This formula helped me write 1000 tracks

[Music] i have plenty of issues but writer's block is usually not one of them i've written thousands maybe not thousands about a thousand production music tracks so i have plenty of experience starting with nothing and then usually finding my way to something that i'm happy with now if you asked me to write a song about my feelings and make an album of songs about my feelings then go play those in front of people and share it with my friends while i'd curl up in a ball and not do anything but if you say write a song that could be used in a tv episode or on a commercial or a long-form internet storytelling video there's a lot of those these days i think i could knock something out fairly quick i tried filming this video yesterday i had every intention of writing a song and talking to you about writer's block while i did it but i recorded for an hour and i was staring at the screen with my mouth open for most of the time so i will cut in and out when it's appropriate but what i want to do is go through somewhat of a checklist now i don't always have a checklist that i go through in my brain when i'm writing a song but there are five things since i always wear this black shirt i can put like the titles across the screen so five keys to five ways five strategies to avoid roger's blog five tips do these five things and never have writer's block again hardest parts of youtube title and thumbnail just an fyi in case you want to go down this path a quick audition of my track [Music] i'll talk about instrumentation in a minute but i will say that one of the instruments i used was my meyer felt which is on sale through august 31st at my website and i also of course worked in the feathered flute on sale at piano book through the end of the month as well so check that out better tip or strategy whatever number one you have to think about the end user now this is a large group of people this is the top of an upside down pyramid if this is the top of an ups this is the top of the funnel right advertising commercials television shows there's so many brands that are using music and and making long form content on the internet that really didn't exist 10 or 15 years ago especially in the numbers that they exist now every brand has pages and pages of videos that talk about their product but keep in mind any type of music can be used in any type of scenario wherever it works so if you write for advertising that doesn't mean it can't be used in broadcasting vice versa but you'll pick up on differences between the way the music works and we'll talk about more those as we work our way down the funnel of the funnel of um writer's block avoidance is that the title but i usually try to simplify it advertising and those are usually more bold you hear it more it's mixed louder and then long-form television where i'm thinking about specific types of tv shows that's usually in the background more underscore-ish not always but that's a way that i can kind of divide what i'm doing and usually i'm focusing a track or a group of tracks on one of those two areas tip number two research this is the fun part you get to watch television don't skip the ads listen to the ads at least get 30 or 40 seconds into it you know the music that we like and the music that we want to make is not always and most the time it's not ever the music that is being used in advertisements or in a lot of shows that we watch that's why it's important to pay attention to what is being chosen and try to figure out why there's almost always a why there are going to be bad productions where people just choose music randomly and they don't have any taste most of the time there is a thought process behind the track selection for advertising you can go to sites like ispot.tv and see what's popular see what's trending but honestly the best thing to do is just watch tv and watch broadcast television watch the main networks because then you get the blocks of commercials from the big brands and there's usually a trickle-down effect you know there's popular music and then the ad agency world kind of catches up a year or two later and then everybody else catches up after that now when it comes to the television side of things the long form programming this is where we have to make some smart decisions on what we are watching you know a lot of programs have custom music but i tend to focus on the networks that are using a significant amount of production music now how can you tell for instance yesterday i was on discovery plus sometimes i worry about there not being enough outlets for our music but then you go on discovery plus and you see all the networks and all the shows and realize there's plenty of places for our music to go as you watch through an episode of one of the shows say it's a home improvement show you can usually tell that it's not custom the tracks usually sound the same maybe there's the same instrumentation but in those moments where the music comes up you can tell the guitars sound different and the drums sound different but watching those shows will give you the best insight into what editors and directors are thinking when they choose production music there are times where i have a theme already in mind and so the research process is just me listening and thinking about that theme but before i started writing this track i was using a research phase just to see what was out there and decide what i wanted to write and that leads to the third part which i'm calling story it's not really a tip i guess but story you know storytelling 101 every story and every show has an arc to it a lot of these home improvement shows they start out with everything's happy in the beginning and then they buy a house and uh oh they find out there's molten house and then they go through the process of fixing it's very formulaic but we like it and it's hard work things go wrong you hit your thumb with a hammer and it hurts and the music for that and then the cute kids in the family walk in and they all have a meal or something and then there's the moment where they reveal the house to the client but as i was watching different shows i was focusing in on that moment where things kind of go wrong and i believe that would be called the inciting incident and the music always changes usually gets darker and i said in my last video you need to be writing upbeat music and you do i don't like writing dark music i think most of us do if we're honest this is a way for me to justify writing music that might be a little dark and a little sad but that's what i like but what's important is that you can visualize scenes happening on top of your music and you can think oh this is at the beginning or this is more towards the middle or this is towards the end and that will affect number four the behavior of your track behavior is a word that is very foreign to those outside of the production music business if you talk to an artist they typically aren't thinking about behavior yeah i guess there is a verse chorus bridge structure that's fairly common but in production music your songs need to behave in a certain way now one common behavior is a building track start small builds to a medium section and then a large section and then maybe a small section to end it off that kind of track is going to play a major role in the story because an editor can edit to that entire track those are fun to make i've made a lot of those and those have done quite well but thinking about the track that i'm riding with this inciting incident theme i'm just focused on that one part and so my track might have some build to it it might have some components that can be moved around and edited too but for the most part i need to stay in that emotion for two minutes because my track needs to be that long but more than likely the editor is only going to grab 30 or 45 seconds if i'm lucky when you take a track like that and you audition the 30 second mark and then the 90 second mark there needs to be a common thread not that it can't change but it needs to be cohesive and let's look about 30 seconds in now if we jump to the b section [Music] and then even later on [Music] as you can tell there is a lift and when you've been listening to the same track for hours that lift seems quite large but in the grand scheme of things it's not that big at all and part of that behavior or what i like to call moments you know edit points in a big building track that's really easy because you have your small section and maybe a stop and you swell into a medium section and then you can do some kind of crazy thing going into the big section and out but in a more subdued track you still need to have those moments but you can't take away from the overall vibe and feel of the track with a background track it's often more difficult to work in drops and swells without drawing too much attention to the music underscores are meant to serve the story they're not necessarily meant to be the story here's my beginning [Music] 1 2 i want to make sure i give the editor something to use at the beginning notice in between the a sections this is a very small moment and then leading into what i'm calling the b section i added that bar after the fact i did not record that but i felt like i needed something because an editor can easily go in right here keep in mind editors they use somewhat rudimentary tools and they also have access to other tools one they've got dialogue going on but they also have sound design a lot of time a bin full of sound effects and such so perhaps they just want to go into this b section they could start right here [Music] fade into it add some kind of whoosh or whatever and cover that edit up completely but at least that gives them an option to now go into this b section that's different from the a section that might increase my chances that it gets used in multiple times during the same scene now in this track i also made a c-section which is basically it just hangs on the same cord and it has an extended build but i added an additional moment before [Music] one thing that i will often do is when i know i'm going to have sections in between sections a drop i'll make that drop two bars instead of a half a bar and the reason i do that is because i will try to fill it in with something creative but if it doesn't work it's a lot easier to close down and make that a bar or three beats or two beats instead of extending it because you have chords that roll out on the acoustic guitar and if you might something up you don't want to go back and do it again and then here's a moment at the end of the track [Music] that's what i call my composed ending right i gave it a little bit of a lift at the end and then came to a very precise ending imagine going to commercial break or imagine shifting to a new scene it's just a sudden lift it transitions over and then we are somewhere else and the fifth thing that i think about is instrumentation now there are times when i'm making an album if it's an acoustic guitar instrumental album well that's decided at step one but in this kind of scenario i have gone through all of these processes right i'm thinking about the end user to what's number two research story behavior you'd be surprised at how instrumentation is not as important you can take instruments that may not go together and as long as you're thinking about all of these other parts of the process you can create something that works well and if this is an advertising track a lot of times the people in charge are looking for something unique and interesting now all that being said if all the tracks in the show that you're pretending to write for are acoustic guitars ukuleles and hand percussion you probably don't need to deviate too far from that nylon string guitar is how i started this this is the part that i started with [Music] it's basically that over and over again with click track bleed that i'm going to have to take out but i think i can do that then we have the meyer felt [Music] together with the nylon [Music] there are elements that make the piano not sound that great by itself but make it really nice in context [Music] then i added an additional meyer felt part [Music] which is heavy on the effects and that comes in later on in this b section [Music] of a rolling arpeggiation that's the idea behind this track is there's a lot of movement uh the nylon is moving really fast the piano is moving fast and all together it's moving but nothing is really sticking out then there's this fun moment then the feathered flute just to add that ambience in the back i'm gluing it all together with this ethereal pad [Music] [Music] and then synthbase i use my basic all the time it's one of my free prototypes you can go pick up for both contact the full version and decent sampler and you can see the mod wheel is connected to the low pass filter so listen to it we'll kind of skip to where it opens up a little bit more [Music] that filter is a way to make the track feel like it's opening up and then i have this snare drum which is a huge marching snare drum that a old roommate of mine from years ago left with me with my left hand i'm playing consistent almost sounds like a shaker because of the way those brushes work and i'm adding a little bit more emphasis with my right hand [Music] there's the track i've taken what are limitless possibilities and put them in a very small box and i've got these tools that i can choose from and if i deviate from it it's obvious so that pulls me back into it and why does this keep me from having writer's block because i have spent the last 30 minutes or maybe hours thinking about this thinking about it in a very specific way and if you do that your mind gets locked into it it's a lot more difficult to not have ideas than it is to have ideas this process works for me but if i miss something that works for you please leave it in the comments and we'll talk soon [Music] you

Channel: Jon Meyer Music

Views: 13,477

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Id: 6YoJ9W5a000

Length: 16min 31sec (991 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 26 2022