Hello once
again!
I'm
Aaron Saloman, co-creator with Aaron Davison of the course "How to Make Money
with Stock Music Libraries". I thought I would chime in with another
guest blog on a frequent topic.
One
of the big discussions that keeps coming up in the music licensing world is
track quality. How good should your tracks sound in order to be licensed? What
does "broadcast quality" mean? How do I get there?
First,
allow me to be pedantic for a minute :) While the term "broadcast quality" has
come to be widely used in stock music to denote some combination of intangible
aesthetic qualities in the composition, recording, and mix, it does have a
real, technical meaning. As I talk about in the course, when I'm not focused on
music licensing I spend much of my time producing, recording, and mixing other
artists. Going back and forth between those worlds, it can be disconcerting
watching technical terms migrate into non-technical usage, causing confusion in
the process. When audio folks talk about "broadcast quality", all they're
referring to is the bit depth and sample rate of the CD spec; that is to say,
16-bit and 44.1 kHz. So if you recorded a hyper-limited, distorted master, a
hissy cassette-to-digital transfer, your worst song ever, or an electrical hum
onto a CD.....these would all qualify as "broadcast quality".
Obviously
this isn't what stock music libraries are looking for when they say "please make
sure your music is broadcast quality before submitting". What can they possibly
mean then? Aaron D. already has a great course on mixing for music licensing, so I won't duplicate info by getting too deeply into the technical end
of it. Instead, I'll just show you some examples, and you can decide if your
ears agree.
I
generally go by the rule that musicians should only show their best work at any
given time, but I'll break that rule for a minute here. Sometimes when you're
trying to help people learn, the best way is to embarrass yourself :)
Inthe course, I tell the story about how I first got a taste of music licensing
in my teens, when a television production company in my hometown of Ottawa
needed instrumental underscore for one of their shows. I got out my Dr. Rhythm
drum machine (the pride of the 80's!), my guitar & bass, and a 4 track
recorder, and sent them a disc of instrumentals. By today's standards, the
tracks sound terrible, but the company used them to score almost every episode of the show, which was re-run hundreds of times.
The back end royalties helped cover my rent a couple times while I was away at
university in Boston - no small feat. Here, as much as it pains me to show you
this, is one of those tracks:
Listen On The Blog!
While
this may have been fine for stock music in the 90's, it's because of tracks
like this that libraries started adopting taglines like "we don't sell stock
music here". The stiff, quantized drum performance, the bad drum machine
sounds, and the amateur mix came to define "stock music". Libraries wanted to
get away from that and offer their clients music that was indistinguishable
from professional product, like you might hear on an album or on the radio.
After
I finished school and moved to Montréal, and with a lot more recording and
mixing experience under my belt, I was trying to build up a small but
high-quality catalogue of instrumental pieces for licensing. I wrote a lot of
new music, but I knew some of those old compositions were fine.....they just
didn't sound particularly good. The track above may be a bit of a genre
throwback, but it works well enough for team sports, winter sports, news
stingers, etc. With that in mind, I re-recorded the track from scratch, and did
a proper mix. It now sounds like this:
Listen On The Blog!
Hear
the difference? A pretty big improvement in "quality", despite being the exact
same song. The drums are now real, coming from a loop library of famous session
drummers. The guitars are a bit more aggressive, a bit less 80's. The mixing
and mastering are competent. (Oh, and the mistake in the intro is gone too.)
Could I have left the track as it was and just submitted it to libraries
anyway? Sure, but I probably wouldn't have landed any big placements with it,
and may have been rejected from the libraries that screen tracks. Instead, I
put in an extra day's work, and the track has now been licensed by several
reality, documentary, and sports shows.
Here's
another example of a track I decided to improve upon later:
Listen On The Blog!
A
nice, mellow acoustic track. This version actually did generate some sales in
stock libraries, but I was never thrilled with it. Hear how the guitars sound
kind of harsh and midrange-y? I was trying out an electric guitar that mimicked
the sound of an acoustic guitar through a DI box. It would be fine used in a
mix with other instruments (secret: I actually used it on one of my
best-selling tracks, "Morning Rain", that you hear in the course), but given
the full spotlight on its own, it doesn't really hold up. A couple years later,
I re-did it by mic-ing up real acoustic guitars. The subtle synth you hear at
the end is the same:
Listen On The Blog!
Notice
the difference that real acoustic guitars make? It sounds much mellower, more
natural, and more relaxing. This track also went on to sell a lot more and
generated several TV placements after I made those changes.
Are
these tracks the pinnacle of achievement in audio quality? Of course not. By
its very nature, stock music has to be done with an eye for balancing exacting
aesthetic standards and time. Because stock music gains financial momentum
verrrrrrrry slowwwwwwwwwly, you can't spend a week or two on a track, or you'll
have long stretches without any income. While I might spend 8 to 12 hours just
mixing a song for a client's album, I rarely spend more than 2 hours mixing a
stock music track, and sometimes less. Partly this is because mixing stock
music is just easier - you're often dealing with pre-made stereo drum mixes,
and instrumental samples that already sound good. Use your ears.....if you
think your sounds are already great right out of the box, then save yourself
the time and don't mess with them. Hopefully someone will tell you if they
disagree, or you can just go back and critique your own work as you learn and
develop.
That
brings me to the final, and most important point: Something we stress
repeatedly in the course is developing the ability to be honest with yourself.
If you put your track on next to your favourite album and it doesn't sound as
good, you should know it. Don't compare yourself to your peers in stock music,
compare your compositions and recording quality to your heroes. You may never get
there, but at least you'll be trying, and your stock music will probably stand
out from the crowd because of it. No one actually told me those two tracks
above didn't sound good.....I had to tell myself that as my skills gradually
developed, and then do what I could to fix it. I'm glad I did, cause I'm sure
those songs wouldn't be appearing on network TV in their original form. The
quality of sample libraries and home recording setups is too good these days to
settle for stiff machine performances and bad mixes. If the lay usage of the
term "broadcast quality" means anything, I guess that's probably it.
****
If
you haven't yet, please check out our course "How to Make Money With Stock
Music Libraries"!
http://www.howtolicenseyourmusic.com/stock-music-course.php
As a bonus this weekend only, I'm offering a free
15/30/60 second edit creation for the first 5 people to purchase the course
(instrumental or wordless-vocal tracks only).
Listen To All The Song Samples And Comment On The Blog!
Happy music
licensing!
Aaron Saloman
http://www.twitter.com/aaronsaloman
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Aaron-Saloman/77127000887
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