via www.filmmusicmag.com

There is one basic fact about the film and television music industry that drives much of what you will read in this guide: it is a very, very competitive business and there are many more songs and instrumental music pieces than there are openings and places to use them in film and television. In Los Angeles on any given day, hundreds, maybe thousands of people are marketing their music for film and television productions. This guide is designed to show you how you can successfully compete in this industry, whether you live in Los Angeles, New York, or in a small country town far removed from the major music cities.

“Location, Location, Location!” – The tried but true real estate mantra is definitely applicable to the film and television music business. A simple fact: being in LA or NY can make it easier to compete for work. While film and television shooting locations can be found worldwide, the infrastructure for post production, which includes music, is still centered in Los Angeles. Although this is changing rapidly as cheap digital editing equipment becomes available in other cities, in film work, the city that the director resides in can also be a major factor in underscore work.

It’s useful to note that song placement is much less location-oriented than score composing. Score composing requires a weeks-long cycle where it can be very helpful if the director and composer are in close physical proximity so demos can be heard. Song placement is much more easily done from locations outside of LA since once the director or music supervisor decide they want to use a song, the physical location of the songwriter is not that important.

That much being said, if you’re in LA or New York, make the most of it and seek out personal relationships with people in the business. Film directors, television producers, and music supervisors are among the most important people you can meet in terms of getting your music into film and television projects. By putting a “face with a name,” you can increase the chances of your music being heard.
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I keep a collection of audio samples designed to help check my monitor setup. Test tones, essentially, that I use after I’ve moved my speakers or desk, to ensure the speakers still behave as they should.

I’ve included 4 of the samples below, and I hope you find them useful - and possibly enlightening. Each tests a facet of the two most common monitoring problems in home studios: Uneven bass response, and poor stereo imaging.

Sine wave sweep

Contents: A sine wave sweeping from 40Hz to 300Hz.
Use this to test for: Bass response, sympathetic vibrations.

Unless you’re outdoors, or listening on headphones, you’ll notice the volume rising and falling as the audio plays. That’s normal, although the level doesn’t actually change. (Open the MP3 in your DAW to confirm this.) Rather, you’re exposing the acoustic response of your room.

Use this test as a rough gauge of how extreme the acoustic issues are in your space. (You can flatten the response somewhat, but acoustic treatment is a topic unto itself. For some more information, check the quick backgrounder on home studio acoustics.)

Additionally, the sweep can expose low-frequency dependent rattles, buzzes, or other sympathetic vibrations happening in the area around you. With this test, I once discovered the casing on an overhead light shook at exactly 140Hz, after puzzling with a mix for 15 minutes, unable to isolate the odd rattling sound.

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In the techno beat live set provided above, you’ll find several samples:

• kick.aif: this is a clean, punchy kick that works well for techno. It has a nice click at the beginning, followed by a punchy sine wave that bends in pitch after a few milliseconds
• snare.aif: this snare has punch and smack to it, with plenty of high-frequency content
• open hh.aif: a very short, minimal sounding click that works nicely for anything minimal
• boink.aif: a high hat and a cup type of sound.
• blip.aif: a synthesized little hit with high and mid frequency content
• tom.aif: a clicky, synthesized tom, very techno

These samples came from SampleMagic’s Minimal/Tech House sample and loop library.

Here’s a quick tutorial of how I made this beat:

1. Create a new Drum Rack Instrument by dragging it from “Live Devices” into the clip/device drop area
2. You should see a grid of 16 squares in the new Drum Rack. Navigate your samples directory with one of the File Browsers, and drag your drum samples into the grid squares. Note: you can select multiple samples and drag them into the drum rack at once, they will be automatically placed in order.
3. If you want your drums to be velocity-sensitive, (which is a must for writing expressive drum paterns) then you will want to select each drum except the kick (either by clicking on a square or selecting it in the Chain List) and set Vel (on the right side) to 50%. The reason I don’t like to set the Vel on the kick drum is because the kick is your constant, you may not want to accidently make the volume of one note louder than another.
4. Now you’ve got a nice drum kit to work with. The typical house or techno beat has a 4/4 kick drum, so go ahead now and create a clip by double clicking an empty slot in the drum rack track, and then double clicking on the newly created clip.
5. Before you start creating any notes, make sure your clip has its Groove set to “Swing 16″, and the global groove amount set to anywhere from 20 or so to 70 or 80. This will make your clip play back with a lot more swing, and this is essential for creating a “groove” feeling. See the image below for where to find the global groove amount:
   
6. Create a Kick drum note on 1, 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4. Play the track so far by pressing space bar, and listen to your simple beat. Now click on the clip and hit Cmd+D or Ctrl+D for PC users. This will duplicate the clip.
7. Now let’s add in some snare in this new clip. on 1.2 and 1.4, add a snare drum note. This is the simplest of all house beats.
   
8. With each new duplicated clip, begin to add in more samples in between the kicks, making it however simple or complex as you’d like. By adding new clips to the drum rack for each new variation, you make it easy to create a progression that will fit into a track. It should start out simple and grow more complex as the song goes on.
   
9. Now that you have several different clips of different beats, you can click record and then trigger each clip and let it play for 2 bars or so, then click the next, then the next after that. This will create a recording of your beats, which you can view by pressing Tab to switch to the song mode.
10. That’s it for now. Good luck! Oh, and if you have any of your own tips, post them here in the comments.

