Film, TV, & Video Game Music Composition + Production Basics

Identify essential music gear for film, TV, and video game production, including a Mac or PC, a DAW, notation software, sample instruments, and mixing plugins, plus budget tips.

Explore essential music gear, sample instruments, books, and business tools for building a sustainable music career. Learn gear setups, bundles, and diversification strategies to diversify income.

Build a studio gradually with an external hard drive backup, a MIDI controller, an audio interface, studio monitors, a microphone, and sample libraries for film, TV, and games scoring.

Compare the top six daws for composing music and evaluate budget and workflow needs. Master one daw, try free trials, and choose the best fit for your projects.

Explore three ways to record instruments: midi, line-in with an active dye box into an audio interface, and microphone capture. Apply mic placement and basic mixing to a complete track.

Explore types of notation for musicians, including lyric sheets, chord charts, tablature, sheet music, and conductor's scores, and learn which works best for vocalists, guitarists, soloists, and ensembles.

Learn to notate an eight-bar piano piece using notation software, balancing melody in one hand with chords in the other to build harmony.

Master the dominant seventh and diminished seventh as leading chords in major and minor keys. Explore their uses, with examples like G7 in C major and the deceptive cadence.

Explore chromatic mediants, an advanced, non diatonic third chord concept that moves by thirds to chromatically related neighbors, creating shocking progressions for film, tv, and games.

Explore the Neapolitan chord, a major flat chord in first inversion that substitutes the I–IV–V–I progression. Use it to spice melodies, in game cues like treasure chests or victory themes.

Explore ambient, edm, chip tunes, hybrid, and sampled electronic music types for film, game, and technology contexts, and learn how to write in each style.

Explore electronic synthesis to craft your own sounds from scratch using Massive and Xebra, with hands-on basics in Logic Pro and guidance for film, TV, and video game music production.

Learn how sampling and recording your own sounds with Logic EXS24 and Kontakt turns found sounds into unique instrument presets, using velocity layers, looping, and convolution reverb.

Learn to craft eight bit chiptune music by using square waves, chip sounds from older consoles, and live recording techniques, with quantization, velocities, and bit-crushed enhancements for energetic game tracks.

Create two 30-second electronic tracks with contrasting styles—ambient pads and synthesis, and a techno dance track using sampling—exploring electronic and hybrid film, TV, and video game music.

Explore an epic tv promo orchestration case study, blending strings, percussion, synths, and guitar, timed to 30 seconds with a flexible template and layered doubling.

Compose an eight-bar piano piece using two hands, keep it simple, then extrapolate it to a five-to-ten instrument ensemble, exploring either electronic or orchestral textures.

Master the art of mastering, not mixing; align a multi-track album in a separate session to create a cohesive sound across all tracks using consistent plugins, levels, and fades.

Explore the three L's of music for film, TV, and video games: linear music from point a to b with sections; interactive layers; and loops for endless repetition.

Learn to score to picture for film by composing, notating, and recording with an orchestra. Apply techniques like emotional openings, dialogue-friendly textures, markers, silence, reverse piano, and low percussion.

Learn to design interactive layers for video game music, evolving from a simple base layer to shuffle chips, kick drums, toms, melody, harmony, and a bright synth doubling through gameplay.