Creating Music for you Video Production

In the past if you wanted to create music for your video production you needed huge multi-track studios and, depending on the type of sound you were looking for, up to an orchestra-full of musicians. Today you can do most of it right at home on your computer, or, if you have some musical talent, on a midi system tied in to your computer.

Take a listen to these two examples. The first one (on the left) is the Pennsylvania Adventures theme, which was written by Jeff Grunden and used on our syndicated Pennsylvania Adventures: Penn’s Woods & Cities television show that aired in the 90s. A computer wasn’t used here, but a midi system was. One musician was used for all of the parts. There were a total of 12 separate musical tracks, played on a Yamaha keyboard, recorded into a midi recorder, and then played back through a tone generator. It was opening and background music for the show and the neatest part about it is we could change the melody line’s instrumentation whenever we wanted to. For example, we would use brass when we did war-related items, a fife for colonial stories, harmonica for country stories, etc. Give it a listen and remember, there was only one musician who played all of the parts for the song.

The next piece (on the right) is from a Children’s program, Professor Migooch’s Now You Know Video Show. The music was composed and recorded by Mike Mancini, and he used a computer. So, you are going to hear the instrumentation produced by a computer, and we simply added a microphone for the vocals.

The point of this whole thing is, you don’t need a full orchestra to use music in your video piece. You can do it yourself at home on your computer.