Hello friends!
I hope you, in the short period of time since we published a previous article, gathered your thoughts, equipped your workplace, and decided on the tools for a work. Now we are ready to depart on a long creative journey!
Starting with this article, I will tell you about creating a specific material for a specific task. Yes exactly. It is not a pure act of creative creation, but rather the completion of a task under certain conditions. This part will be organizational and motivating. Please follow the link to find the music sample we going to create step-by-step over a series of following articles.
Making music for the soul is certainly good. You can sit down, spend a week or a month, satisfying yourself and making happy your friends and family. But this is not the goal that I want you to set for yourself. We will consider writing music for certain, specific goals, with further monetization. Yes, we will immediately create a product, of a quality that can be presented to customers! Do not be intimidated by this. From my own experience, I will say that making a valid project strongly boosts internal resources and helps to find non-standard solutions for seemingly unsolvable problems. This is very important, and we will emphasize to this point more than once. Do not be afraid to do something wrong, whatever you do is the response from your inner self, which means this response is appropriate, and you just need to apply it correctly. Yes, there are rules, techniques, even taboos! But all these nuances come with experience and are deposited inside us, which in the future will greatly save work time.
For a quick and efficient work, you should follow a few important rules:
a) You should not be distracted by anything. Tell your family that you need to be not distracted for a certain number of hours, say 4-5. Know that just one phone call or a text message can ruin your concentration and hours of work. You will encounter this more than once. Do not be surprised. Just take it as a rule and try to make it a regular work routine. The key to high-quality creative work is peace, relaxation, and inner spiritual balance.
b) You must prepare a plan of how and what you will do. This is the hardest but also the most important part. It is difficult because it includes a lot of points that are worth considering in the work and connecting them together while trying to fit it into a certain time frame. I will give you clear guidelines to follow and focus on important points that may not be so obvious.
Well then. Let’s assume that you have figured out all aspects of the first point and are ready to start. Let's begin!
Planning very much depends on the conditions of the order. Writing music for a one-minute video and for a feature film or just a composition for a performer requires a different time frame and completely different approach to the process.
Personally, I am focusing on the following points:
- Always meet the schedule. For me, the worst thing is to fall behind the schedule (It almost never happens now when I developed, maintain, and follow my personal routine). Try to submit a finished project a few days earlier for at least one reason - revisions are always should be expected, some of which can redraw your composition completely, which will take a huge amount of time. Our reputation is more important than our procrastination!
- After the composition is arranged, give yourself a day or two to rest before mixing it. Perhaps, after listening it every other day, you will hear that you do not like the bass, or you want to add Crash at some point.
- After you have mixed the composition, give yourself another day or two to rest before sending it to the customer. The fact is that when you work with a composition for a very long time, your ears get used to a certain sound and takes it as a reference, and you simply cannot hear some fragments that you will clearly hear after a rest. In general, a very simple rule for everyday work routine: 45 minutes of working with sound, 15 minutes of rest.
Based on all of the above, I give myself 5-6 days between the end of the project and submitting it to customer. In total, I should have a finished project one week prior the deadline. Under these conditions, I have no problems in detecting and fixing an errors which allows to provide a quality result to the customer. But we are all different, perhaps you might have a slightly different time frame. The very time of creation and arrangement of course depends on the volume of the material and experience. It takes me a day or two to create a small one-minute composition. But again, this comes with many years of experience and understanding of technical and creative aspects of the project. At the very beginning of your creative path, this timeline will be much longer. I am only giving you an examples of planning based on my resources and experience.
Let’s assume we received an order to make a musical background for a sports workout video. And this is going to be our project from now on. Please take a minute (a minute and eight seconds to be precise) and listen to a music we going to recreate for this project.
When you compose the music for a specific video, it is advisable to watch the material to catch an idea and vibe of the video. If the video is still under an edit, try to learn as much as possible about it from the customer. The best option would be if the customer drops you a reference music, so you can create something of the same style yet unique and original.
Any track has a following structure: Intro, Theme, Pre-Chorus, Chorus, Bridge, Outro - these are all parts of the composition that make its mood, each are different from the other.
Combination of all will help us to compile a composition of any length in the future.
Here is an example.
In our sports video, we decided to do something dynamic, but not fast. Let's lock speed at 110 BPM (Frankly, it's easier to take 120 BPM, it will be easier to fit in one minute, but we are not looking for an easy ways. Let's pretend, the vibe of the video does not allow us to rise speed above 110.
Mandatory parts in any composition are Intro, Theme, Outro. Four beats on Intro and Outro in this composition will be enough. At 110 BPM, that is an eight seconds for an Intro and eight seconds for an Outro. Now we know where to apply 16 seconds. 44 seconds are still remaining. It will be boring if we spend them all on Theme. So, let us add the Bridge and Chorus parts for the dynamics. We will give them 8 seconds each. After some thought, we build the following final structure of the composition:
INTRO THEME 1 BRIDGE CHORUS THEME 2 OUTRO
8sec 18sec 8sec 8sec 18sec 8sec
In total, we got 1 minute and 8 seconds, which is slightly longer than our given time. But since we will initially do an OUTRO with the moment of fading (Fade Out), in our case it will be acceptable.
Now I will explain why I spent so much time on the structure of our composition.
Let's pretend that a customer suddenly decided to make a video longer. In this case, for example, we will just add another ready-made BRIDGE or CHORUS part and add THEME 3 to maintain the integrity of the composition. Whereas the customer asks to send him the composition not as a whole track, but in ready-made blocks, from which he himself construct any duration he needs. In our project we will proceed with the assumption that we must provide a full track.
I think this will be enough information for today, so please stay tuned for a next article.
To be continued…
Andru “Namaste” Shaitar
webdisweb@gmail.com
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