If you are a purchaser of royalty free music and would like your music to stand out from the crowd, this article will offer some useful suggestions that will do just that.
Let me start by being perfectly candid about this. Let’s face it, when you download a piece of royalty free music from this or any other site, you’re getting a stock piece of music. That means it’s no different from the same track that somebody else downloaded.
Of course the exception is if you have a piece of royalty free music custom made for you. The upside to that is that nobody else can use it. The downside is that it can be a little pricey and some people just can’t afford it.
So if you download a stock track, what can you, as a licensee, do to make that piece of music stand out from the other people who have downloaded and used the same track?
Note – The suggestions that follow will require you to have various pieces of software. Some are cheap, or even free, while others may cost a few bucks. It all depends on how deep you want to go with this.
For starters, you can take your piece of music and break it up into smaller pieces. Now if the track you downloaded is only a 20 second clip, obviously this isn’t going to be possible, or at the very least is going to be difficult to do. But for longer tracks of a few minutes, this is very easy.
What you do is take the track and import it into something like Audacity, which is free. Highlight a section of the track and export that section to another file. Continue doing this throughout the entire track until you have about 4 or 5 different sections of music. To make these tracks sound smooth, you will probably want to fade in and out for each track, otherwise they will sound cut. Then blend them into your video or project at different locations. This will make the music sound much different from the original track if done right.
Another thing you can do is run the track through an effects processor. Some effects processors that are free are fairly decent but you will probably want to spend a few bucks to get a good one. The effects that you can apply to the track are quite numerous.
For starters, you can apply reverb or echo to the track, especially if the music was recorded dry to begin with. A lot of my tracks are so that you are able to do just that to the track. In fact, in many tracks, I use as little processing as possible.
You can also run the track through a phaser or flanger to give it that psychedelic sound. A heavily phased musical track can sound totally different from the original especially if you combine it with the next two effects.
The first one is time shifting. That is actually speeding up or slowing down the track. A good time shifter can do this without changing the key of the music. Of course if you want, you can do both.
That brings us to the second thing, key transposition. This can be done in addition to time shifting or in place of it. Together, it really breathes new life into the piece of music.
If you want to get really creative, another thing you can do is mix two or more pieces of music together. This works best if the music is related in some way.
Thinking ahead, I created two series of tunes that take this method into account. One of them is what I call my Fitting End series. These are solo piano pieces that can be mixed in various ways. The pieces are relatively short (between 20 and 45 seconds on average) but when combined can turn into a long piece of music.
Another series I’ve put together is my piano and violin duet series. There are some great similarities between the pieces so that they too can be mixed and matched in a number of ways.
So essentially what you do is this. If you need a piece of music for a project, grab a hold of maybe 4 or 5 different related pieces and then splice sections of them together in various ways. Naturally you will probably want to do a lot of fading in and out in order to achieve a smooth effect.
Okay, why would you want to do these things? Well, like I said, the music you’ve downloaded is the same track that somebody else has downloaded. But why does that matter? It matters because when somebody hears something that they’ve already heard, especially if this is for monetary purposes, they tend to tune it out. Something in their brain says “Oh, I’ve head this already.” By making slight or not so slight changes to the music, you help avoid the tuning out process.
Naturally, all of this is going to depend on what rights you have with the music you’ve purchased. Some royalty free music stipulates that the music cannot be modified in any way. Fortunately, that is not the case with any track that you get from me. All my tunes come with unlimited rights.
Is all this mixing and matching, processing, cutting, clipping and mayhem worth the effort? Well, that depends on what you’re trying to accomplish with your video or project. If you want to give your prospect a completely unique experience, this is difficult to do with stock music, especially if it’s a long piece of music and especially if, for some reason, that piece of music becomes popular. By taking a few extra steps to alter the sound, you give yourself a better chance of standing out.
Point is, when you do purchase a piece of royalty free music, again, depending on the rights you get with it, you’re not necessarily stuck with what you purchased. With a little creativity, you can turn that stock piece into a truly original piece of work.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim