Tea Break Tip: Library Music | Underscores and assets

Pro Songwriting Masterclass | Nick Evans (Award-winning Chøppersaurus: BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky | Homeland, Eastenders, The Grand Tour, Big Brother | Film: Blood Fest | DJ : Pacha, Ministry of Sound, Ibiza’s Eden)

An underscore mix is basically without vocals and without any intrusive melodic elements. So what it’s really good for is to sit underneath lots of dialogue. So it is a very stripped back mix. It can sometimes just be like drums, bass, and some rhythm guitar or synth chords or whatever it would be.

Then you have to do cut downs, which are probably the least fun part of anything in the world ever, which is basically taking your track and doing a 62nd version, a 32nd version of it, a 15 second version. And then what is called a sting, which is basically a very short three or three to seven second long motif that could be used at the end of something or whatever, just as a tool.

And then you deliver stems. Every library is different. Sometimes they want all the stems, but of the time they’ll ask for group stems, which is basically drums, percussion, bass guitars, synths vocals. So it’s all easy. And that what that allows is at the end, the process, if a music editor is gonna use your track, they have the option of doing their own mix of it.

And that essentially is what we’re talking about here. That is what is so, important about library music is the fact that it is essentially what you are trying to do. You’re trying to write great songs, obviously for use on tv, but the end goal is to give music editors a toolkit to so they can edit and make their own versions of your track.

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