color coded for my own visual convenience, and I have them routed into the mixture. I also have some guitars, and this way I don't have to deal with all the time of finding what instrument I'm going to use. When I I'm actually starting to make my melodies. I can just say, OK, I load up this project, I'll save it to a new name and then I can use all this information and instruments without happening to spend my time looking them up, so that should save you some time. Then what I do is I add four patterns. Well, if I'm doing orchestral, have four different sections on my shrink checks and brass section, woodwinds and percussion. I might even have another one for piano and guitars, but ah, and I have these ready to go, and then what I'll do is I will speed up the ability to determine what key em in as well. So let's say I go into my strings here. First of all, I add in a dummy instrument, an instrument that's not going to be playing anything. The whole purpose of this is just for my visual reference, and I will going to be animal. That and I'm going to choose what key? I'm going to be composing it. So let's say I pick my key to be region. Then what I will do is I will add in some ghost notes some invisible notes that don't actually exist for any purpose except for visual reference as the only purpose of these. I'm just copying them, making sure I'm always starting on f and propagating them all the way up to the top. Close enough, right? So I have all of these now. Highlight. No. Copy these over and then I will make them all ghost notes. I remove them all. Why have I done this? Well, now, if I go into another instrument, let's say I go into my piano. I have this go to note these invisible, non existing notes that are just there. So I know what notes are in the key that I can use. So I have this available any note that I choose as long as they are on the same position, uh, will be in the scale, and I don't have to worry about trying to figure out. Well, there's this network. Does this work? There's no not work, so well, I can visually see this. So I find this is helpful and I can just copy these for each of my sections. And now if I come out, you can see I have all of these set up. So I know exactly what key I'm going to be in. I have my instrument ready. I have my mixture ready and I'm ready to start. So this is a useful way to get started for getting your instruments set up before you've even composed anything. 31. Scoring Trailers: Let's take a look at the force, awakens trailer score and break it apart. So, of course, when I'm saying the force awakens, I'm referring to the Star Wars film. The Force awakens, and this is one of the most successful box office films of all time, grossing in $2 billion at a budget, which is 300 million. But I want to focus in the trailer because the trailer itself did extremely well. I mean, on YouTube alone, the trailer has 100 million views. If you can get millions of views in your trailer, your films probably gonna be watched. So you're going to want to analyze at least this score or other popular films that have really good trailers, because this is something that you're often asked to do, is okay. You can score the film or the video game. Can you also score the trailer and you should be able to say, Yeah, yeah, I could do that. So let's take a look at this trailer. There's a few things that we can notice here. Well, first of all, step back up. What is the purpose of a trailer and ask to sell a film you're supposed to draw in the audience, you're supposed to make them say, Hey, that looks interesting. I think I'm going to go look into it was a more. If you've done that, you've done your job. The's stores film The Force awakens trailer. We can break it down into three acts in Act one of the trailer. We have the quiet, sparse sounds and some mysterious sounds and chords that slowly draw the audience in. And this is in combination with what's going on on the screen, of course. So when some characters are in dark lighting and you don't really know what's going on, this is where this mysterious sound works. Well, who are you? No. One. I was raised to do one thing, but I've got nothing to fight for. In Act two, we have the buildup. This is where we have the pulsing tension, repetitive notes that air slowly building up. At a certain point, the sound cuts off their If you are having another tray or for a comedy or something, you might have a joke. And this is where the sound cuts off for a second before resuming, and they throw in a bunch of references toothy Star Wars score themes, which is great if you already have a bunch of teams throughout the film, because then you can throw these in as you go along. Nothing will stand in our way what you started their stories about what happened. Move it. And in Act three, this is where you rise to the climax and you throw everything and heath all your drums, you for all your great big string sounds. And then it comes to avert the very ending whose silence And it also has a throwback to one of the main Star Wars theme songs as well, No way, really. It's calling you. Wait, just let it in. So let's sum this up. How do you make a trailer? Most trailers in general are just a montage of random clips, old phone together, and your job is to identify where you could have a mini story. And when I say mini story, I mean something that you can have one musical idea and then you can transition into the next musical ideas. You go along often you can throw in themes that you used already throughout the film of video game and check those into the trailer as well, so you can have some reference to those. Sometimes you might just have a single clip. It's often occurs in video games, but you'll just have a single clip that's going on, and then you can just score it. Even easier is not even a montage is just a regular seen like any other throughout the film . A video game. So once again you break up the video into individual pieces. You try to identify what kind of key events or scenes are going, and then you can transition between those you can have adjusting music intensity. That depends on what events are going on, and you add in transition sounds between those such a silence or rising and falling sounds , impacts and so forth. And you should expect to have several different versions of these trailers that you can present. Because the trailer is the most important part of the product. It's whether people buy or not. So they're going to want to treat this like an advertisement, and you're going to want to say, Does this version appealed to you more than this version and so on. So this is how you do trailers for video games and films 32. Case Study Scoring The Course Trailer: So let's take a look at the trailer for the course that you're watching right now and you'll see how I scored it. And this will be a nice little the fresher, combining a bunch of the different concepts we've covered throughout the lectures. So here's how this sounds. Before you added a any of the dialogue, and then we will pick it down into its pieces. Okay, so the first thing that we see is in the very beginning is a little run that I did with flute to some short notes. And then I have the violin and the cello bling, and the way I was able to get both of these in the same general instance is doing that method I mentioned in an earlier lecture where we can assign different many outs, two different instruments. So that's how you can see this violin and the cello, which is a different midi out. So that way I can see them the same time and mapped them out easily from there. We then move into our accord with the piano and a metallic percussion instrument, and essentially the only thing I want to mention here is first of all, I did something similar to run again, and also how I did this court progression rather than just having a straight cord. What I thought would make him are interesting. Melody. Two years is toe. Have a note coming down. And what? Let me explain the rationale behind this when you're moving up in courts, your ears, hearing that and it's saying, Okay, you haven't upwards movement, but if at the same time you're notes of moving downwards, your ear is trying to understand, is it moving down or up and it can't quite picture. I can't quite figure out what it's doing exactly, and that's a lot more interesting for you here. So this it's a lot better than and and yet it's the same court. All I've done is movement owed up an octave, so you can do this with your courts by just rearranging them, moving them higher or lower, and so on. All I'm doing my keyboard to do this is just highlighting a note and then holding down control and an arrow key either up put down. So this is one way to spread out your notes with cords, and you can do this very easily. You can do this with the whole cord moving, moving all over the place. It's a very easy method to come up with different court combinations. And if let's say you had a cord that was the same, but you didn't want it to be boring. What could you do with this? Let's say you had this court playing twice in the same two bars. You could just spread them out a little bit and rearranged the positioning of the highest known the lowest note. And this is already going to sound different to your ears just because even though they're the same chord and you're using the same notes, you've just moved from around slightly. I'm sure you have this one sounds that's the same court, and yet it sounds not exactly repetitive at all. So that's something to keep in mind. Okay, then we move on into what I like to call the hand Zimmer sound. So how do you make that? Well, the way Hans Zimmer actually did it with the Bad Man movies is he used French horns, and he used four French horns on the left side of the theater and four French horns on the top, right hand side of the theater and when you played them all the same time with this lower note, are you able to get this great, big, expansive sound? So it's actually quite easy to replicate the only needed any kind of brass low, brassy sound. In this case I'm even just using a synth sound to get that. And the key to making it sound interesting, though, is with the automation with the over expression once again. So here we go so you can see that I have and bring this up. The automation actually increases until it hits that second note, and then it tapers off. So that's how you get that Hans Zimmer sound. And then, of course, I layered that with some percussion as well. That's all that is. And then I had a symbol that's crescendoing. Okay, next up, we have the orchestra section and the key to getting a strong, full sounding orchestra. I haven't actually quite finished that here, but is there a way to do it? Is to utilize the frequency spectrum to your advantage, So this is gonna be a new concept to a lot of you and this is the idea that you can check out the frequencies off your instruments and uses to side what instruments are lacking. So let's make this big for you. This is just a geek. You plug in. You can use your own in whatever digital audio workstation using in. And the idea is that you have your frequencies in the bottom and you have your volume on the other axis. And when you play an instrument, help me. You can see the frequency wave form on your EQ. You plug in. So these little bands that are showing up you'll see that as I choose a different instrument, bands air in different positions. They're occupying different frequency ranges, the higher the instrument further along the frequency spectrum. It is so the violin is the highest. Of course she'll see. There's more keeping over here. Where is a low has more over here and what your goal is when you're a composure. If you're trying to get a full sounding orchestra, feel well full is the hint. The word full is essentially saying you're filling up this