If you’re wondering how royalty free music is made today, you might want to check out this article. Things are a lot different than they were even 20 years ago.
Back in the stone ages, royalty free music was made the old fashioned way, with real musicians and real instruments. A group, solo artist or orchestra would get together at a designated location with musical score in hand, record the piece in question, sheet music would be made, and the song would be distributed to whoever purchased a license.
While the above sounds simple it was far from it. Scheduling could sometimes be a nightmare. Imagine recording a piece that had a 70 piece string section and you had to pick a date where they were all free for the session, assuming you could even finish the track in one session.
And what if you were creating an entire royalty free collection of 16 or more songs. Can you even comprehend how long that would take when you have to coordinate 70 musicians, recording engineers and available studio time?
Those dinosaur days are pretty much behind us, at least for the small operation. Sure, there is still RFM created the old fashioned way. It also costs a small fortune for anybody who wants a piece of it.
Today, however, the whole process has changed dramatically. For example, how do I myself create the royalty free music that I make? It’s really very simple.
The hub of the process is the Digital Audio Workstation or DAW. This is a piece of software that essentially allows you to bring in all types of virtual studio technologies (VSTs) in order to create your sounds. If you go to my site and read the FAQ page, you’ll find a brief list of the VSTs that I use for creating my music. These VSTs can duplicate just about any sound imaginable and some not so imaginable.
The DAW has MIDI and audio record capabilities. So you can use actual real instruments (if you want to) in the creation of your songs. So far I have personally kept everything digital.
After all the individual VSTs are brought into the project and each musical part is recorded, the next step is to take each track and mix them together so that the levels are where they need to be in order to get the “best” sound. Of course a lot of this is subjective and to taste. After the mix is complete, final processing is performed (compression, limiting, etc.) to create the finished product.
The last part of the process is making the musical track available, which today is as easy as creating a WAV or MP3 file, uploading it to a web site and preparing it for sale using some kind of product sales software like DLGuard, Rapid Action Profits, or in my case, WordPress eStore.
What used to take days or maybe weeks to do can now be done in a matter of hours depending on how complex the musical arrangement is.
And the beauty of this process is how flexible it is.
For example, let’s say you’ve just created a piece of royalty free music that consists of a piano, bass and drums and you want to make another version of this music to include horns, violins and a string section. It’s as simple as just adding three more VSTs to the original file and recording those three parts. No need to get the musicians back into the studio to do another version, which by the way because of the human element may not sound exactly like the first recording.
In the case of using DAWs and VSTs everything from the first recording will sound exactly the same in the second recording. All notes will be played exactly the same. The timing will be exactly the same. The only difference will be the additional parts.
And because using DAWs and VSTs is so flexible, you can virtually made an unlimited number of mixes of the song without having to bring musicians in each time you have something new to record.
Plus, you can add or subtract effects from each mix. You can take one instrument and replace it with another one without having to replay the part. I’ve completely new styles of songs simply by doing just that. For example, I’d replace a piano with a synth pad and get a whole new sound.
There is a downside to this and I’d be amiss to not tell you what it is. Because royalty free music is so easy to create today (DAWs are relatively cheap as well as the VSTs) everybody and their grandmother can pump out tunes like water pouring from a faucet. This leads to a lot of crap being pumped out into the marketplace. In turn, that means a lot of crap that you have to wade through. And trust me, as someone who used to look for RFM for his own use, it’s not fum.
The low barrier to entry, just like with anything else, brings out all the bad elements of this business. As a result, a lot of royalty free music gets a bad rap. As always, the bad apples ruin it for the good people.
Still, I would never want to go back to the old way of doing things. I could not afford to hire an orchestra to perform one of my orchestral scores. The symphony that I wrote (sorry, it’s not royalty free) would have never been made. So I guess as with anything else, you have to take the good with the bad.
Anyway, there you have it in a nutshell. That is more or less the process that most composers go through today in order to get their music out to the public. If you yourself are interested in creating your own royalty free music, you can get started for under $300 and that will cover just about everything.
With that being said, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to my $300 studio and make some more great music for the world to use.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim