Hi. Robert here. I'm a music producer(mainly beats) but I aspire to create music for films, television, advertisers and so on. My question for veterans is that: do you need to have a specific structure of your composition for it to be taken into a part of a movie? Thanks in advance.
I already have some projects with a cyberpunk thematic but I need to know if I have to improve their structure.
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If you are just talking about having one of your songs placed in a movie/tv as background music you would need to attract the attention of a music supervisor. The way that it has happened for me was that the tracks were in a production music library that the music supervisor happened to look though and found something they liked. Now, this stuff isn’t the main music you hear by any means. It’s placed in the background. Like two actors could be in a car talking and the radio is on and your song is on the radio or they are in a nightclub and the DJ spins your tune. It’s incidental, but you get paid and see royalties. If you don’t have any tunes in any libraries, you might want to join something like Taxi and submit to the hip hop listings. They’re in there all the time and they're looking to place them in films and tv series and tv ads. Or you can solicit different libraries on your own.
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I'd agree with everything Linwood said. Those are all good places to get started.
Library music does tend to have a specific structure. It does depend on exactly the kind of music you're making and what the library want, but here's a suggestion of a fairly common outline to get you started. The most important thing is to have a key idea that you run with and possibly develop throughout. Hit points (for editing) are also really important
0:00-0:30 - Intro, implication of idea, some kind of build with a hit at the end
0:30- 1:30 - Establishing idea, building slowly, expanding on idea as time goes on. Hit at end
1:30-2:00 - Breakdown, strip back, lower intensity. Hit.
2:00- 3:00 - Increasingly building, getting more and more intense until the end. Big hit.
(3:00-3:30 - Less intense, outro-esque thing but this isn't always needed)
Hope that helps.
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If you are aiming to score a film then there are no rules about structure or how a score should sound