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    Making A Living From Music For Picture: Part 8

    Being Creative Under Pressure

    In music-for-picture work, there's never enough time to do what you'd ideally like to. We look at what it's like producing music under pressure.

    Techniques Jul 2006
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    Making A Living From Music For Picture: Part 7

    How To Cope With Revisions

    What happens when the Director whose work you're scoring isn't satisfied, or demands changes due to events beyond your control? We find out, and also look at writing music for film trailers.

    Techniques Jun 2006
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    Making A Living From Music For Picture: Part 6

    Completed Orchestrations

    We look at the completed orchestrations for the film project introduced last month, and begin to consider the problem of what to do when a director demands revisions to your work...

    Techniques May 2006
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    Making A Living From Music For Picture: Part 5

    You Got The Commission — Now What?

    So, you've been commissioned to write the score for something. What should you do next? We provide some suggestions, with real-world scoring examples for you to download and try.

    Techniques Apr 2006
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    Making A Living From Music For Picture: Part 4

    How To Make A Pitch

    Success! You've been invited to pitch for a job. Surely that Hollywood career now beckons? Well, no... This is just a pitch — there are others competing for the job. We look at how to maximise your chances of winning the commission...

    Techniques Mar 2006
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    Making A Living From Music For Picture: Part 3

    Essential Gear

    The perfect project studio doesn't exist, as everyone has different working methods — and so it is with equipment for creating music for picture. However, there are some fundamental bits of gear you will need. We provide some guidance...

    Techniques Feb 2006
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    Making A Living From Music For Picture: Part 2

    Creating Your Showreel

    If you're ever going to make it in this game, you need a calling card, a way of impressing potential clients with your musical ability — you need a showreel. We explain what to do to create one...

    Techniques Jan 2006
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    Making A Living From Music For Picture: Part 1

    Getting A Break

    Writing music for picture seems like the ideal career. You get to work in your studio for a living, you can earn good money, and there's so much potential work: action films, travel and nature documentaries, romantic comedies, cartoons, low-budget sci-fi, even breakfast cereal ads. But how do you break into this lucrative world?

    Techniques Dec 2005
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    Composing Theme Music For Royal Gardeners

    TV Theme Music

    Is writing TV show theme music as easy as it might seem? To find out, we follow the progress of David Lowe and Paul White's music for a recent BBC series on gardeners.

    Techniques Mar 2004
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    Composing For Video Games

    Jack Wall

    Jack Wall is a leading light in the video game soundtrack industry, where his credits include the latest chapter in the best-selling Myst series of computer games.

    Techniques Feb 2003
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    Uniting Music & Film

    The Ballet Mécanique

    Not content with reviving and staging a 1920s avant-garde work for the first time, Paul D. Lehrman also worked out a way to reunite the piece with its contemporary film, which was never used due to technical problems. This is how...

    Techniques Sep 2002
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    Hit Factors

    The Link Between Music & Emotional Response

    Do hit songs have a hidden ingredient that makes them successful by appealing directly to our emotions? It's a question that musicians and scientists have sought the answer to for many decades. Acoustic researcher Ernest Cholakis has a new take on the theory...

    Techniques May 2002
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    Orchestral Music For Computer Games

    Richard Jacques & Matt Howe: Headhunter

    Abbey Road's famous Studio One has played host to innumerable big-budget orchestral recordings for film, but the final session before its refurbishment in 2001 saw it being used for a new purpose: to record the soundtrack for a video game.

    Techniques Mar 2002
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    Understanding And Writing Lyrics: Part 5

    Simile & Metaphor

    Sam Inglis demostrates how you might furhter enrich your lyric writing with the use of comparisons.

    Techniques Apr 2001
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    Understanding & Writing Lyrics: Part 4

    Connotation & Metonymy

    This month, Sam Inglis shows you how to improve your lyric writing by using fewer words to say more.

    Techniques Mar 2001
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    Understanding & Writing Lyrics: Part 3

    Meter & Rhyme

    In this month's installment, Sam Inglis looks at how you can use the sounds and rhythms of words to make your song lyrics more memorable.

    Techniques Feb 2001
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    Understanding & Writing Lyrics: Part 2

    Modes

    Whenever we hear or read song lyrics, we are hearing the voice of a person, whether that voice be the songwriter's own, exploring his or her own emotions and feelings, or someone else's. The second part of Sam Inglis' series explains how you can write for different voices to put across different messages.

    Techniques Jan 2001
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    Understanding & Writing Lyrics: Part 1

    An Alternative Approach

    Writing the words to songs is often thought of as a process of pure intuition, but there's a lot more to it than that. In the first part of a new series, Sam Inglis suggests an alternative way of going about it.

    Techniques Dec 2000
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    Arranging Pop

    Tips & Tricks

    If something's letting down your pop tracks, it could be the arrangement rather than the song itself at fault. Derek Johnson & Debbie Poyser offer some advice on how to make sure your music gets the star treatment it deserves.

    Techniques Apr 2000
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    Creating Orchestral Arrangements On A Budget

    Tips & Tricks

    Use of a full symphony orchestra remains a luxury afforded only to the world's top-selling artists or film composers. But with a little help from technology, the sound of convincing strings and blaring brass is achievable on a budget. John Rowcroft reports, and offers advice to anyone seeking to follow his example...

    Techniques Apr 2000
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    Creating Realistic Sample-based Orchestral Arrangements: Part 1

    Tips & Tricks

    These days, any decent synth or sampler offers plausable orchestral sounds — but there's much more to creating believable arrangements for orchestra than realistic samples. Keyboardist/composer Dave Stewart offers some guidance, passes on some advice from pros, and explains how orchestral samples were used to create an arrangement for the latest Geri Halliwell single.

    Techniques Dec 1999

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