frequency range you're trying to use up as much of this is you can. And when she do, you're going to get this nice, full sounding orchestra. Now, if you're a if your experience with this, you'll kind of realize that, Hey, this arrangement right here is only occupying this section. So maybe I could add in a summer some music in this lower section. But if you're new to this, you might need a visual chart to help help you and you conduce Google lists. And you should be able to find a chart similar to this just Google frequency spectrum chart . And here you go, you'll be able to see here's frequencies. So in your lower frequencies, you can see what instruments will occupy that range. We'll see drums on this 100 tennis section. And whereas, um, your flute is going to be a lot higher and you can say, OK, well, I'm listening to this piece, this orchestra piece and I'm playing and it sounds like it's on. Lee got some higher sounding instruments and I feel like is missing some something in the middle, something in the mid range or something in the low range, and you can use this chart to say Okay, well, I'm I'm gonna add in an instrument that's going to fit in that frequency range, and once you've done that, you'll be able get this fuller sounding orchestra will feel. So this is one approach you can take to doing this, okay, and that occupies a significant section. And then finally, we have the piano section of the ends. So the one thing that I want to mention the piano, which I've covered in an earlier lecture, is just deciding which melody of the piano you want to have standing out. And this applies to all instruments, of course, but piano especially. And if I were to look at the velocity for these notes, you'll see that some of these notes are a lot louder than these other notes, and I have actually done that. Strategically, you'll see that these notes these main melody notes are the higher notes, the louder velocity, the louder sound. And that way, when I play these notes, when the snows get hit, they will stand out over the rest of the piano. So once again, when I recorded it in the beginning, it was probably something like this, and all I did was I went into my panel role. I selected these notes and then I hold down left Ault school of my a mouse hovering over the note. And then I could just raise the volume, and I can do the exact opposite for the notes that are slightly lower. I can select the notes, however, in lower slightly. And once you've done that, you'll be able to bring out the melody off the piano that you want to emphasize. So there you have it. That's how you can create a trailer with using all of these techniques that we've mentioned . Now the last thing that I want to mention that isn't really within the scope of this course . But it's what I did for this trailer was Theo Audio itself. So let's take a look at what I did with the audio. I did a few things to it. First of all, I de est it, um, essentially, the idea behind this is you're trying to remove popping s sounds that you hear when you're using a microphone and to do this I just used a plug in. I was a preset. If you happen to have Maximus and you're using FL Studio, you can just use a DSR plug in, uh, preset and that will do the work for you. Or you can manually go in and say I want to reduce the frequencies off the S and P sounds and that that's a way you can manually do it. But it's essentially it's a it's around this frequency range. You just reduce the volume slightly. Then what I did with my e que plugging if you happen to have an EQ you plug in similar to this is if you want to add some power to your voice, you can raise the e que around 160 hertz. Let me show you what this sounds like without the CQ 1,000,000,000. Welcome. Did the soundtrack composer masterclass now with it? Welcome. Did the soundtrack composer masterclass So by raising this little section only for dialogue . So I must stress is this is just for when you're doing something like a voiceover and you really want to bring out this particular power sound. You don't want to do this when you're saying that it's going to sound quite odd, but so this is what I did for that. And then finally, if you're trying to compare the music to your audio. You might want to duck the sound of music when the vocal is speaking overs. So that's what I'm doing up for this song. Let me show you what I mean by that. What I've done is I've chosen all of my instruments, and I routed them to a specific channel, which I've called. All instruments make this picture for you all instruments. You'll see every route, it all of my channels to this channel. And I am going to be ducking the volume whenever my vocal starts playing. So let me play this for you and you'll see that much. This volume is going to decrease at certain moments when the instruments are playing or when my vocal is speaking. If you've ever wanted to know how to make soundtracks in this course is you. Whether you are a composer musician, they'll make a game designer or just making music for fun. So how do I do that if I want to make sure that my ball, my vocals hands out above the instruments? Well, I'm using a form called ducking or also notice side chaining. For those of you who are in electronica music, and the idea behind this is whenever the vocal speaks, the volume is going to be used to trigger a decrease in the volume of something else. So I have my vocal over here, and I'm using a plug in NFL studio called a Peak Filter Pete Control or sorry and essentially the ideas. Whenever the vocal is occurring and this volume gets increased, its going to trigger the channel over here to decrease the volume by this amount, in this case by negative 50 something percent negative 50% and you'll see that the volume is going to decrease as certain increments whenever my vocal is talking. If you've ever wanted to know how to make soundtracks, Miss course is you. Whether you are a composer musician, he'll make. So that's how you can use a a ducking to reduce the volume of your music while you're speaking over doing a voice over. So that was a lot of different topics. I wanted to mention a little bit all over the place, but it's how I scored the trailer, and it's an idea of some of the topics that we've covered in the course, as well as to give you a little example of how a trailer scored 33. Working with the Director and Game Designer: Let's discuss meeting with the director and Kim designer. So the first thing that you do when you meet a director of game designer and you've been approached, are you approaching them about this project is to ask questions. Find out as much you can about their game. You want to come across as someone who is actually curious and that this would be a project that you're interested in. It's not just something you're doing for money. It's something that you doing because you want to do it. Okay, so now when you are meeting with the director and the game designer, you're going to want to find out as much about the project as possible. You're going to go back and do some research. You're going to learn as much as you can about similar projects that have been done, and you're going to want to bring this to the table. If you know more about scoring that they do, you should be able to convey that you should be able to show that these air other scores that have worked really well and you should be able to reference them because that's probably what they're going to be doing. They're going to be referencing other films or video games and saying This is what they've done. I'd like to do something like this and you should already know. So if there's a video game, you should already know what similar video games air out there. If there's a film out there, you should know what similar film scores are for that film. Our Silver Films out There. So your job is to build report and trust. You want to become across a someone who's likable, someone who they would like to work with, because this is a team, it's a collaboration, and it's a creative cooperation to. So the people that are the most creative are the people who are working in a team environment that everyone could get along well with. If you can't get along wealthy team, it's hard to be creative with um, so you're going to want to come across as someone who is easy to work with. Now, when you're actually sitting down with the director in game designer, what you're going to do is actually walk through the entire film, or at least a significant part of the video game and you're going to go scene by scene slowly and meticulously pointing, pausing and saying, OK, what do you want here? What do you want here? What does this look like? And hopefully, if the directors done this four, he will have some idea already. But in my experience, they probably haven't thought this through very well. And you're going to want to be suggesting ideas as you go along, because the director may or may not have done this before. So here the things you're going to want to find out and you will as you're walking through the film a video game. Does the director have a musical background that's going to make this a lot easier, a lot harder, And that's going to determine at what kind of words and phrasing you use. You're going to ask for reference music. Does theme game designer director have something in mind already? What kind of songs or scores do they have in mind? When they were directing the scene when they were designing this idea, you're going to want tohave these at hand that you can refer to whose point of view of perspective should the music before when you're watching a video and is a character on screen. The music is actually dictated by that character Most of the time. If there's a protagonist, the music is probably going to be from their perspective. You're going to have happy music. If there's a happy scene for a character, if it's a scary scene for a character, that music will be scary. On the other hand, if the villain is the one whose perspective you're making the music for, it might not be scary. So it's really determined by what perspective of the character on screen that you're making the score for. So that's one way to go. Scene by scene is identify. Hey, this characters on the screen right now. Do you want the music to be from their perspective or from the audiences perspective or from the environments perspective? What kind of perspective should the music before? And, of course, what emotional impact is the director wanted? It's each scene. Should it be intense, should it be? Relax, should it be what kind? What kind of feel do you want for this as well? Because often you don't want to get too specific. You don't want to say what instruments do you want? Because the director might say one thing and you'll go back and do it. And the director will say that wasn't very good at all. Whereas if the director says, I want this emotion, I want this intensity. You can come up with several different versions and you control that back at the director and he can say, OK, I kind of wanted this, but I like this one MAWR less and so on, But if you are limited by instruments, then you're in trouble. So try to focus more on emotions rather than on specifics, if possible. With video games, it's a little bit helpful to understand how the process works. For video games, it's more for Project. There's actually, uh, parts that have to be done in stages who are is with a film. Often you're given the film already made, and you just have to score. It's not often that the director will come to you and say, Hey, I have a project, make the music and then I'll make the video for it. Probably not gonna happen very rarely. Usually it's the video is made, and then they come across for the the score afterwards, but for video games, there's actually set deadlines that are supposed to be done. So here's the timeline