A lot of people are totally clueless when it comes to just how much work goes into creating a royalty free music track or any music track for that matter. All they get to hear is the finished product. Well, if you’re a customer and want to get a better appreciation for what goes into all this or if you’re a wanna-be writer who wants to know what you’re getting yourself into, you might want to read what’s to follow. It’ll be a real eye opener.
Let’s dive right into the worse case scenario for the 14 hour work day. Hopefully, this isn’t your normal routine.
You’ve just gotten a client who needs a 10 minute soundtrack for a video he’s made. He wants you to write a Celtic score. No problem except you have no idea what Celtic music sounds like. So the first thing you do is head on over to YouTube to listen to, you got it, some Celtic music. So you spend a good hour there listening to samples. There’s one hour of your day shot before you’ve even written one note.
After you’ve done that an analyzed the genre, making a list of all the instruments you’re probably going to need to recreate a true Celtic score, you go into your VST collection and notice that you are lacking a few essentials. At least there’s nothing in your arsenal that sounds good enough to put into a professionally done soundtrack that you’re going to charge somebody $1,000 for.
So now begins the mad hunt online for a VST that recreates the sounds that you’re looking for. Depending on how many sounds there are, this could come down to purchasing as many as three or four different VSTs. And if there are competing brands, you’re now spending time comparing the two. Is there enough of a difference between them to warrant spending $300 as opposed to $30?
By the time you’ve purchased all the VSTs that you need to complete the project you’ve spent a good two hours looking through products. You’ve now gone through 3 hours of your work day and still haven’t written one note of music.
Oh but we’re not even close to being done yet.
All these new VSTs have to be installed. Not only that, you find out that one of them has quite a steep learning curve as far as keyswitching and MIDI assignments. So you spend a good hour learning how to play your new instrument after an hour of installation headaches. We are now up to 5 hours of your day shot to heck and finally about to write some music. Well, kind of.
You need to watch the video and make notes along the way. The video itself is 10 minutes long. Even if you could absorb it all in one playback and make all the notes you need to make as far as what music will go where, between all the starting and stopping (you can’t make notes about one part while you’re trying to listen to the next part) you’ve now killed another two hours. So 7 hours of your workday is now gone.
Finally, you have the whole project mapped out and you’re ready to write the score. A Celtic orchestral score for full orchestra takes about one hour per each minute of music. Yep, you got it. Your 10 minute score is going to take 10 hours to write. You have now shattered your 14 hour day and have gone into your 17th hour, which means you’re now into the next day’s work by 3 hours assuming you’ve decided to stop after 14 hours.
So now 3 hours of your next day is shot just completing the score. Naturally this all assumes taking no time for eating or going to the bathroom. I have not tried this so don’t ask me if it’s even possible. Attempt it at your own risk.
Anyway, the score is complete. Now it’s time to actually convert it into music. Well, there are two ways to do this. One is to import it directly from your notation program into your DAW or you can play it real time. There are downsides to each.
If you’re going to play the score real time then for starters you better be a darn good performer or you’re going to be making a lot of mistakes and doing a lot of retakes. This can be incredibly time consuming, especially with a 10 minute score.
Importing the music from a notation program has its downside too. Because of the way notation programs work (they are very exact) the music ends up sounding very robotic. What you have to do, after importing the score, is go into each part and start moving MIDI notes around to try to create that human feel.
For example, let’s take a 6 French horns part and a violins part coming in at the same time. In real life, the violin player has to start playing slightly before the French horn player because the sound from the violin takes longer to make because of the bowing action. With a notation program, the notes are sounded simultaneously which gives it an unnatural sound. By moving the violin note a little early, you achieve the more natural feel of a real orchestra. And you need to make this move for each time the horns and the violins play together.
But it doesn’t end there. If you have other string parts like viola and celli, you want to move those notes as well but have them overlap with the violins and each other. Why? Because human beings don’t all start playing at the same time. By making these slight adjustments, you get the feel of a real human string section where everything kind of sounds like mush. It’s supposed to. If it doesn’t, you’re doing something wrong.
All of this moving around after the import of the score can literally take hours if not days.
So as you can see, whether you enter your music through notation software or play it real time, you’re going to be spending a lot of time getting things just right.
Hours spent? I wouldn’t even dare to estimate. Countless.
And we’ve hardly scratched the surface of the amount of time it takes to put a piece together. After each instrument is recorded, you have to put the proper effects on each one to get that big orchestral sound. For example, do you know how the Hollywood music gurus get that big horn sound? They run the horns through an overdrive. Yep, the same thing you run a guitar through. Strings are EQ’d like crazy on the top end so that they really stand out. Timpani have a sine wave added to them to bring out the low end more.
Heck, I could write a whole article (think I will) on how to process your orchestra so that it sounds big and meaty.
But I think for now you’ve pretty much gotten the point. Producing music is a big and time consuming job. The rewards, however, make it all worth it.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim