Sound Advice: Makin' Music

Today's software tools never cease to amaze me. They routinely take intricate, complex, time consuming tasks and turn them into child's play. Even better, these tools are available at ever-lower prices with added features and better quality. Take audio production software for instance. Ten years ago, digital audio editing required proprietary hardware and thousand-dollar software. Today, by comparison, every computer comes with built-in hardware and software to record and edit digital audio. Recently, this trend has extended into desktop music production. With your existing computer, some affordable software and little or no musical knowledge, any video producer can create custom music for their projects. Let's explore some of your options.

Give Me One Good Reason...
There are several good reasons to create custom music for your project. One really good reason is song length. Advertising is one of very few production categories that use fixed segment lengths and many production music libraries cater to those lengths. However, the majority of projects fall outside those time constraints and rarely match the length of the song you want to use. Another reason to use custom music is content control - whether for stylistic or copyright reasons. The whole debate over file sharing and services like KaZaa and the now-defunct Napster ignore one simple principle - there are laws in place that protect music created by other people, and you, as a video creator, cannot simply drop any song you like into your next video. The January 2003 issue of Videomaker has an excellent article on the subject of copyright and how it affects you as a video producer. One last reason to create custom music is there are times when the music simply must be original. Maybe it's a jingle or just an audio identity, but there is great value in the ownership of these audio elements. Many television shows and movies spend a great deal of money ensuring they have a unique soundtrack. And now, with today's music creation software, it's your turn.

Probably the easiest way to get custom music into your video is to let the software do it for you. Products such as SmartSound (included with Adobe Premiere, version 6 and up) offer a simple check-box approach. The process starts with a built-in library of pre-recorded songs, along with a twist. For each song, the software contains a list of pre-defined edit points that divides the song into perfectly timed segments. You select a style of music from a list, tell the software how long the piece should be in minutes and seconds, and then generate the finished product. Based on its edit list, the software builds a version of the song using your criteria. If you don't like the way the software created the piece, either redo from the start or just change a few options - that's literally all there is to it! Of course, what you gain in speed and convenience is offset by a minimum of control, but the results are consistently good and, if you need custom music fast, automatic generation is the only way …