Production Music – Edit Music

[Mark Suszko]

I would love to have the budget to hire a live composer, but our best ROI comes from using loop-based DIY music software, which is highly customizable, yet carries none of the restrictions and issues of needle-drop or buy-out. Pay once, own it. In our case, we use Sonicfire Pro, which works great for people without any music ability at all, giving custom lengths with various instrumentation variations, automatically, and offers a lot of variations with just menu selections, but gets even better results if you have any skill at all in understanding tempo and rhythm, since you can add and mix modules of a collection to further customize it.

[Grinner Hester]

I keep one of my guitars in my suite for when I just need a filler bed. But when cutting to music or needing something bigger, I have gravitated to DeWolfe. I like their stuff and I love their people. The let me pay blanket fees per production so I do not limit creativity by counting needle drops. FirstCom is good too. Very interactive site that lets you audition clips at one running time at another and I find that quite a time saver.
Outside of those, I have a large handful of musician friends that are all about laying down custom scores for me… within an hour of their reading my email and getting a file.

[Jon-michael Brown]

Thanks both you guys! Mark Suszko with Sonicfire Pro, you still have the buy songs composed by the company that can then be adjusted to your liking using the Sonicfire Pro software, correct? Or did you buy a whole library with the Sonicfire Pro software? I have found the music selections, and digging through their options a bit cumbersome, but I have used it in the past.

And grinner hester. I will be looking into both mentioned options.

Thanks again.

[Mark Suszko]

Sonic Fire uses proprietary files, yes, but it’s kind of unique. You can buy “albums” of the source files on CD or DVD disks, load that in, and from there, the software will dice and slice the component pieces into a myriad of versions… or, the cool kids now just use an interface in the current version of Sonic Fire to browse a much larger selection of these collections online, then once approved, you pay electronically and download them, no optical or physical media involved. Which is handy if you get short for local storage space. You also don’t have to drop a lot of money up-front to build a decent variety of tracks to work from… you can order stuff “a la carte” as you go, and not get “stuck” with “old” track media.

Sonic Fire is not the only such system out there: Sony Acid is long-established, with a heck of a back-catalog, but I’m going to opine that Acid is better if used by someone who has some actual music skills. Whereas, with sonic fire, I could teach my elderly mom how to use that software in a few minutes.

[Andrew Rendell]

Late to the party on this (having an unusually busy start to the year) but I have a couple of composer friends who I use when I can but more often than not I use library stuff. (I’m a musician myself but my stuff is rarely the right thing for my editing work).

I don’t think in terms of “best” (that’s far too subjective) I think of what is right for the project. It’s fairly regular for me to need something orchestral and I tend to use Audio Network for that because there’s never time to get it arranged and recorded (and synthesised/sampled classical instruments rarely succeed IMO) and I’m reasonably familiar with ANW’s stuff. Then there’s the stuff that needs a very modern feel, so I might get asked for, say, dubstep (and it has to be dubstep) so that’s usually a trawl through libraries.

I think it’s fair to say that there is no part of the programme making process where the phase “you get what you pay for” is more apt than music.

[Grinner Hester]

also, Check out SOundminer. It’s a cool lil app that auditions clips from your favorite libraries and allows you to retime them and hear pitch differences before even bringing them into your NLE.

[Jon-michael Brown]

Thank you, Sir for all your comments. I had a great talk with Dewolfe – they seem to be MUCH more reasonable then many of the other big guys out there. 😉