Related articles

• Sonic Transfer: How to build a kick drum
• Sound On Sound: How to synthesize a snare drum (advanced tutorial)
• Tweakheadz: How to write original drum tracks

1. Jailbreak your iPhone with ZiPhone (download for Windows and Mac)
2. Download Masayuki Akamatsu’s akaRemote (download .zip here) and upload it to your applications folder with Fugu (Alternatively, use the Installer app that comes with ZiPhone, and find akaRemote under the “Network” category)
3. Install i3L Midi Bridge software for Mac OS X (download .dmg here) This will allow you to intercept the controller data being sent from the iPhone
4. Open akaRemote on your iPhone, and go to the configuration page. Double tap the series of numbers after “Host Address”. Change this to the ip address of the computer that will receive the MIDI data. On most home wireless networks, it will be something like 192.168.0.X, or 192.168.2.X on other routers. I don’t know if this will work without a wireless network router.
5. Open i3L and then run akaRemote on your iPhone. When you press buttons and move sliders in akaRemote, you should see corresponding activity in i3L’s buttons and sliders.
6. In Ableton Live’s preferences, under “MIDI Sync”, you should see “Input: from i3L_v0.2 1″. Turn on Track and Remote.
7. In Live, hit Command + M (Ctrl + M for PC users) to access the Midi Map mode. Now click any button or slider that is highlighted in blue. Now press a button in akaRemote on your iPhone. If everything is correctly configured, you should see a number appear in a box over the blue highlight. This is the MIDI CC number of whatever button you pushed.
8. Hit Command + M again to exit Midi Map mode. Now press the buttons that you have assigned and they should activate the ableton live buttons.
9. Awesome!

“Most people don’t realize that the distance around the inside of a 12-inch record is about half the distance than around the outside,” Golden explains. “As the distance around each revolution decreases, the high frequencies become harder for a playback stylus to read.”
Link to source

On a tangentially related side-note, I found an interesting video of how vinyl records made, check out How Vinyl Records Are Made Part 1 and Part 2. I know the vinyl vs. CD format war will never be resolved, but it’s interesting to consider when deciding between the two methods of physical distribution for your project.

View movie

If you aren’t confident enough to record melodies from a MIDI keyboard or even your computer’s keyboard (a nice feature in Live for when you’re on the road with no MIDI controller), I find that the easiest way to write melodies with the pencil tool (Command + B for mac users, Ctrl + B for windows users) is to write in your melodies step by step. If you recall the formulas for major in tones (W = whole step, H = half step) (W W H W W W H) and minor (W H W W H W W), then you can use the Fold feature of Live’s clip view to hide the notes that are not included by one of these formulas. Notice in the first image, we have one octave of notes stacked up on top of each other in two different scales, F major and F minor.

All we need to do is create one of these stacks in a MIDI clip, and then duplicate it once or twice. Just select all the notes, then hold down option (mac) while dragging the notes up one octave. This should create a duplicate of your notes, but transposed up one octave. Do this again for the octave below. Now when you click the “Fold” button located at the top left of the clip view, all notes that are not in the clip are hidden. Note in this second image that at the very left, there is a stack of notes that form the scale of F minor. After that, I randomly double clicked to create new notes all over the grid. I set my synthesizer’s polyphony to 1 so that it can only play one note at a time. So no matter what notes I drew, they were all in key. As long as you have the fold view enabled, you can now draw notes anywhere and it will still sound pretty decent.

by Bob Katz

Mastering requires an entirely different “head” than mixing. I once had an assistant who was a great mix engineer and who wanted to get into mastering. So I left her alone to equalize a rock album. After three hours, she was still working on the snare drum, which didn’t have enough “crack”! But as soon as I walked into the room, I could hear something was wrong with the vocal. Which brings us to the first principle of mastering: Every action effects everything. Even touching the low bass affects the perception of the extreme highs.

Mastering is the art of compromise; knowing what’s possible and impossible, and making decisions about what’s most import and in the music. When you work on the bass drum, you’ll affect the bass for sure, sometimes for the better, sometimes worse. If the bass drum is light, you may be able to fix it by “getting under the bass” at somewhere under 60 Hz, with careful, selective equalization. You may be able to counteract a problem in the bass instrument by dipping around 80, 90, 100; but this can affect the low end of the vocal or the piano or the guitar - be on the lookout for such interactions. Sometimes you can’t tell if a problem can be fixed until you try; don’t promise your client miracles. Experience is the best teacher.

Think Holistically

Before mastering, listen carefully to the performance, the message of the music. In many music genres, the vocal message is the most important. In other styles, it’s the rhythm, in some it’s intended distortion, and so on. With rhythmic music, ask yourself, “what can I do to make this music more exciting?” With ballads, ask “is this music about intimacy, space, depth emotion, charisma, or all of the above”? Ask, “How can I help this music to communicate better to the audience?” Always start by learning the emotion and the message of the client’s music/ After that, you can break it down into details such as the high frequencies, or the low frequencies, but relate your decisions to the intended message of the music. Some clients send a “pseudo-mastered” demonstration CD illustrating their goals. Evin if you don’t like the sound on their reference, or you think you can do better, carefully study the virtues of what they’ve been listening to. During your mastering, refer back to the original mix; make sure you haven’t “fixed” what wasn’t broken in the first place. There is no “one-size-fits-all” setting, and each song should be approached from scratch. In other words, when switching to a new song, bypass all processors, and listen to the new song in its naked glory to confirm it needs to be taken in the same or different direction than the previous number. Likewise, as you gain experience, you may want to “tweak” the “presets” in your equipment. Presets are designed to make suggestions and provide good starting points, but they are not one-size-fits-all and should be adjusted according to the program material and your personal taste.

To continue reading, download the PDF for Secret of the Mastering Engineer

My album, Six Minute City, is available for listening and for purchasing online at modcam.com. Additionally, you can download free tracks from the album on last.fm