for it. You have a team formacion, where they decide which member is going to be involved. You have the concept pitch where of proposals and presented presentations were made. The design document with a design, every single thing is gonna happen throughout the entire video game, and then they have the walk through, which is the early prototype. This is sometimes where you brought in, but sometimes you brought in earlier. Sometimes you're brought in straight from the beginning, depending on what the game is, and they might want tohave you through involved throughout the whole way so that you can carefully crafting music as you're going along and the stage can be a creative and evolving one. Um, then you have the beta release and you get feedback from others and they will completely tear everything apart. Everything that you worked so hard to achieve will now be removed and you'll have to start from scratch often. Then they have the trailer, which is where you will compose the trailer for them and the final abilities of course, that the very ends. So for video games, you often involved a lot earlier in the process and in films where you will be expected to work a lot more collaboratively with people who are not involved in the music just because they will have a lot more ideas that you will be exposed to, and you'll be bouncing ideas back and forth. And sometimes you'll have other tests as well. Money, money, money, money, money, money. How are you being paid? Is that hourly? Is it? Project based depends on the project. Sometimes they will pay you differently. This is an area of difficulty for most people in creative, the creative consulting because money is different in every project. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes not. How are we way it's going to be budgeted? Is the director going to re score everything later? And if they do, how you gonna be compensated? I once worked on a project where I didn't do this, and we went through the entire film when everything was scored, and then at the very end, he said. You know what? I didn't like this and this and this and this and this and this. I want you redo the whole thing. And I hadn't budgeted that into the contract. I hadn't done that. So don't fall into this trap. Make sure you have set this up in the beginning. If the director of game designer wants to have, Lee writes later on, how is this going to be budget? Does the director want live music sessions? You need to budget accordingly, as he may expect you to coordinate all the spending for music and he might not want to deal with it. So he might just give you a sum of money and say, OK, take care of the music and you're going to need your budget. This if you're going to hire violinists or something like that. And, of course, what is the timeline for the project? How much leeway do you have if you need more time? How did you do this? There's a software called Insta Ghent, and I find this is quite useful for budgeting your time You get the 1st 3 Well, these currently you get the first we inst agains free and then after that you have to start paying. But I find this is quite useful and it's a way to budget your time. And you can show this to the director of game designer and say You have given me this event , this scene for the film, for the video game and here's how much time I need. If you want me to rewrite this, it's going to extend the amount of time I need by so much. So this is useful because you can actually point out to them and say thes air the tasks that I need to do. This is the timeline, how much time I need? If you need me to do something else, this is going to get pushed back. Everything else will take a little bit longer. So this is one way to show your boss Hey ah, you can ask for more tasks if you want, but it's going to take longer. It's going to need to be budgeted accordingly. So before you start your going to want to make sure you've summed up all of the expenses that you expect to have to pay, what kind of software, what kind of musicians And then from there, you should be able to budget yourself 34. Exporting Sheet Music for Musicians (MuseScore): If you want real musicians to be playing your piece, you want live music, and you need someone to actually understand this music that you created in your digital audio workstation. Then you're going to need to export this as sheet music. So let's describe how to do that here. The recommendation that I have is using Mu score, which is a free, open source software you condone download, and this will translate the notes the Midi notes that have you created in your soft for and turn it into sheet music that's a musician can then read from and play it. So a few things you need to do before you can actually get the sheet music. First of all, you need to plan for it in the beginning. And when I say that, I mean that sheet music will always start at Bar zero, and it will bars over one, and it will move upwards from there. In your digital audio workstation, we sometimes get in the habit of starting our patterns of positions that are not always bar zero, and if you're planning to export a sheet music, you need to start start your music at Bar zero because your music will always start in this beginning, and it will adjust everything else to the 0.0, which will mess civil. The timing. I didn't want this to come in here. I wanted it to coming here. What I need to do is add in this empty space before in my music starts. So just keep that in mind, and this is something that you will need to plan for. So now in your digital audio workstation, let's export thes midi notes. If you're not using FL Studio, the steps will be a little different. But the idea is the same going to whatever piano roll or system that you have for exporting and select file export as MIDI file. I say this is that, you know now in Muse score, what we can do is we can create a new projects, and you can choose the