Music Matters!

We've gotten lazy

Just because a quirk in the fair usage aspect of US Copyright Law allows us to put commercial music tracks onto our videos does not make it the right way to act. In fact from the film making angle it is almost always wrong.
Slapping one or more music tracks under your pictures to help hold them together in a video may be better than nothing - but not much.

Commercial Tracks

We call 'em "music videos". Europeans call them "video clips". I'm talking about the sort of short video you see on MTV or all over YouTube which illustrates a song or instrumental by a popular group. Here the music is at the heart of the work and the pictures are very much secondary. For film makers that is the wrong way round. Sure it is an interesting exercise and an easy club contest. But it is not film making. What's more there are very few chances for such works to be seen legally so your audience is restricted to the home and club. Very, very occasionally that style might have a place in our world ... I'm thinking of Jim Beach's tribute to his late wife Wind Beneath My Wings which uses a favorite song of theirs combined with stills. (Read about it here.)

Composers

The internet has opened the way for non-commercial movie makers to work closely with musicians to have music specially written for their movies. There are plenty of enthusiastic amateur music makers keen to try their hand at the art of writing for films. Thanks to the internet you can work with people on the other side of the country or the other side of the world. Do some Googling especially around music forums.

Royalty Free Tracks

No, don't sniff! Some years ago much of the stuff available as "royalty free" was poor quality synthesizer tunes on high-price CDs. Now the field is much more open. Most of the companies which supply music to the film and tv industry will also sell their music to us on a track by track basis and at special rates. You can find some of those companies and typical rates here.

But better still there are good tracks available totally free of charge. The largest collection I know - and one whose tracks I often use myself - is Incompetech (gotta love the name) - click on the Royalty Free Music link and explore the tons of material on offer.

If you have never explored this field before, be ready for the fact that most "background music" is just that. It is not meant to be listened to as you would a popular song or classical recording. Its role is to underpin your images and boost the emotional impact of your documentary shots, your travel panoramas or your drama highlights.

Using Music

This is a huge field, but in essence: music in movies is a tool that you employ to underscore (!) the emotion of a moment: be it tranquility, tension, happiness, tragedy or vibrant energy. It is best used in short chunks with specific scenes and then either switched to another piece with a different mood or stopped for a while as the movie tells its tale in pictures, dialog and special fx. It is usually sensible to stick to one type of sound - lush strings, pop-group, modern jazz etc - throughout a film. If you have to cut from one piece of music to another do it at the end of a musical phrase, even if that means speeding up or slowing down the music a little. Failing that cover the change of music so that it happens low down in the mix under dialog or sound-effects.

You would not (I trust) zoom in or out with every shot. Your would not shoot an entire film with the camera at an angle. So do not use the same music throughout ...

- Dave Watterson

P.S. When you start exploring online music libraries, whether free or paid ones, be prepared to spend happy hours listening to tracks and trying to figure out how to keep notes of ones you might like to use sometime.