type of score that you want to use. In this case, I will just pick classical orchestra. I'll choose the scale that I'm using, and I'll identify what kind of time signature Hominy beats But bar and so on and slick finish. I know what is done is it's actually created a sheet music template that I can now add notes to. So I was old in this case. Differences. I chose the classical orchestra template. I have all of the instruments that I might want to use ready to go. You can always adjust any of these at them, take him away and so on. And now I'm going to import the Midi notes that I just created in my digital audio workstation, so you'll see that it's opened it up in a new score. But that's not That's OK. It's not a big deal. I can just select the notes hit control C to copy, go into my actual score, select the instrument that I want to paste into control V to Paste. And there we have it. I now have added in three notes from my digital audio workstation. It's that easy. So once you're in here, you can then add in whatever articulations you want. Just by dragging and dropping, I can add in some different dynamics and so on, and you can do that for the entire score for all of the instruments, because this doesn't have any of the dynamic changes that you had in your software is not going to include any of the velocity, any of the of the expression, any of the volume changes. You have going to have to do that again because all it did was import the MIDI notes, but not any of the other information. Okay, so now we can export this when we're done adding everything and I will expert this Sure I'll call. It's my score for now. And now I can open this up as sheet music and I can see the notes that I've just created, as well as the dynamics and so on. And a musician can then take a look at this. If there's a violin player, I mean, this probably isn't that realistic, but the idea should be should make sense. They will then be able to say, OK, I understand the trouble, Cliff. I see the scale. I see the timing thes of the notes that I need to play and they can go from there. So this is how you can take a musician outside your music outside of your digital audio workstation and give it to musicians so they can play it 35. Reading and Writing Sheet Music: Let's describe how to read sheet music. So essentially sheet music is a group of symbols that we can use to interpret a musical idea. You can take this document and you can give it to anyone in the world's who knows how to read sheet music. They can take their instrument and read it and understand what you're trying to do with your musical melody. Do you need to know a lot of music theory to read sheet music? No. Do you need to know a lot, too? Right? Cheek music? Not anymore. You used to. But what's happened is a lot of software's have a place. The need to understand a lot of musical writing because it just does all the work for you. And that's the method I recommend you use. You compose your idea in your piano software or your digital audio workstation whatever they use, and you export that you import that in your writing software such as Muse Score, which is the free open source. When I recommended, and you let it dual the work for you in your panel roll, and then all we have to do is add in the details. That's your softer missed. So let's just cover the fundamentals and then you can get rolling from there. So this is your sheet music. You have your name off your piano PC musical piece. You have your second description. You have the arranger, the composer, some information about where it came from and then it starts. It goes from left to right in a downwards motion. So left right, then down to the next one left, right down to next. One left, right, and so on. The first thing you'll see already collapse. This is called a treble clef. This is called a bass clef. Where did these come from? If you're looking at a piano, a treble clef in general, is anything from C. This is the middle C. Note. Anything higher than middle, And why do we have different clips? Well, for piano, at least it's indicating the right hand. Anything at your right hand place. Eyes usually trouble cliff anything. Your left hand place is in general, the bass clef. Some instruments only have trouble clefts or based collapse because their notes are usually only higher than see old Lodin see, so they usually only use one cliff The next thing that you'll see are these things called flats or sharps. So these air flats and these are sharks, and what they do is they indicate what scale urine. When we're using a piano roll, you can see often something called a scale that just does all the work for you. Select a scale and you choose what note you want to start on, and it will build the scale for you so you don't even have to memorize these things anymore . Your software can do that for you. But if we were to look back at how where did these things come from? If I were to look at my piano and were to hit some notes, if I would just look at the C major scale if I were to move up and use the black notes. This is where sharps and flats come from. Sharps and flats indicate Onley thes black notes. For the most part, if you move up from the white note to a black note way, call it a sharp. If you move down from a white note to a black note way, call that a flat. When do we use flats When do we use sharps? Because you will only ever see flats here or you will only ever see Sharp. Sir, you will never see both. Why? If we were to look at these notes here in the C major scale again way hit each note in the scale. Once we hit, see DVD effigy A, B and C We were to pick a different scale low, for example, the F major scale that has hey flat in it. We still only want to use these names of notes once we want to use that once the G wants a ones that be once in this case, we want to hit this note way could call it in a sharp. We've already used a in the scale we cut F g a a sharp. That's confusing for someone trying to read the music. So we call it something else. We have to call it a be something, and it's either be sharp would be flat. We call it a B flat because it's downwards beef what, before using its F major scale, we have to use flats. Otherwise we're going to double use this a note so you use one of the other. Then you'll see something called you a time signature. That's what these numbers indicate, and this indicates how Maney beats you. Have poor bar. Let's look in your digital audio workstation, and you should have a section that shows you how many beats you have per bar three beats per bar. So this should be three out of four. If we were to change that, in this case is a two out of four. So you have two beats per bar and you'll notice something has changed. Over here, you'll see these distances are changing, and this is indicating how many beats you. Have you see 123 beats but bar steps to meet. If I have only two, you'll see it's only 12 beats per bar. What is a bar? Exactly This distance from this line Long line to this next long line Here is your bar. Essentially, what we're doing is we're saying we break up this bar into pieces, and these little pieces here are the beats that we say. So if we were just using Net Metrodome here, we can hear that it's going every two beats before 1212121212 If we were to change the beats of a bar to something else and played again 123123123 And that's how many beats you. Have the bark. You'll see some dynamics. This is your volume. How loud or quiet you're going to play If I were to record some notes, so I played a few notes, and you can see over here in this bottom section we have these dynamics Cesaire, the velocity. How hard of my hitting these notes on the piano and I'm getting louder. I'm hitting these notes harder, and then I'm getting them quieter. If I hit him hard, you get allowed a sound we call this forte indicated by an F If I were to hit them quieter , we call that piano or pianissimo F for 14 means loud pianissimo is quiet. We also have MP, which is measured piano or medium piano medium quiet. I m f medium loud, and there's lots of different names were all of these things and essentially they're just saying, how loud is this instrument going to be and that could indicate indicate your velocity or it could just indicate your volume is those are essentially the same things most of the time. Volume. Louder, quieter. Sometimes you need to range from getting a lot quieter. Toe louder, louder, the quieter. And if you're going to do that in your sheet music, you should have a little symbol here, which indicates quieter, getting louder or louder. Getting quieter. That's what these indicate. Quieter. Getting louder, louder, getting quieter. And finally we get into this up here, which is some words. Well, sometimes you'll see a number, and that's indicating your speed. Whereas in your digital audio workstation they use something called beats per minute. 80 beats per minute is slow 160 beats per minute. Well, that's a lot faster. How Maney beats how many times you hitting something for a minute? Different genres of music tend to have different speeds. Example. Dub Step tends to be 140. House music tends to be 128 beats per minute. This was invented before beats per minute and was used. Didn't have exact timings that we have with software, so they just had to have a relative timing. So they allowed the musician to improvise a bit more rather than having the exact second. And then the final thing to mention is the notes themselves. So if we have nothing, it's empty. There's no notes. We use something called rests. Rests indicate there's no sound. There's nothing being played. Anything other than arrest is a note, and it's something being played. Add notes. Traditionally, you had to write them by pencil, and you had to actually say, I'm going to add a note one note, two notes, three notes and figure out where they were going to be positions within your scale. And do that the timing and figure out how to do that the entire piece. Compare that to other instruments to that will playing at the same time and try to figure out where does everything go together And thank God we don't have to do that anymore. Now your software can do all that work for you when you export this sheet music. It turned this into sheet music. It will maintain all of the timing for you. You don't have to worry about this. You don't have to worry about in putting notes anymore. Thank goodness. And when you're comparing this to a new instrument. You can just have a second instrument playing at the same time, and you can preserve the exact position. So you know, when that notice playing and have it hit at the exact same time, So much easier than trying to figure this out. However, just in case you did want to add some notes like Iran and you wanted to change it a bit, you need to understand how to read this at least So these lines here indicates which note they're going to be pressed on. Each one of these Positionings here indicates where the note is in the scale. So this with that little line underneath the trouble clef under these old these bars is your middle seat, for example, maybe note higher than this. As we go along, I za note higher. So this is your d that's indicated by this note. Ease the next note that is the next note and so on as you move away. Okay, so what's the big picture here? The big picture is you don't have to worry too much about reading and writing music anymore . You can let your software do most of the work for you. There's tons of symbols that you could be spending all of your time going through music theory and going through lessons and trying to figure out what all of these different symbols mean. But it's just like words in a language in a dictionary. There's a lot of words out there you don't need to know. You need to know enough to have a conversation. You know what I need to know? Enough so you can communicate. Working musician, You can spend all of your time composing melodies, getting the timing, the melody, figuring out what instruments work well together. Then what you can do once you've done that is if you want to have riel mystic instruments played by real musicians, what you could do, he's export your music. Send it to a software such as music or and it will capture these mini notes. But it won't have the dynamics, so you'll have to go in and you'll say, I'm going to add in this loudness it's quiet and then maybe some articulations as well. And then you can send that to your musician. The musician will then take this piece. Read this document and say, OK, I get your what you're trying to convey here. I can see the scale that I'm in. I can see the timing. I understand the timing off my piece. You've told me what they dynamics outline quiet. It's gonna be And I can see these notes of spacing what their nose is supposed to be. And I could read this and play your melody. So this is how you can read music and just the fundamentals. So you know, just enough so that you can give something to a musician and they will be able to interpret your idea. 36. CPU Optimization (Remove Lagging): Perhaps you have a project where your computer is lagging and you see beauties can't handle of the instruments and plug ins. Here's a few tips that you can use that may help. First of all, go Teoh. If using FL Studio, go to your audio settings. Make sure you're using an as you know for all for using a different sound one of these, then it's probably not going to be a fast, so make sure you're picking and as you for all make sure you have multi threading selected . These are going to be using more course on your CPU, and that will be important. If you're not using these, your computer will not be optimized. You re sampling should be 24 lower, at least for your if you're running into issues. If you're not, then that's fine. You can use high ones. This is gonna be the quality of your sample, and 24 lower should be good enough for most people. At least when you're still brainstorming composing, make sure that these are selected your triple buffer mixing buffer switch, so these were selected the selects that this is 24 or less. You have as you for all selected. And also you can go into your tools, go to Mac Rose and make sure that the switch smarts label for all plug ins is selected. And what this is going to do is it's going to turn off any instruments that are not active . So when something is not being used, turn it off when it is being used. Turn it on. So that way you don't have to deal with everything running at all times. It'll speed things up, and you can also make sure that your instruments are routed to their own individual channels. At least in the current version of Apple Studio, the different channels actually are integrated with your CPU differently. If everything is routed to one single channel, your computer is actually can only use one core because it designated one core for this. But if you have multiple channels and it can use multiple course, so it's good practice in general to have everything rounded to individual channels. But if you haven't done that, that might be one of the reasons your computer is lagging is because you haven't split them up. So do that. Anyways. That's should be done regardless. And if this still hasn't solved your problems, your computer is still lagging. You have two options. You can either try to please your tracks and what do I mean by freezing? I mean turning your tracks into audio and then re importing them into your dog. And that's not a pretty solution. It's a pain in the butt. But if you have no other option, then you can do that. And if you have a whole bunch of audio tracks instead of meaty notes, your computer will be able to run those much, much faster. How do you freeze tracks? Well, let's show you how to do that. They had a few notes here, and I can go to my mixer. In this case, in my piano, I can select record. It's like this disc recording rendered away file these air. Fine, select start. I know how my audio tracks so I can play this, Uh, and that's now the audio file itself in C. I can't change these notes, but your computer can handle this much faster. Not a pretty solution. But if you have no other choice, you can do that. And then of course, you can buy a faster computer. So these were some steps that you can use to deal with. Slow Cebu or computers starting to glitch in. You hear lots of liking sounds. This is a solution for you. 37. Conclusion: congratulations. You've reached the end of the soundtracks going masterclass. I hope you learned a lot. I hope you had a lot of fun. I know I have a lot of fun teaching you going forward. There is a few additional resources that I have for you that may be useful. First of all, I have to Facebook Page is the 1st 1 is the Music Producer Club, and this is a Facebook page that's regularly post links to recommended videos on music theory or music production. So definitely check that out. If you're into that as well. I have another Facebook page called Filmmakers Club, and this is one that's oriented towards filmmaking. So if you're into sound tracks or directing or cinematography, this page will focus on videos related to those subjects. So definitely check those out and consider giving those like as well. You can always follow me my website, Facebook page, Twitter or Soundcloud with all of my music. And I have another course on music production, which is available where I took the videos on FL Studio that you saw in this course. So in my other course on music production, I cover topics such as mixing, mastering effects, vocal processing and so on. So if you enjoyed this course, you'll probably enjoy that course. And that's it. You've reached the end of the courts. I hope you had a lot of fun, and I wish you the best of luck in your own productions.